Okay, so I was messing around with some sports data today, specifically looking at odds for Nadal’s matches. It wasn’t anything fancy, just wanted to see if I could pull some numbers and maybe get a better feel for how bookies were setting his lines.
First, I spent some time checking on different websites. I was just poking around, trying to get a sense of the overall interface and where the data lived.
Then, I started manually grabbing the odds. This was super tedious. Just copy-pasting numbers from the website into a spreadsheet. I only did this for a few matches, just enough to get a sample.
- Copied the odds for Nadal’s opponent.
- Copied the odds for Nadal.
- Made a note of the tournament and date, just for context.
After I had my tiny, manually-collected dataset, I just eyeballed it. No serious analysis or anything. But it did give me a rough idea of how the odds fluctuated depending on the opponent and the tournament.
In the end it gave me a basic overview. I could see that the odds changed depending on where the match was. I’m not about to start betting my life savings or anything, but it was a fun little exercise to see how these things work. It is a start!
