There are moments in any sporting match, game, or contest where an outcome can quickly pivot.
Those same moments can also affect a betting line. According to Bettormetrics Managing Director and Co-founder Robert Urwin, in an NFL or college football game, “you have lots of big swings in the odds,” he said last week during SBC Summit North America at the Meadowlands Expo Center in New Jersey. “Bookmakers are making lots of changes in their pricing in real-time.”
But often, according to Irwin, money is lost when oddsmakers lag in updating betting scenarios. According to a report Bettormetrics released earlier this month, suspension – defined in the report as “when a sportsbook periodically shuts down betting lines in a sporting event to readjust the odds based on activity within the event” — has cost sportsbooks billions in in-play handle during the 2023-24 NBA season.
“It’s efficiencies observability, observing what they’re doing versus their competitors and the rest of the market,” Irwin said, “and understanding where all the key deficiencies lie within their sportsbook. And these things matter, to the tune of billions of dollars right now. The USA is going through a bit of a land grab. and everybody just wants to get products out there and capture customers. But sooner or later, optimization is going to be the key thing.”
Based in London, United Kingdom, Bettormetrics was launched in 2021. The company attempts to illuminate inefficiencies that may not be readily obvious to sportsbooks.
“A lot of them are spending money on operations to try to prevent these things from happening as much as possible,” Urwin said. “Where we differentiate is that we have built a service that enables comparison between bookmakers definitively, so you can see what your price is versus competitors. I don’t think anybody has seen that in such level of granularity.
Bettormetrics’s platform can be deployed for most sports, with tennis and basketball being particularly adaptive to the company’s analytics. Commercial Director Sabin Brooks sketched a scenario in a basketball game, with 60 seconds left to play yielding three scoring opportunities, each expected to result in 2-3 points.
“The moment that someone misses the basket is the moment that the odds are going to swing the other way,” Carroll said. “It’s the same with a double fault in tennis, for example. The moment that swings, that second, the whole price of the match can change from being odds on to odds against. And it’s those moments where if you’re too slow to suspend, or you’ve got your pricing slightly wrong, you can get taken to the cleaners by your customers. It’s those moments which can be really, really expensive, where you have to get it absolutely spot on.”
If sportsbooks don’t get the odds right, they are vulnerable to sharks – and really, any other savvy bettor paying attention – who are ready to pounce.
“They (sharks) will attack bookmakers and take full advantage of those key differences at the right time,” Urwin said. “They earn their living from this, and bookmakers should do everything they can to protect themselves from it.”
Brooks noted while most companies pay attention in detail to player retention, sign-up bonuses, and other player-centric issues, a company’s trading department often is less scrutinized.
“The executives, your regular CFO, CRO, CEO, don’t understand the trading desk in a way that they should because there isn’t that level of accountability and transparency,” Brooks said. “That’s what this service provides, and to understand where money is being lost.”