Recently, Nigerian punters nearly drowned the ship of a sports betting operator when the company was under pressure to pay winners over N700 million within 48 hours. Nseobong Okon-Ekong writes that the use of artificial intelligence may be helping bettors to arrive at more accurate results
While artificial intelligence (AI) assisted football forecast companies ensure that they are free from liabilities to users of its predictions, they proudly advertise their correctness, which many times landed an impressive 100 per cent, but never less than 75 per cent.
As close as the machines may come to reasoning and understanding how a football match may proceed, a couple of unforeseen elements like players injury and players having a bad day no doubt alters the expected outcome from the computers, leading to results that are wide off the mark from artificial intelligence assisted forecast. Yet, it is increasingly possible to state with a good degree of exactness which team will have more on-target shots, commit fouls and hold on to the ball for longer moments.
Deploying data from the past, computers can safely conclude a football match. Artificial Intelligence relies heavily on statistics. Machine learning algorithms devoid of human emotions determine what results will be reached.
A leading company in this space is Nerdytips. It identifies as “a football predictor with artificial intelligence where you can find soccer predictions for matches from over 160 leagues. The tips are calculated using artificial intelligence algorithms and for each match, you have a wide range of tips. For each match, you can also access the section of details, where you can view statistics, recent matches and the profiles of the teams. This can help you have a better understanding of the prognostic offered.”
A common thread that runs through all Artificial Intelligence assisted football predicting companies is their reliance on Mathematical algorithms. For instance,
SureBets says it is “a system for predicting football matches based on statistics. The system offers football predictions based on mathematical algorithms for each game of the world’s leading leagues. More than 200 leagues’ football data for the past 15 years is stored in our database.”
Though artificial intelligence-assisted football forecasts may encourage bettors, these companies do not like to take responsibility for outcomes resulting in litigation to which they may be liable. Kickoff.ai clearly states that the information provided is “in good faith and for general information purposes only. Any action you take based on the information on our website is strictly at your own risk. (In short, we are not responsible for any side effects of the luxurious lifestyle you will enjoy if you follow our predictions.).”
What is its reason for stating so? The publication believes that ” matches are not completely predictable. Sometimes, surprises happen (some surprises are less expected than others!). Focusing on a particular prediction misses the big picture, which is the overall accuracy when all matches are taken into account.”
Octosportsprediction discloses what may not be readily apparent to bettors who are too emotional to make clearheaded decisions: “The secret of the software is that it improves from match to match because it learns continuously by analysing the statistics of the matches, deciding the importance of each one and making the predictions. The software is developed in Java and runs on multiple servers in order to ensure its continuous analyzing process.”
For the avoidance of doubts, the publication stated, “Our tips are calculated by taking into account a great amount of statistics and the predictions are based on mathematics and algorithms.”
It added, “The absence of human input in the calculation of the predictions leads to a maximum level of objectivity. The software offers predictions for over 160 leagues.”
It seems that more and more bettors would rather ignore the caveat issued by the increasing number of artificial intelligence-assisted football predictors offering diverse services. Taking a chance on the computation, which are free from human influences, reduces some degree of risk, which is comforting to many punters.
