Changes to latency have caused us big problems in UFC Live Betting

I’ve been live betting on the UFC for 15 years, and during that time, everything has been very consistent. Like anything, we’ve had occasional rough patches, but nothing ever felt different. The odds moved as expected, and the volume of bets remained stable.

Throughout these 15 years, we’ve consistently made significant profits, maintained a steady win rate, and profited from most UFC events.

Recently, however, things have felt different, and until now, I couldn’t pinpoint why.

The main change has been a significant drop in the volume of live bets we’ve been placing. A few years ago, we typically placed 2 to 5 live bets per UFC card. In recent months, we’ve averaged only 1 to 2 bets.

This lower volume of bets has extended our dry spells because we no longer have enough bets to quickly recover from losses.

When you lose one bet on a UFC card, it’s not a big deal if you’re placing three, four, or five bets because you can still end the night with a profit. But when you’re only placing 1 or 2 bets, a single loss can define your entire night. This has been happening to us more frequently than ever before.

Psychologically, this makes my job much tougher. With fewer bets, I have less room for error, making it riskier to take calculated gambles. A loss can take longer to recover from due to the reduced betting volume.

Consistency has been key to our success in the UFC Live Betting Group. For 15 years, my methods have remained the same, allowing us to produce a stable, steady uptrend in profitability.

Consistency extends beyond just the bets. It includes how I manage my betting accounts, place bets, adjust my sleep cycles, and even what I eat and drink on fight days. Extreme dedication has been crucial to our long-term success.

A significant part of this consistency is how we watch the fights. Satellite broadcasts have much lower latency than online streams, which is vital for live betting. For 15 years, the UFC broadcast in the UK, despite various buyouts and rebrands, has fundamentally remained the same.

A year ago, BT Sport, which held the UFC broadcasting license in the UK, was bought out and rebranded to TNT Sports. They assured customers that nothing significant would change, and for a while, it seemed true.

However, over time, live betting on the UFC felt different. It became harder to place bets, and odds moved faster. I couldn’t explain why, since everything appeared the same.

Every week I talk about how difficult it is to Livebet early prelim fights because we know due to latency issues we’re often 30 seconds to a minute behind the betting sites, which significantly diminishes our edge.

A few months ago, I noticed something strange. Even before the fight started on my TNT Sports broadcast, the Bet365’s stats counter showed strikes had already landed in the fight. This indicated a significant delay in the TV broadcast.

A longtime community member confirmed that TNT Sports had switched from satellite to streaming their broadcasts without informing customers. This change introduced a 30 to 40-second delay, making live betting much harder because odds move significantly in that time.

This delay explains our decreased betting volume. Last week, using a faster broadcast for the first time in a long time, we almost secured three live bets at underdog odds, which hasn’t happened all year.

We almost got in on Herbert, Sandhagen and Kutetaladze all at underdog odds. We almost went 2-1 for a decent profit, but narrowly missed out of getting in on Kutetaladze by seconds. It’s been so long since we even got close to Livebetting a card wwith 3 underdogs.

This new faster broadcast demonstrates how much things have changed. For example, without the fast stream, we couldn’t make the Mokaev live bet the week before official because only 50% of our group got in. If we had placed the bet 30 seconds earlier, everyone could have gotten decent odds.

The 30-second delay has likely caused us to have many break-even or small losing nights that could have otherwise been profitable.

We can’t know exactly when TNT Sports switched their broadcast method, but an article from October 22, 2023, provides a clue. Take a look:

https://www.tntsports.co.uk/all-sports/bt-sport-app-to-close-how-do-i-activate-discovery-and-what-is-the-tnt-sports-app_sto9830262/story.shtml

Our profitability curve went flat almost immediately after this article was published, marking a significant change after years of consistent profits:

Thankfully, with the help of a longtime community member, I’ve resolved this issue and now see the fights in real time with the betting sites. This should restore our edge and hopefully return us to consistent profits.

While this is great news, it means that there will be some changes in commentary. I’ll now need to watch fights on two separate broadcasts, switching between them, which may cause some jumps in the timeline during my commentary. I’ll work on adjusting to this new system during the transitional period.

Even though we only broke even on last week’s card, it felt like old times again. We were able to mix things up by almost getting in on 3 underdog bets and we almost got our money into 3 really strong positions.

Those are the kinds of positions that have enabled us to make so much money over the years and now that we’ve identified the latency issues I’m very confident that we’re going to go back to making big gains. This week’s card is tough, but I have a feeling the rest of this year is going to be great for us.