The sports betting industry has been rapidly growing in recent years, particularly in the United States, as more states legalize sports betting both for land-based operations and mobile/online sports books. As this legalization and growth has developed over recent years, sports books have invested more money into their own technology to be able to set lines and odds more efficiently and accurately, ultimately increasing their overall profits.
The most common technology that these sportsbooks are investing in is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which can be trained to set the most efficient and accurate odds, and as more people join the books and place bets, the algorithms only learn more and get better at what they do. This, however, has not been done without any concerns. Customers who engage in sports betting are most often middle-class Americans, which means they do not have the money, resources, or access to high-technology systems like AI algorithms. This means that they are operating at a huge disadvantage compared to the sports books.
The extent to which this new technology used by sportsbooks is unfair and unregulated has not been investigated with enough detail by government and regulatory entities, so it remains unclear how important it may be to further regulate the use of technology in the sports betting industry, both on the side of the sportsbooks and on the side of the consumers.