I’ve already talked a bit about using sports arbitrage software to help you out with your bets, especially when you’re first starting out, and for good reason. The right software can be immensely helpful in finding new opportunities, comparing your possible gains and profits, and accurately calculating everything so as to reduce the margin for human error.
If you’re going to get into sports arbitrage trading, use the software. You really don’t have anything to gain by doing it all by hand except maybe a few headaches. Using the software, you save time, you find better opportunities for arbitrage betting, and you eliminate any risk of making a calculating error.
The real upside to sports arbitrage software is that it’s just incredibly hard to find the best opportunities on your own. Bookmakers don’t make their money by making it easy to play them against each other, and in most situations, you’re not going to be able to find a pair of odds with a margin for profit. A bookmaker’s primary interest is in taking your money, not in providing you with solid investment opportunities.
In fact, when you compare the sheer number of bets available (multiply the number of bookmaker by the number of bets they each offer) with the number of unique arbs generally available, it almost seems as though finding a valid sports arbitrage trade is a bit if a fluke.
Most bookmakers tend to offer roughly similar odds. The upside is that, with thousands and thousands of bookmakers around throughout the western hemisphere, that’s a lot of flukes. What arbitrage software does is seek those flukes out and bring them to your attention. Arbitrage software calculates the risk (or lack thereof), and tells you how much you stand to gain by placing an arbitrage bet on this particular opportunity or that one.
On any given day, there will be at least 500,000 bets available from all of the bookmakers online. Out of these bets each day, there will probably be no more than 500 sports arbitrage trades available. That’s 0.1% - a needle in a haystack. Unless you have advanced software, such as ArbAlarm, doing the searching for you; relentlessly and in real-time.
Just keep in mind that all arbitrage programs are not created equal. Some of them will vastly improve your trading while others will waste your time and money.
Of course, I recommend ArbAlarm because it’s the software that we have been developing and continuously improving over the last decade! I genuinely believe that ArbAlarm is the best solution available today in the market, especially when combined with the range of unique add-ons in our TraderZone.
But I don’t expect you to take my word for it 
Please take the time and make the effort to check out ALL of the sports arbitrage software free trials that you can find. You’ll find that a few are great, some are okay and many are rubbish.
You’ll find that each program has its own quirks, its own strengths, and its own flaws. To list some of the more preferable options…
Arbitrage Filters
A program that alerts you to arbitrage betting opportunities will basically tell you about every available opportunity out there. Sounds great? Not always. Sometimes you’ll wind up digging through hundreds of notifications before settling on the one or two that actually interest you.
An Arbitrage Filter option will allow you to restrict the particular types of arbitrage opportunity alerts which are presented to you. This means…
1- Minimum Profit Yield
This will allow you to restrict your options only to the arbitrage opportunities that will yield a certain amount of profit based on your settings.
2- Restrict by Bookmaker
You’re going to have a number of bookmakers that you don’t like, bookmakers who place too many restrictions on bets, bookmakers that you’ve already used quite a bit this week and would like to give a rest before they start placing limits on you, etc. Restricting by bookmaker allows you to only see the arb alerts for bookmakers you prefer to do business with.
3- Restrict By Sport
Restricting by sport means that you won’t have to deal with arb alerts for sports that you’re not interested in trading in. This is more than just personal preference, of course. The yields in certain sports tend to be higher than the yields in others.
4- Rules Compatibility
In the MLB and NHL leagues, as well as tennis, there are a number of odds that will differ thanks to unique rules revolving around things like pitcher-changes, injured players, overtime and so on. This might not bother you, but if it does, your sports arbitrage software should be able to block them
Bookmaker Bonus Trade Alerts
At any given time, you will have some bookmaker bonuses that need to be bet with in order to be released. Some sports arbitrage programs will allow you to list those bookmakers and it will then go on to alert you, in a separate window from the main arbs, whenever one of these bookmakers can be traded with either in an arbitrage trade or a break-even trade. This feature allows you to virtually automate the process of scalping bookmaker bonuses.
Instant Chat / Trader Interaction
If your sports arbitrage software allows it, the ability to chat and share trades and other information with other traders can be of great benefit. As well as providing an instant community of like-minded individuals who are actively engaged in the same activity at the same time, if the Chat is built into the software then it should allow much faster sharing of trades than would be possible using a normal instant messenger service such as Yahoo.
Real-time Updates
With many arb alarm programs and websites and other services, you’ll receive emails or messages into your private account at a site. The problem with this is that you might not actually know of a given opportunity unless you are checking your email. Most opportunities come and go in a matter of minutes so unless your software updates you in real-time you will find yourself trailing behind and missing most trades.
Other programs which actually provide up to the minute updates onscreen, by simply keeping a little window open as you browse the internet, work, watch TV, etcetera. Take a glance at it now and then, and it will only show you the opportunities available at that precise moment. No outdated messages, just currently available opportunities.
Speed
The best arbitrage trading programs should let you complete a trade in less than a couple of minutes. You’ll want notifications right away while the bet is still active, you’ll want a quick, responsive user interface.
Comprehensive Arbitrage Calculator
Your software should automatically calculate your stakes for any type of trade, including those with betting exchanges. It should be able to take into account, automatically, issues such as exchange-commissions and up-to-date currency exchange rates.
Free Trials
If you visit the website of the software developer and you can’t find anything remotely resembling a free trial of the software or some of its features, just ask yourself, what do they have to hide?
Play around with a trial run or trial features of any arb program before investing in it. Beyond how effective the software is, you want something user friendly, easy to understand, and easy to use. Remember, you’ll be using this software extensively as you trade so you must feel comfortable with it.
Some things to consider while using your free trials…
1- Is it fast?
Sometimes a program acting slowly isn’t your computer’s fault, but rather, just clumsy, careless programming. Ideally, it shouldn’t take forever to calculate a few arbitrage opportunities.
2- Does the user interface make sense?
If you can’t figure out how to use the program in less than a day, it’s probably a little too complicated for you to want to figure out.
3- Does it get you good results?
This is the most important thing. A good sports arbitrage alert system is meant to do one thing: Help you to make more money. If you’re not being presented with plenty of great, genuine & tradeable arbitrage opportunities, just give it a pass.
Learning to use the software.
This item really shouldn’t be necessary. Ideally, the best arbitrage software is also incredibly easy to use. You should expect a nice combination of ease-of-use and excellent results and you should not accept the sacrifice of one for the other. There’s no reason as that an effective program needs to be hard to use, or that an easy to use program needs to be ineffective.
Just play around with it a little. Read the instructions and experiment. If the interface designer knew what they were doing, you should get the basics of how to interact with the software within an hour or two. If it takes any longer than that just to figure out how to place your first bet, go ahead and move on to the next software demo. Remember, sports arbitrage software is supposed to reduce the amount of headaches that go along with sports arbitrage trading, not increase them.
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