Artificial Intelligence in esports betting – Unikrn takes the leap

Popular esports betting provider Unikrn is now using artificial intelligence or AI in its betting services. This is to enable betting markets on a larger volume of live-streamed matches. Where previously, odds, matches and the like had to be set up manually, Unikrn is hoping that its new AI is going to do the trick!

It will fulfil a specific function and enable them to provide a new service – Streamer betting! As announced by Unikrn’s CEO Rahul Sood, the company will enable esports betting on any ‘approved’ live streamer’s activity. While not much is known about this list of approved streamers, it is believed to be relatively comprehensive, and covering a variety of esports and streamers.

Real-time odds established through game analytics, AI bots as well as screen-analysing tech. Unlike traditional sports, esports matches have virtually no upper limit when it comes to volume. Matches can happen anywhere, any time and to anyone, really – while a football match takes time to set up, a location, two teams as well as countless other people to be in the same spot at the same time, for many esports, all it takes is a few messages, stable internet connections and nothing much else.

Team-based esports do require the entire team to be present of course, but esports like Hearthstone only need two players to be up for a match at the same time – for that reason alone, a match can happen at the drop of a hat – great for fans and players, not so much betting providers, as they need time to set up and provide odds for this sort of thing. At any given time, there are several thousand individual channels streaming Fortnite content alone – no betting provider could even hope to cover that, yet with technology like Unikrn’s new AI-powered toolset, it seems possible.

Fatigue, human error, limited manpower and unexpected annual leave aren’t a problem anymore – the AI used by Unikrn takes care of that automatically. Additionally, Unikrn is also launching another service – Unikrn Virtual, a virtual esports betting environment. It relies on a database of previous esports matches (at the moment, only for CS:GO) and it gives betters the opportunity to bet on a new, randomly selected match every two minutes, for a quick experience.

This sort of betting is already common for sports in Europe and is starting to expand into the US as well. Either way though, both AI-driven services are set to shake up the esports betting world. At the moment, Seattle-based Unikrn is the only company to provide a service of this type, and it even had CEO Sood boasting that the company was “five years ahead of any other bookmaker in this space, and lightyears ahead of what is possible in a traditional sports world.”

Those are some big words, and it’ll remain to be seen whether or not Unikrn will live up to it in the end – we certainly hope so!