Sportsbook Python App

Online sports betting is illegal in Washington State, so I built my own sportsbook using Python.

Around the start of 2023, before I had even heard of ChatGPT, I created a personal betting tracker. It wasn’t about making money; I just wanted to answer the question: If I were risking money, would I be winning?

I built the original version in Google Colab, the IDE I was most comfortable with at the time. It was a single long .ipynb notebook, not something I ever expected to share, just a tool for myself.

More recently, I decided to turn it into a real software project. Key changes included:

• Migrated the codebase to VS Code
• Broke the notebook into separate .py files
• Used Git Bash for version control, creating feature branches, committing changes, and merging into main on GitHub
• Treated .csv files like lightweight database tables to persist user data

The app now tracks:

• User deposits and bet amounts
• Win/loss outcomes and current balances

I plan to build additional features like:

• Separate user balances and bet histories
• Input validation (e.g., disallowing bets above available balance)
• Automatically pulling game results via API or web scraping

Building this project helped me understand not just Python scripting, but how to structure and persist state in a way that mimics real app behavior. It also reminded me that if you want to learn something, the best path is to start building.