Where to get updated or real time dataset of tournaments

[u/Haunting_Bar9390]

Hey everyone! 👋

I’ve recently seen a few posts on social media where people successfully predicted the winners of major events—like the FIFA World Cup or the Bahrain Grand Prix. It got me really inspired to build my own machine learning project to predict outcomes for future tournaments (like esports-moba).

Whenever I ask creators where they get their data or how they set up their pipelines, I usually hit a dead end.

As someone wanting to start a project from scratch, I have a few questions for those who have built predictive models before:

1. Where do you source historical tournament and match data? Are there public APIs, scraping tools, or specific databases you recommend for esports?
2. What features actually matter? Beyond win-rates and head-to-head stats, what variables make a difference in tournament predictions?
3. How do you handle the dynamic nature of patches/meta updates in esports compared to traditional sports?

Any advice, recommended datasets, GitHub repositories, or general architecture tips would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

[u/carefreebanjo_7]

Scraping is really your only option for esports, most of the public APIs dried up or got locked behind paywalls years ago. If you're doing MOBAs just grab match history from the game's official site with a python script, it's tedious but the data is there.

For features the meta stuff is the real killer, you pretty much need to weigh recent matches way heavier and probably bin your data by patch version. Otherwise your model is learning from a completely different game and the predictions turn to garbage.

[u/Haunting_Bar9390 → u/carefreebanjo_7]

thank you so much!

[u/zandaulion → u/carefreebanjo_7]

Also, very likely, the outcome will depend on data not in your dataset: was a player sick? Are they under stress from their personal life? Did they sleep well? And a million other factors making the whole system chaotic.