World Cup Psychic: Automatically Predict World Cup Score In Purplelane App
Intro
The end of the world cup is finally getting near & everyone rushing to predict the final score of the game. I thought I would share an interesting thing I made just two weeks into the world cup. Since the start of it everyone & almost all the companies were posting predict and win score guessing competitions and among them was also the purple-lane app.
Purple-lane is this amazing reward program app based in Maldives that helps companies to enroll & manage their customers in their reward programs such as coupons, discounts & more.
I got signed up for the world-cup Foari that they were doing and started making predictions of the match of my own. Almost everything I predicted was wrong. And I was also missing matches because I wasn’t able to watch or keep up with the world-cup schedule. So thought of making the process automated.
Initial plan & Steps
- Get all the Live fixtures from worldcup API
- Get the fixtures to predict from PurpleLane API
- Convert Local time ( Qatar Time) to Maldives Time
- Mins Before
prediction_closes_atequals to current time. Get the live score of the world cup fixture - Predict with for the given email with away team score & home team score
- Send notification over telegram when the bot makes a prediction
- Host & run the app periodically on server
So I looked under the hood of how purple-lane API worked & found the end-point to predict the score for the match & the live fixtures.
Sample fixture response from their API
1{
2 "id": 2414,
3 "uuid": "97d6a6c5-9620-4a01-928d-76f26f22970d",
4 "participant_id": "279",
5 "fixture_id": 31,
6 "home_team_score": "0",
7 "away_team_score": "0",
8 "status": 1,
9 "prize_won": 0,
10 "won": 0,
11 "created_at": "2022-11-26T16:56:07.000000Z",
12 "updated_at": "2022-11-26T17:56:59.000000Z",
13 "fixture": {
14 "id": 31,
15 "uuid": "97c7a238-d1c0-469a-a150-16fd2d185e74",
16 "stage": "Group D",
17 "tournament_id": 1,
18 "home_team_id": 13,
19 "home_team_score": "2",
20 "away_team_id": 15,
21 "away_team_score": "1",
22 "prize": 2,
23 "prediction_closes_at": "2022-11-26T17:22:00.000000Z",
24 "kick_off_time": "2022-11-26T16:00:00.000000Z",
25 "match_status": 3,
26 "created_at": "2022-11-19T05:47:08.000000Z",
27 "updated_at": "2022-11-26T17:56:42.000000Z",
28 "date": "26-11-2022",
29 "time": "21:00:00",
30 "home_team": {
31 "id": 13,
32 "tournament_id": 1,
33 "name": "France",
34 "code": "FRA",
35 "logo": null,
36 "flag": "GH2ZVtbsLaTpS1WBCw22VY1jecILdFWmMsctsowb.png",
37 "created_at": "2022-11-16T02:56:09.000000Z",
38 "updated_at": "2022-11-16T02:56:09.000000Z"
39 },
40 "away_team": {
41 "id": 15,
42 "tournament_id": 1,
43 "name": "Denmark",
44 "code": "DEN",
45 "logo": null,
46 "flag": "dPwWtRNjPgOGlqQp3HV4grvOnyBC4td74JsAZtkI.png",
47 "created_at": "2022-11-16T02:56:50.000000Z",
48 "updated_at": "2022-11-16T02:56:50.000000Z"
49 }
50 }
51 }
There was a prediction_closes_at time for each fixture of the match so I knew from the pattern of the matches so far that If neither of the team’s scored before the prediction closes (which was approx 70mins into the game) I would get points. And for extra monitoring, I also made a telegram bot to send me a notification every time the prediction bot made a prediction.
So I tested and made the bot in like few hours & I initially made it to predict only the last 2 mins before the prediction closes but that had a major flaw when sometimes when the cron job failed. I instead then changed the bot to predict the current score every 2 mins until the prediction close time. I got a lot of points and even somehow I was able to reach the leaderboard!
I think if the bot was active from the beginning of world-cup I would have had a chance to win some goodies. But it was just unpredictable in the knock-out matches & most matches after that. But it was a really fun experiment regardless.
Below is the link to the GitHub repo of the project. Don’t mind the messy code I was in a rush.
Cheers