Normalised odds

Bookmakers describe the same bet in different words. One lists Man Utd v Spurs and another Manchester United vs Tottenham. One calls the market Match Result and another 1X2, and a goal total can be Over 2.5 Goals at one book and Total Goals O2.5 at the next. Normalisation maps every version onto one set of names, keys and lines.

Done properly, it settles four things the same way for every bookmaker: which fixture a price belongs to, which market, which selection on which line, and which format the number is in. Get any one of them wrong and a comparison lines up two different bets side by side.

The payoff is that a best price means something. If one book's Over 2.5 were a full-match market and another's a first-half market, the higher price would belong to a different bet, and a matcher would pair a back price with the wrong lay.

In the OddsRelay feed

In OddsRelay's feed one fixture is one event_id on every route. commence_time is the exchange's kick-off where the fixture is paired with an exchange, else the earliest start the bookmakers give. home_team and away_team are one chosen spelling, and on the matched feeds an h2h outcome spelled like a side is renamed to that side. Every bookmaker appears as its key from GET /v2/bookmakers.

Markets and lines get the same treatment on the matched feeds. A market key such as h2h or totals means one thing on every bookmaker, and a goal-total outcome arrives as Over or Under with its line in point. Raw keeps each book's own outcome labels, the line included. On the raw feed, an event's sport_key and sport_title are the spelling most bookmakers use, so the key an event is filed under does not hang on which single bookmaker named it.

Normalisation cannot make an id permanent. event_id is opaque and stable across feeds, but a paired fixture re-keys once when a higher-ranked exchange lists it. A product that stores fixtures keeps its own mapping and updates it when an id moves.

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