Built a bot that follows sharp money on Pinnacle and Betfair. 83 bets later, here's what I found.
So I got into this whole steam betting thing properly about a year ago and it kind of took over my life a bit. For context I built a little scanner that watches Pinnacle and Betfair and fires an alert whenever both books move on the same outcome at the same time. The dual confirmation thing was something I added after noticing that single book moves were way noisier.
Anyway I wanted to share some of what I've learned about filtering because I think this is where most people get it wrong including me at the start.
For football the move has to be at least 4 to 8 percent depending on how close we are to kickoff. The closer to the game the smaller the threshold because sharp money tends to come in late and even a 4 percent move an hour before kickoff is meaningful. Early in the week a 4 percent move on a football line means almost nothing, you need something bigger to cut through the noise.
NBA is interesting because the lines move constantly and you get a lot of garbage movement. What I found is that NBA alerts are actually more reliable than football ones when they do trigger, probably because the market is so efficient that anything getting through the filter is real. We're seeing around 80 percent win rate on NBA signals which I honestly did not expect.
Ice hockey is the smallest sample but the signals that do come through tend to be pretty clean. Fewer leagues tracked so less noise overall.
One thing I'm still not sure about is timing. I alert in real time the moment both books confirm the move but I keep wondering if waiting two or three minutes to see if the line holds would improve results or just cost value. My gut says you want to be in as early as possible but I genuinely don't know.
Also curious how people here handle staking. I'm using proportional sizing, bigger stake on stronger signals, smaller on standard ones. Seems to work but would love to know if anyone has tested something different.
Happy to share the full public results if anyone wants to look at the actual data.