Problems to be Aware of with Oddsportal
Unfortunately, Oddsportal is not perfect. No-one is. Their site is huge and to ensure everything is accurate must be an almost impossible job.
There is a raft of different problems with their database which undermines absolute reliability on manually block-scraping their highest or average odds.
We alluded to just a few of these in a previous article about correcting the errors in their figures.
This being the case, the only way to ensure as accurate a set of figures as possible is to look at every game individually and determine which timestamp is closest to the close of the ante-post market.
Of course, this is a very time-consuming and laborious process.
The Importance of Timestamped Odds
Consistency of historical data is absolutely vital for establishing football betting systems that have the potential to work.
But why should this be?
Once again, it’s the old adage about comparing apples with apples and not apples with pears.
In simple terms, the further away from the truth you are to begin with, the more distorted your results become as time goes by, and if your basic analysis is distorted, relying on it for accurate predictions then becomes a matter of luck dependent upon the margin of error involved.
Hi Elena,
I’m about to try using oddsportal’s historical odds to look at the 2017/18 Bundesliga season. So I’m going to try to get an idea of how accurate my bets would have been if I had used only your cluster tables and what sort of yield I would have achieved.
But I guess the time stamp is crucial for that?
I’m wondering where the time stamp is meant to be.
The date and time shown just under the names of the two teams who played. Is that particular date and time supposed to be the match date and kick-off time? Or is it supposed to be the time stamp for those odds? Or both? I.e. the time stamp is the moment before kick-off?
Kind regards,
Audiendi
Forget that. I figured it out 🙂
What I was looking at is kick-off. And the odds cited are closing odds. But if you get the mouse to hover over the closing odds, it a bubble pops up telling you what the opening odds were and when that was.