Buyer guide
What 'oddsmatcher-ready' means
'Oddsmatcher-ready' gets used loosely. This guide pins it down: what a feed has to do to a price before it is ready to render in an oddsmatcher, and how to tell whether a provider does that work or leaves it to you.
7 min read
An oddsmatcher is the tool a matched bettor lives in: a table of bookmaker offers paired against the exchange, sorted by how good each pair is. Behind every row is a surprising amount of processing.
'Oddsmatcher-ready' should mean the feed has done that processing for you, so each row arrives matched, rated and gated. In practice, providers use the phrase for very different levels of finish. Here is the full pipeline, so you can see how far a given feed takes you.
Step 1: Fixture and selection matching
Two bookmakers describe the same event and the same outcome in different words. Before anything can be compared, those have to be matched to one canonical fixture and selection, across every book and every market.
This is the unglamorous foundation. Get it wrong and you pair the wrong back against the wrong lay, which produces confident, wrong numbers. A feed that is genuinely oddsmatcher-ready has solved this so you never see it.
Step 2: Pairing back against the exchange lay
A matched bet is a bookmaker back price set against an exchange lay price. Pairing them means lining up the right exchange market and lay price for each bookmaker offer.
Raw feeds stop short of this. They hand you the prices and let you pair them. An oddsmatcher-ready feed returns the pair as one row.
Step 3: Rating each pair
Not all pairs are equal. Each one needs a rating (how close the back and lay prices are, i.e. how little you lose, or how much you gain, to place the qualifying bet).
This is the number a matched bettor sorts on. If the feed does not compute it, you are building the maths yourself.
- A rating per pair (closeness of back and lay).
- Consistent across every matcher type you offer.
Step 4: Liquidity and update-time gating
A beautiful pair is useless if the exchange has no money on it or the price is stale. Gating removes opportunities that are not actually actionable: too little lay liquidity, or a price that has aged out.
Gating is what separates a feed you can render directly from one that needs a layer of your own filtering on top.
Step 5: The matcher types
'Matched betting' is not one calculation. Standard, each-way, extra-place, BOG, dutching and 2Up each have their own logic, and a complete feed handles all of them, selectable per request.
Ask which types a provider supports as finished output. A feed that only does 'standard' is doing a fraction of the work.
At a glance
| Criterion | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Fixtures matched | Selections mapped to one canonical fixture across booksMismatched fixtures produce confident, wrong pairs. |
| Pairs returned | Each row is a back/exchange-lay pair, not two separate pricesOtherwise you build the pairing engine yourself. |
| Rated | A rating per opportunityIt is the value users sort the oddsmatcher on. |
| Gated | Liquidity- and update-time-gated rowsUngated rows are not actually actionable. |
| All types | Standard, each-way, extra-place, BOG, dutching, 2UpA single-type feed does a fraction of the job. |
Where OddsRelay fits
OddsRelay's matched feed is oddsmatcher-ready in the full sense: the whole pipeline above runs before a row reaches you, and you rate the delivered pair with one line of maths at your own commission.
Keep reading
Matched-betting feed checklist
A practical checklist for the feed under an oddsmatcher: matched output, Bet365, gating, types and more.
Lay & exchange coverage
Why the exchange side matters as much as the bookmaker side, and what 'lay coverage' really means.
Choosing a provider
The eight criteria that actually separate odds feeds: coverage, update time, schema, support and more.
Matched betting & arbitrage
The stack behind matched-betting and arbitrage platforms: the matched feed, the tools, and full white-label builds. Scoped per partner.
Odds & betting glossary
Put the criteria to the test.
Start a free trial of the full UK feed and judge it against everything in this guide.