Event Matching

The Problem

Each sportsbook uses its own internal event IDs. The same Lakers vs Celtics game might be event 33483200 on DraftKings, nba-bos-lal-20260208 on FanDuel, and 556677889 on Pinnacle. Without a unified identifier, building cross-book comparison tools requires implementing your own event matching logic.

How SharpAPI Solves This

SharpAPI generates a canonical event ID for every event. This ID is deterministic — the same real-world event always gets the same id, regardless of which sportsbook it comes from.

Format: {league}_{teamA}_{teamB}_{YYYY-MM-DD}

Example: A Celtics vs Lakers game on February 8, 2026 produces the same ID across all sportsbooks:

Two Types of Event IDs

Every event in the API has two ID fields:

{
  "id": "nba_celtics_lakers_20260208",
  "external_ids": {
    "draftkings": "33483200",
    "fanduel": "nba-bos-lal-20260208",
    "pinnacle": "556677889",
    "betmgm": "ms_44556"
  }
}

How Canonical IDs Are Generated

The canonical ID is built from four components:

1. League code — sport mapped to league (e.g., basketball → nba)
2. Team names — normalized and alphabetically sorted
3. Date — event start date in YYYY-MM-DD format

Team Name Normalization

Team names are normalized to handle variations across sportsbooks:

• "Los Angeles Lakers" → lakers
• "LA Lakers" → lakers
• "LAL" → lakers

Normalization strips prefixes (“The”, “Los”, “Las”), suffixes (“FC”, “United”, “City”), punctuation, and accents. Teams are then sorted alphabetically so the ID is identical regardless of home/away ordering.

Using Canonical IDs in Your Application

As a Primary Key

Use the id field as your database primary key when storing events:

// Fetch events from the API
const { data: events } = await fetch(
  'https://api.sharpapi.io/api/v1/events?league=nba',
  { headers: { 'X-API-Key': API_KEY } }
).then(r => r.json());
 
// Store using canonical ID as primary key
for (const event of events) {
  await db.events.upsert({
    id: event.id,  // "nba_celtics_lakers_20260208"
    home_team: event.home_team,
    away_team: event.away_team,
    start_time: event.start_time,
    external_ids: event.external_ids
  });
}

Cross-Book Odds Comparison

The canonical ID lets you compare odds for the same event across all books:

// Get odds filtered to a specific event
const { data } = await fetch(
  'https://api.sharpapi.io/api/v1/events/nba_celtics_lakers_20260208/odds',
  { headers: { 'X-API-Key': API_KEY } }
).then(r => r.json());
 
// All odds in the response are for the same canonical event
// Group by sportsbook to compare
const byBook = {};
for (const odds of data.odds) {
  byBook[odds.sportsbook] = byBook[odds.sportsbook] || [];
  byBook[odds.sportsbook].push(odds);
}

Deep Linking to Sportsbooks

Use external_ids to link users back to a specific sportsbook’s event page:

const event = await getEvent('nba_celtics_lakers_20260208');
 
// Build a sportsbook-specific link
const dkEventId = event.external_ids['draftkings'];
// → "33483200"

How This Powers EV and Arbitrage Detection

SharpAPI’s opportunity detection engines rely on canonical event IDs internally:

• EV calculation finds the sharp reference (Pinnacle) odds for the same eventId and compares them to soft book odds
• Arbitrage detection groups all odds by eventId + market type to find cross-book price discrepancies
• Middles detection finds overlapping lines across books for the same eventId

This is the same matching system exposed to you through the API — when you see an arbitrage opportunity with legs from different sportsbooks, the canonical event ID is what linked those odds together.

Key Properties