In-play odds

A goal, a break of serve or a red card changes a market's prices at once, and bookmakers suspend markets around such moments before reopening them at new prices. Some also hold an in-play bet for a delay before accepting it, so the price on screen and the price taken can differ.

That makes in-play a separate engineering problem. A product needs each market's open or suspended state as well as its prices, and it needs changes pushed to it as they happen, since a price read on a timer can be gone before the user acts. Settlement differs as well, because markets such as next goal or next point exist only once play has started.

Pre-match is where standard matched betting sits. The back bet and the lay normally both go on before the off, and the lay side's price and depth can be read from lay[].price and lay[].available before either bet is placed. A lay left unmatched at the off leaves the back bet uncovered once play starts, which is the exposure matched betting sets out to avoid.

The match itself still decides some pre-match bets. A 2Up offer pays out on what happens during play, yet both of its bets normally go on before kick-off at pre-match prices, which is how a pre-match feed can serve 2Up as one of its six feed types.

In the OddsRelay feed

Your product polls OddsRelay's feed, and there is no push connection to subscribe to. Every event carries commence_time, its scheduled start. Where the fixture is paired with an exchange, that is the exchange's kick-off time, otherwise the earliest start the bookmakers give. Set against the response's time, it is the field that places a price before the off.

A tool that must show only pre-match prices has two simple checks. It can send commenceTimeFrom set to the current time, which keeps events kicking off at or after that moment, or compare each event's commence_time with meta.processed_at. GET /v2/events also labels every fixture upcoming or started.

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