Glossary / Markets & bet types / Live betting
A ParlayAPI glossary entry

Live betting (In-play)

Live (in-play) betting is placing bets after an event has started, into prices that reprice continuously as the game state changes. It is a different product from pre-game betting: prices derive from live models, markets suspend during volatile moments, and data freshness becomes the whole ballgame.

In practice

Live prices respond to every possession, injury, and momentum swing; books protect themselves with suspensions during scoring plays and reviews, and with delays on bet acceptance. For anyone consuming odds programmatically, stale live data is worse than no data - a price from twenty seconds ago may describe a different game.

Where it shows up in ParlayAPI

ParlayAPI maintains sub-5-second freshness on major sports for exactly this reason, and offers streaming delivery (WebSocket and SSE) on the Business tier and up - see pricing and the live streaming demo. On why in-play is architecturally different from pre-game: live in-play odds.

Related terms