Technology has been a big friend of sports bettors. With the speeding up of advances in computing and mobile devices, sports betting has become more and more accessible and convenient for punters. 

Throughout the years, it has grown to be more mainstream and it is largely thanks to technology that it has. User engagement at online bookmakers like those listed at the analysis site Match.Center has boosted the mass appeal. 

The foundations for the boost in the appeal of sports betting have been features like live-streaming, live bets, promotions and mobile betting apps. Behind the scenes in such a competitive industry, bookmakers are always trying to get a leg up on the competition, inevitably leading to further innovations. 

In this article, we look at some of the latest new trends in sports betting.  

Some of the Previous Big Advancements 

Two areas of online sports betting are really recognised as being the biggest and best in terms of advancements so far. The first of those is in-play betting. As the delivery of data across the internet got a lot quicker, it meant that betting sites could handle constant, rapid updates of odds in live markets. 

Massive amounts of new markets, especially for football betting were created with live betting. Bookies benefited from receiving more bets, punters benefitted from having dynamic new markets in front of them.  

The other major advancement in the world of online sports betting was mobile betting, which does tie into live betting. Mobile betting gave people the chance to call up sportsbook markets from wherever they were, whatever time of day or night it was. It sent the convenience of sports betting through the stratosphere. 

Micro Bets/Rapid Bets 

Moving into some of the new technology, a deeper level of in-play betting has crept into sportsbooks thanks to the development of micro bets, or rapid bets. Punters can now go well beyond major markets like picking out the winner of the match, or the total goals or points scored. 

Micro bets have become increasingly popular because they offer bite-sized opportunities. Those rapid bets can commonly be found in a set period of a football match, within which the punter selects from what may happen in the next five minutes, like a foul, a goal, a free kick etc. 

In sports like tennis, cricket or baseball where there are natural breaks between plays, bettors can find options like what the outcome of the next pitch in an MLB game will be, or whether the next ball bowled in a cricket match will be a boundary, a wide, a single or a dot ball. 

Statistical Integration 

Thanks to greater models of statistics, which in turn is a result of many sports encompassing things like player-tracking, there are much better statistics for in-play betting than there ever were. The flow of games, backed up by statistics can be found on a lot of live markets. 

But this is also an area where punters may look away from a betting site. There are specific sports info sites for fans to track big data and analytics of games while they are going on. A couple of the major sports for this are American Football and Ice Hockey.  

But it’s an area that is going to grow and grow. The more real-time game statistics get presented, the more informed the punter is going to become about which bets to place. 

ESports 

In the last couple of years, there has been one area of online sports betting which has grown exponentially. That’s eSports betting. For bettors who enjoy big video game experiences like League of Legends, Dota 2 and CounterStrike: Go and FIFA then there has been an explosion of betting markets in this genre. 

Esports betting came to the fore in 2020 and it’s reported that in the next decade, it could double its betting market value globally. More and more online betting sites have embraced the popularity of the gaming world, and have pushed along features to complement it, like streams and even in-play betting on things like maps and handicaps. 

Machine Learning Forecasting  

This is one area that is probably going to be a big wave in the near future. Bookmakers deal with a huge amount of sports data to calculate their odds, which are based on a reflection of how their traders analyse the data. 

The better that machine learning gets, the more accurate those odds, based on predictions are going to get. AI would be able to crunch the numbers much faster and potentially give much better market value consistently. It’s probably not worth asking ChatGPT for sports betting tips right now though. 

VR and IR 

This is already creeping onto the fringes of having a much bigger presence in sports betting. NBA matches can be caught on the Oculus device, but over time the integration between extended reality platforms and sports betting is likely to be narrowed. 

The biggest train of thought is that not only could something like integrated reality allow bettors to track in-game stats by pointing their phone at a TV screen, but also to have the latest betting odds for the fixture pop up in front of them. 

Technology Goes On 

Even though it may not feel like it at times, the development of new technology for online betting just doesn’t happen overnight. When big new features at online betting sites appear, it’s only after it has been ticking along in the background and on the fringes before full launches happen. 

So a lot of the above technology is already out there but just not mainstream yet. Expect big features like AR and VR, bigger and better live-streaming experiences, stronger analysis predictions and much more to come.