An Inside Look at an Organized Courtsiding Operation
All the models in the world won’t beat being 5 seconds early.
You don’t need a thesis when you’ve already seen the play.
While The Quant’s Playbook is primarily dedicated to quantitative investing and trading, every now and then we explore markets outside the traditional financial world — especially when there’s real edge to be had.
Sports betting is one of those markets.
Now, just like any other market — if you want to sustainably make money, it’s good to have at least some form of edge.
Generally, your edges will be in one of a few categories:
Analytical — being able to process the same data better
Behavioral — exploiting predictable human biases
Informational — being able to access faster. exclusive, or underpriced information
Of the three, an informational edge is the most potent advantage you can have.
Models built on public data can only go so far, and behavioral biases aren’t always present or exploitable. But if you have game-changing information that others don’t — that’s almost as good as free money.
To get an idea of what an information edge might look like, let’s walk through an example:
Scenario: A star player gets injured moments before tipoff.
That single event can ripple across the betting markets:
Without that player, the team’s offensive output is likely to drop, making the over/under line for total points temporarily overpriced. Say the market was pricing a 50/50 chance for 200 total points—without the star, a more realistic number might be 150.
At the same time, the opposing team may now be undervalued on the moneyline (outright winner/loser bet), as their odds to win have quietly improved on the absence of the star competitor.
Second-derivative bets may also be mispriced — for instance, if Player X consistently racks up assists by passing to the now-injured Player Y, their assist totals bet may be set too high, since their go-to option is no longer on the floor.
Of course, information like that is immeasurably valuable — but in most well-developed markets, such information is kept tight:
If you’re an NBA coach, you’re not going to risk your salary, reputation, and job security just to tell your buddies that your star player caught the stomach flu on the bus to the game.
If you’re a player, you’re constantly reminded that betting activity is under a microscope. Since legalization, scrutiny has only intensified. Sharing inside info — or worse, betting on yourself — isn’t just risky; it’s a career killer.
In most cases, by the time the news reaches you, the odds have already moved.
But not always. There are still ways to access proprietary information — and act on it faster than the sportsbooks. Sort of.
The Basics of Courtsiding
Courtsiding is basically as the name implies: you sit courtside, watch the play happen in real time, and place your bets before the sportsbooks can update their odds.
Example Scenario:
Say there’s a live bet on LeBron James to make at least 20 points. He currently has 15, and there are 12 minutes left in the game.
He’s passed the ball and makes a 3-pointer.
You already have the bet pulled up across multiple sportsbooks. The moment the shot goes in (or seems like it will), you place the bet at the stale odds still reflecting 20 points.
If you’re fast enough, you can either:
Instantly cash out once the odds adjust (buy at 50%, sell at 75%), or
Hold the position, knowing you locked in a value price before the market caught up.
Simple and rough, but this is actually a thriving practice for those in the know:
We’ll go into the deeper specifics in a moment, but despite what you may think, there are still significant delays between when an event happens and when you see it on screen.
The delays for major sports like the NBA are small, sometimes as fast as 12 seconds, but for things like European Tennis, you can sometimes bet on an outcome that was already settled a minute ago.
The main reason this edge still even exists is that the capacity is so low:
If you’re a bettor, you can’t realistically sit courtside to every game that happens — generally, you can only do it at home games in your city, so just a few trials per month.
If you’re a sportsbook operator, you can’t realistically have physical employees at every live game you offer.
Even if you could, so few bettors do courtsiding, so moving from a delay of 30 seconds to say, 7 seconds, would likely not justify the cost and training of those new, salaried employees.
If we were in the 1910s, this would be a novel, wide-open idea that we could easily print money with. However, as technology gets faster and faster, the delays, while inherent, are getting smaller and smaller — still beatable, but you’re going to need some skill.
So, now that you have a general understanding of the basics, let’s take a deeper look into the nuances of actually pulling this off where we show you exactly how it’s done and the real-world profits being made.
