How I Built a Real-Time Sports Odds API with SSE Streaming

The Problem with Polling Every sports odds API I tried had the same architecture: you poll an endpoint every few seconds and hope you don't miss anything. For live betting, that's a problem. Odds shift in milliseconds. A +EV opportunity at -110 becomes -115 before your next poll. You're always behind. I wanted push-based delivery — the server tells you when odds change, not the other way around. So I built SharpAPI around Server-Sent Events (SSE). Why SSE Over WebSocket? I evaluated three approaches: Approach Pros Cons REST Polling Simple, stateless Delayed, wasteful, misses short-lived lines WebSocket Full-duplex, fast Complex reconnection, proxy issues, stateful SSE Push-based, auto-reconnect, HTTP-native One-directional (fine for odds) SSE won because: Auto-reconnect is built into the browser spec. If the connection drops, EventSource reconnects automatically with the Last-Event-ID header. With WebSocket, you build this yourself. It's just HTTP. Works through corporate proxies, load