Providing more bets – particularly live options – accurately and timely remains one of the sports betting industry’s biggest logistical challenges. Bettormetrics is working to alleviate that issue.
Bettormetrics, a European-based B2B sports betting data and analytics firm, is providing sportsbooks tools they need to better understand how they stack up against their competitors in offering lucrative live bets – and avoiding damaging downtimes. Co-founder Robert Urwin spoke with Covers about his firm and how it can help shape the future of sports betting.
Covers' Ryan Butler: There are hundreds of sports betting analytics firms. What does Bettormetrics do and how does it separate itself from the others?
Robert Urwin: We take in data from many different sources, including aggregators, bookmakers, event data providers, and exchanges, then we combine all of that data. We sort out all the issues with the data and transform it into one common format and then enable visualization of that data.
This enables bookmakers to observe all their deficiencies in the trading operation, because they can compare their price lines to competitors' price lines, and they can get a very clear, easy sense of their key issues. We also aggregate that data so they can look across very large cohorts of fixtures and see all the principal patterns and trends.
RB: One major focus for your company is providing sportsbooks with information about downtime periods when they (and their competitors) don’t have the capacity or oddsmaking capabilities to offer live bets. Why is this information critical to bookmakers?
RU: There's a big gap between the best and the worst when it comes to down time. Why does this matter? Simply because the longer you're up, the more opportunity there is for your bettors to place their bets at those key moments when they want to get on.
(In the NBA) typically people want to bet after there's been a basket or there's a complete swing in momentum of a game. As often happens with basketball, the momentum can go from one team to the other, and bettors tend to follow these patterns and cues, and they want to get their bets on. These bettors don't understand, of course, why they're blocked from doing that.
ANOTHER.
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Doncic has 27 and we're back to single digits!
A 20-6 Mavs run on ABC 👀 https://t.co/Hs2FtiKbz5 pic.twitter.com/HB4aGMNiEt
Here in Europe, we see most bettors have in the range of four to five sportsbooks. If one sportsbook isn't giving them what they want, they'll readily move on to someone else. So it's really important for bookmakers to have great uptime and that their prices are set correctly and what we term as "anomalous events" are minimized as much as possible.
RB: Football dominates U.S. sportsbooks’ handles as far and away the most wagered upon sport. How well do American books handle these issues while offering football bets?
RU: Around football, we see the worst issues, and particularly with college football. These issues are very pronounced for many operators. We see that some books are down 50% of the time in college games. That must be very frustrating for the betting community out there. Some bookmakers like DraftKings do so much better than others but we want to help progressive sportsbooks who want to improve these KPIs and to compete.
RB: What do these issues mean for U.S. sportsbooks overall?
RU: What we've seen here in Europe around soccer is you can literally count your handle decline by each second you're down at key moments. The same applies to American football when there's a touchdown, when there's a field goal, and that has quite substantial ramifications for the total handle that a sportsbook would take on a game. And it's really bad for some of the biggest names in the industry, quite surprisingly.
We want to work with those bookmakers, who are aware of these things and want accurate analytics. That’s the first step in resolving these things is being able to observe it and to be able to understand how you are different from the rest of the market.
A lot of the reason these things exist is because bookmakers spend an inordinate amount of money on what they believe to be the best algorithm and service, but they're not looking at what everybody else is doing. And why don't they do that? Well, because it's very hard.
It's very hard to get that data. First of all, where do you get it from? You inevitably have to get it from aggregators. The data is very lousy. It's in lots of different formats. There are all sorts of issues managing or cleaning up the data and getting it into a common format so that you can compare the timeline, get it all correct, and organize it so it is all nicely, and easily observable.
That’s the tricky bit, and that's what we do incredibly well.
RB: Six years after the Supreme Court struck down the federal wagering ban, the American market has begun to settle in with a few major operators dominating nationwide handle. What do you see as the biggest factors that will keep these operators on top – or could open the door for new companies to become more competitive?
RU: This is what's going to differentiate the winners and the losers if we project forward 5-to-10 years into this market: It is going to be those operators who offer the best markets and keep them up as long as possible. I think website usability is one thing, but does the sportsbook have the markets that people want to bet on? Has it got enough of them? And is it as accessible as operators need it to be?
Sportsbooks need a lot of statistics. It’s a very, very data-heavy industry. It goes without saying that having that analysis to be able to tell you where you are versus your key competitors is absolutely critical. You cannot improve if you don't have sufficient data to make data-led decisions.
