How to pick the right esports data provider

Unlike many traditional casino and sportsbook offerings, esports fans are naturally technologically advanced. They have grown up with the internet and are a more analytically inclined audience than those drawn to traditional casino games and traditional sports betting.

Chief among your checklist should be the following: you need to make sure the data has good integrity, understand which games it covers, how the company captures the data and assess the delay in it being updated.

Data integrity

Esports is an emerging market for sportsbooks, so oddsmakers must ensure that the data they receive is reliable. Every year, more tournaments and more teams are formed, so it is important that any data provider can quickly update its algorithms and formulas to accurately reflect the latest information in the industry. You do not want to be left behind and have inferior odds for certain matches because you’ll lose a lot of money from bettors spotting the discrepancy. Conversely, you won’t earn a share of the handle if the odds are too strict.

In the age of internet sportsbooks, data is king and separates the various betting sites from each other. The better the data you receive, the more accurately you’ll reflect the market with your odds. 

Games covered

Perhaps as important as the integrity of the data is the breadth. You need to make sure whatever data provider you decide on can supply data on the games you want to offer at the sportsbook. You want to use a provider that can help you enter the market and give you room to expand in the future as new games are released and become popular in the esports world.

At the very least, any suitable data provider will have accurate, high-quality data on the most popular esports titles on the market: League of Legends, CS:GO and Dota 2. Any additional games are an added bonus because the sportsbooks with the most diverse offerings are more appealing to bettors than highly limited odds. But you also need to make sure the data for each game is deep enough to support multiple markets for each game. 

Data delay

This shouldn’t be as big a concern because information moves so quickly now that rarely are there massive delays. However, the faster you can accept and verify the data, the quicker you can pay out wagers and update the odds for current matches in progress. The fewer seconds between a match ending and your data updating, the better off everyone is in the gaming world.

It is more expensive to limit delays on data, so it is crucial to weigh the speed with what the data will be used for at the sportsbook. If it takes a minute for a sportsbook to verify a result and settle wagers, that isn’t a big deal. But if it takes a minute for sportsbooks to verify the data to update their live odds, that is a bigger problem.

Data capture

The delay in data delivery is directly related to how each company processes the data input. There are companies that rely on human-inputted data, but you need a company with automatic data capture and input. In this industry, the time it takes for humans to input data is too valuable to be wasted on an error-prone system of data input whose accuracy is spotty.

The machine-learning applications that can automatically translate data into analytics are vital in the current age of esports betting. You need to find a reliable source of data that can be updated quickly to reflect the latest knowledge and then can be processed to better update the odds for live matches. The more reliable and quicker the data is captured, the easier it is to analyse and use the data to construct the latest odds.