Value Bet Finder: Soft Books vs Sharp Price

Finds the bets where DraftKings, Bovada, Unibet or LeoVegas pay more than the bet is worth, measured against a fair price worked out from Pinnacle's odds.

No API key, no login, no proxy.

What does this do?

A bookmaker's odds are not a probability. Two sides of a coin priced at 1.91 and 1.91 imply 52.4% each — 104.8% in total. That extra 4.8% is the bookmaker's margin.

Strip it out and you get the no-vig fair price: the market's honest estimate. Do it with Pinnacle's odds, which run on thin margins and high limits, and you have a benchmark. Every soft bookmaker paying more than that benchmark is offering a bet worth more than it costs.

flowchart LR
    A[Pinnacle odds] --> B[Remove the margin]
    B --> C[Fair price]
    D[DraftKings · Bovada<br/>Unibet · LeoVegas] --> E{Pays more<br/>than fair?}
    C --> E
    E --> F[Value bet, with its edge]

How is this different from arbitrage?

Arbitrage means backing every outcome across books for a guaranteed profit. It is real but rare, and it vanishes in minutes. Value betting is the everyday version: no guarantee on any single bet, but a positive expected return every time you take a price above fair. This Actor looks for those. If you want the arbitrage view instead, that is a different tool.

What data do you get?

Field	What it is
edgePercent	Expected return on a unit stake. +5 means the price pays 5% more than it is worth
bet, game, league, startTime	What to back, in which game, and when it starts
bookmaker, bookmakerOdds, bookmakerOddsAmerican	Who is offering it and at what price
fairOdds, fairProbabilityPercent	The no-vig price and the probability behind it
sharpOdds, sharpMarginPercent	Pinnacle's raw price and the margin removed
pinnacleLimit, limitConfidence	What Pinnacle will accept on this line, and what that says about its confidence
longShotCaveat, warning	Where the method is least reliable, and where an edge looks too good

Example: one run, September 2026

Thirty college football games, ten value bets:

Edge	Bookmaker	Bet	Price	Fair	Notes
+30.7%	LeoVegas	Northwestern	+1200	9.95	long shot, flagged suspicious
+10.7%	LeoVegas	South Alabama	+900	9.03	long shot
+3.2%	Unibet	Akron	+450	5.33	clean
+2.8%	Unibet	Oklahoma	+450	5.35	clean, Pinnacle limit 2,000

The Akron and Oklahoma rows are the useful ones: modest, believable edges on lines Pinnacle is happy to take real money on. The +30.7% at the top is flagged twice over, because an edge that size almost always means the two books are not offering quite the same bet.

What it refuses to do

• It does not promise a winner. The edge is an expected return over many bets, not a prediction about one. Any single bet can lose and still have been the right price.
• It says out loud that the fair price rests on an assumption. Pinnacle is treated as efficient. That is the standard assumption in value betting and it is stated on every row, not buried.
• It flags where its own method is weakest. Removing a margin proportionally flatters long shots, because bookmakers load more margin onto that side. Any bet with a fair probability under 15% carries a caveat saying the edge is probably overstated — and in the run above, the biggest edges were exactly those.
• It warns when an edge is too good to be true. Anything at or above 20% is marked suspicious: in practice it means a stale price or a different line, not free money.
• It will not compare two different bets. A spread of -3 is not a spread of -3.5. Prices are only ever compared on the same market, same line, same outcome.
• It never scores Pinnacle against itself, and it stops with a clear message if Pinnacle returns nothing, because without the benchmark there is no fair price and nothing honest to say.

One thing worth knowing about the build

The bookmakers fingerprint the TLS handshake. Built on Node 24.21, this Actor got HTTP 403 from Pinnacle and 410 from Kambi on every league while identical code on Node 24.20 got 200. The base image is therefore pinned, and the failure mode is worth knowing: the Actor still runs and simply finds nothing. If it ever returns no sharp prices at all, suspect the runtime before the code.

Popular value bet searches

Ready-made runs you can open and start, or copy as a starting point:

• Value Bets Today
• College Football Value Bets
• NFL Value Bets
• MLS Value Bets
• Soccer Value Bets
• American Football Value Bets
• Moneyline Value Bets
• Unibet Value Bets
• LeoVegas Value Bets
• DraftKings Value Bets
• High Edge Value Bets
• High Limit Value Bets
• Positive EV Bets
• No-Vig Fair Odds

Pricing

$0.01 per value bet found. A run that finds ten bets costs $0.10. A run that finds nothing costs nothing, because nothing is charged for an empty result.

Input

Setting	What it does
Leagues	Thirteen competitions across football, basketball, baseball, hockey and soccer
Bookmakers to check	Which soft books to price against Pinnacle
Markets	Moneyline, spread, total
Minimum edge	1 to 2% is a realistic working threshold
Minimum Pinnacle limit	Raise it to keep only the lines Pinnacle takes serious money on
Days ahead	How far forward to look
Maximum bets	How many to return, biggest edge first

Integrations

Runs on a schedule and connects to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make or your own code through the Apify API. Value appears and disappears as books move, so a run every few hours finds far more than one run a day.