How fast do odds-scraping bots actually move?
Short answer: Odds scrapers poll endpoints continuously - the effective latency from your price update to their database is often under a second. Your prices are republished, arbitraged, and fed to rival books and tipster services before most of your own customers have loaded the page.
What your odds are worth to others
A book's prices are its analysis. Scrapers sell that analysis to comparison sites, syndicates, and competitors in real time. The value leaks out of your infrastructure while your bandwidth pays for the privilege.
Why rate limits only slow the honest
Scraping fleets distribute requests across thousands of IPs and sessions, each individually polite. Per-IP limits become meaningless; per-session limits get farmed. The aggregate flow keeps pace with every price you post.
Serving data to humans only
The working model scores the consumer of each response, not its rate. Humans browsing a match page behave differently from machines draining a market tree - and the difference is visible before the data leaves your servers.