The best sports for arbitrage betting — ranked by real data
Ask which sport is best for arbing and you'll usually get a guess. We counted instead. Our scanner logged 791 real arbs across 102 days of scanning between April and September 2026, so here's where they came from — and where they didn't.
The leaderboard: arbs by sport
| # | Sport | Arbs | Avg arb | Value bets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tennis | 257 | 2.10% | 434 |
| 2 | Baseball | 135 | 2.64% | 171 |
| 3 | Cricket | 120 | 2.12% | 103 |
| 4= | Football (soccer) | 69 | 1.64% | 784 |
| 4= | Ice hockey* | 69 | 4.28% | 72 |
| 6 | Basketball | 42 | 1.85% | 99 |
| 7 | Boxing | 27 | 2.10% | 202 |
| 8= | American football | 18 | 2.22% | 71 |
| 8= | Aussie rules | 18 | 1.56% | 62 |
| 8= | Rugby league | 18 | 1.99% | 52 |
| 11 | MMA | 16 | 2.12% | 82 |
| 12 | Handball | 2 | 1.47% | 102 |
Counted from our scanner's log, 5 April – 30 September 2026, across the 20+ bookmakers and exchanges licensed in the UK & Ireland that we scan. We've left out 109 arbs we now treat as stale prices: gaps of 4.5% or more between two soft bookmakers, with no exchange involved. *Read the ice hockey note below before you take its average at face value.
Tennis is the clear winner — Grand Slams most of all
Tennis produced 257 arbs, almost a third of the total and nearly twice as many as any other sport. Grand Slams dominate: Wimbledon alone produced 152 arbs in just over two weeks, and the US Open 55. Measured per day of action, nothing else comes close:
| Competition | Arbs | Avg arb | Arbs per active day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wimbledon (women's) | 82 | 2.26% | 6.8 |
| Wimbledon (men's) | 70 | 2.11% | 4.4 |
| US Open (men's) | 38 | 2.09% | 2.9 |
| NHL* | 69 | 4.28% | 2.2 |
| MLB | 129 | 2.66% | 2.0 |
| Madrid Open (men's) | 23 | 1.92% | 1.9 |
| T20 Blast | 49 | 2.41% | 1.9 |
| US Open (women's) | 17 | 1.75% | 1.7 |
| NFL | 12 | 2.33% | 1.2 |
| T20 internationals | 31 | 1.83% | 1.0 |
An "active day" is a day the scanner logged at least one alert (arb or value bet) from that competition.
Two things work in tennis's favour. A match has only two outcomes, so two bookmakers disagreeing is enough to create a gap, where football needs three prices to line up. And a Grand Slam's early rounds put dozens of matches a day in front of every bookmaker, many between players few customers have heard of. From the trading side of the counter, that's where attention is thinnest: those prices get set quickly and moved slowly.
Baseball and cricket: the steady earners
MLB was the most consistent source we found: 129 arbs between April and September, about two on every day it produced an alert, at an average of 2.66% — comfortably above the 2.32% across all sports. Cricket added 120, led by the T20 Blast (49 in June and July) and T20 internationals (31). Limited-overs cricket is a two-way market too — and fewer than 1 in 10 of all our arbs needed three bets.
Football: lots of value bets, very few arbs
Football is the UK's favourite betting sport and the worst one for arbs. Across the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and the Champions League, the scanner found just 12 arbs against 305 value bets. Overall, football produced 35% of our value bets but only 9% of our arbs, and 59 of its 69 arbs needed three bets (home, draw and away).
The reason is attention. The big leagues are the most heavily traded betting markets in the world, so bookmakers' prices sit tightly together. Where a soft bookmaker does drift is against the sharpest line in the market — which is exactly what our value-bet alerts pick up. The one exception was the World Cup: 22 arbs in a month of tournament football.
Ice hockey: treat the headline number with caution
On paper, ice hockey ranks joint fourth with 69 arbs at a 4.28% average, roughly double almost every other sport. But 67 of those came during April's NHL playoffs, and that month told us something: 155 hockey arbs were logged in April, and 88 of them were 4.5%+ gaps between two soft bookmakers. A gap that big usually means one bookmaker hasn't moved its price yet, and prices like that tend to vanish, or get voided, when you try to bet. That's why the scanner now holds them back. We'll know what a normal NHL season looks like by Christmas.
When arbs turn up
| UK time | Share of arbs |
|---|---|
| Midnight – 6am | 18% |
| 6am – noon | 22% |
| Noon – 6pm | 27% |
| 6pm – midnight | 32% |
Evenings are busiest, and the single busiest hour was 11pm to midnight. Nearly 1 in 5 arbs arrived while most of the UK was asleep, which is why an alert on your phone beats checking a website now and then. Monday was the quietest day of the week.
What each month looked like
| Month | Arbs | Biggest sources |
|---|---|---|
| April | 225 | NHL playoffs*, MLB, Madrid Open tennis, basketball |
| June | 220 | Wimbledon, MLB, cricket, the World Cup |
| July (to the 19th) | 157 | T20 Blast, Wimbledon, MLB |
| September | 157 | US Open and China Open tennis, football, MLB, cricket |
May and August are left out because the scanner wasn't running for most of those months. September is broken down arb by arb on our results page.
What this means for you
- Watch the tennis calendar. Grand Slam fortnights were our busiest periods by a distance.
- Open the exchanges first. An exchange was one side of 86% of tennis arbs and 91% of cricket arbs. Our bookmaker leaderboard covers which soft books to add next.
- Don't judge a service by a football weekend. Football mostly brings value bets; the arbs come from tennis, baseball and cricket.
- Expect quiet spells. Weeks with no Grand Slam, or an international break that stops club football, are noticeably thinner.
What the data can't tell us yet
These figures cover April to September only. The scanner hasn't yet run through an NBA or NHL regular season, the Australian Open, or the Premier League's winter programme. We'll update this page as that data comes in.
See where today's arbs are coming from
The free channel posts up to two real arbs and two value bets a day — you'll see these sports appearing again and again.
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