Before we dive in:
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The Nuances of Courtsiding
Before placing a single bet, it’s worth peeling back the layers on how live odds are actually set. To do that, let’s try reverse-engineering how a major sportsbook prices in-game action.
As you’d expect, sportsbook operators aren’t just watching TV screens and updating bets one at a time, they make heavy use of specialized, automated data feeds.
Thankfully, we can sneak a further peek of what this data might look like by browsing the play-by-play endpoint of their API documentation:
Interestingly, this is much like how a high-frequency trading firm might receive a message from the exchange containing key characteristics regarding a new order/event.
We’re shown what happened, when it happened, how long it took to process, and other general information.
Taking the “completionDelay” field, we can infer that it represents the length of time from when the event happened to it being confirmed and formatted into the API.
So, assuming it only took 5 seconds, you can see how sharp some operators are.
While it may only take 5 seconds for the sportsbook to recognize that the score has updated, it will take a bit more time for them to process who was involved in the play (e.g., was an assist involved?, who specifically made the basket?).
This is generally accounted for by them temporarily pausing the relevant in-game bets until the new data is fully factored in.
However — this is just how one of the largest, most efficient operators in the entire space might operate in the most watched and efficient sport — it’s definitely, definitely not the standard.
As we mentioned in our Guide to Ultra-Leveraged Trading, the edge that generates profits starts from taking a general big-picture strategy and then implementing your own custom nuances to solve some of the problems that make a naive implementation infeasible:
So, if someone was setting up a courtsiding operation, they wouldn’t go right away for DraftKings and Pinnacle, but rather for alternatives like Hard Rock, Fliff, Caesars, Bally, BetRivers, Bet365, FanDuel, and BetMGM.
However, once you’ve created your network of target sportsbooks, another central issue arises — how do you even get courtside access to these games?
Well, it’s actually pretty interesting.
The Courtsiding Underworld
In courtsiding, the syndicate approach is generally the most effective and the structure is generally as follows:
Since we aren’t the first to come up with this, with just a bit of legwork you can find access to these kinds of groups hosted on platforms like Discord.
Once we found a few of these, we spent a few weeks just observing calls, seeing user betting activity, and just getting a real perspective into how it’s done.
We aren’t affiliated with any of these groups, nor do we receive any benefits from referencing them, but they’re the source of the content, so it’s only fair that we at least mention them:
Here’s a better POV into some of these groups:
You can also take a listen into an example of how the callouts are made:
Unfortunately, we currently reside in a state where sports betting isn’t legalized yet, so while we couldn’t fully participate in the wagers ourselves, live proof was not difficult to come by:
Final Thoughts + Risk Considerations
You’ve now seen how courtsiding works at both a high and low level, and while it can be profitable — it’s not exactly a free money glitch.
A few of the biggest risk factors are:
The ban hammer: It’s almost guaranteed you’ll get limited eventually. Sportsbooks won’t outright say “you beat us, now you’re banned” — instead, they’ll quietly cap your bets. One day you’re moving real volume, the next your max wager is $3.45.
Play overturns: The key to courtsiding is acting fast — if your caller said that player X just shot and made a 3, you need to be placing the bet before his sentence is even over. However, a coach can challenge the play a few seconds later and force a replay review that could invalidate the previous action → action invalidated = you’re now holding a risky bet.
Caller errors: The scout is generally pre-vetted and their accuracy is incentivized, but human error happens all the time — “James 3pt attempt - good! - oh wait no, it’s out, it’s out!” is typically what it’ll sound like when things go wrong — but remember, you’re placing these bets as fast as you hear them, so if the callout is no good, you’re stuck holding that risky bet.
So, like most profit-making market endeavors, the high-level strategy is the starting point, but the real $ lies in the operational edge (e.g., do you have a weak sportsbook not many others know about? can you choose a smarter bet than just the outright over/under points of a player? can you figure out how to circumvent a ban at scale?)
There’s definitely still lots of edge out there — but if you want it, you’re gonna have to get your hands dirty.
Happy trading! 🫡
Like this one? You’ll probably eat these next few alive.