BettorTakes: Improving Bettors’ Performance with Personal Algorithms
How can bettors use behavioral stats to find their personal betting strengths and weaknesses? DataArt met with Steve Rubenfaer, CEO at BettorTakes, to talk about the psychology behind betting choices and how their app enables users to analyze their betting actions and make better predictions.
Speakers
Russel Karp, Senior Vice President in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice, focusing on sports betting.
Steve Rubenfaer, CEO at BettorTakes. BettorTakes is an analysis and recommendation engine for sports bettors. The app analyzes users’ sports betting and provides insight into their strengths and weaknesses as a bettor, which types of bets they have an “edge” on, and which ones they maybe don’t. In addition to historical analysis and rating, the app analyzes future bets users plan to place.
Kevin Twitchell, advisor in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice.
Watch the full video or read a shortened text version below.
Russell Karp: Please, tell us a little bit about yourself and what BettorTakes is all about.
Steve Rubenfaer: Okay. Well, I am a lifelong entrepreneur. I’ve never really had a real job. I’ve always just started my own companies from scratch. I grew up in Detroit, and my background is very diverse. One of the companies I ran was the largest seller of collectible stamps on the internet in the history of the world, actually. I’ve had another company that sold art online. I’ve just had a bunch of different companies. I’ve always been an entrepreneur, and a few years ago when betting became legal, I started betting on college basketball, and I wanted to take a look at how I was doing.
I wanted to see where I was making money, where I was losing. And so, I went online searching for a tool that would help me understand my own betting, and I couldn’t find it. There was nothing out there at all that could tell me how I did it. And I just got the idea. I was living in San Francisco, the tech hub of the world, so I had a lot of developers as friends.
I said, “Hey, is this something that would be too hard? Can we build something that will let people analyze their own betting performance and find their strengths and weaknesses?” And I just started the company from scratch. I have a couple of friends that have big names in the sports business, in the sports industry, and they’ve been around a long time.
And I ran it by them, and they were excited, and they wanted to get involved. One of my good friends is a CTO of a company, and I said, “Hey, do you want to be our CTO?” And he said, “Sure.” And it just grew and grew. It just grew from this little idea I had, and it’s taken a couple of years, and we finally are live. We just have our app in the App Store and Apple for the first time last week, and we are ready to go.
And what the app does, what our mission is, is to help you understand, as a sports bettor, your strengths and weaknesses and show you your patterns, biases, and things you might not know about yourself or might be a little hidden. And if you’ve been looking at different informational sites for the past few years, there’s a ton of information out there.
Steve Rubenfaer
CEO at BettorTakes
There’s a lot of data, and it’s all trends and strategies, and it’s about the players and teams. But there’s nothing out there that looks inside of you to figure out what your particular strengths and weaknesses are. And as all that information is ubiquitous and played out, it is going to be the only way to gain an advantage to look at your own performance, your own history, and make better-informed betting decisions.
So, we built this tool now with a very exciting road map with a lot of features. Right now, we just have our basic product, and the way it works is: before you place a bet, you check with our app. So, every day you open up the app and type in the bets you want to make, your predictions for the day.
I bet college basketball. So, today I put in the college basketball bets I want to make today: High Point, Appalachian State, very exciting teams; and when you tell the app the predictions, our algorithm goes through your past betting history, and it finds similar situations. There’re a lot of different variables, there’re things like betting on home teams, betting on underdogs, different situations like if it’s a good team, a bad team, if they’re coming off a win or a loss; a whole bunch of variables that we take a look at. And we distill a whole bunch of them, we weigh them in certain ways, and we distill a whole bunch of them into one number that we call your Edge score.
And your Edge score is a representation; it’s a numerical representation of your expertise or your proficiency in the particular bet that you’re making. So, every bet you make is going to have its own unique Edge score. An Edge score of 50 means that you have no advantage. It’s basically if we were giving Edge scores per coin to cost, as they would all converge around 50. So, 50 means it’s something that you have no advantage or disadvantage; over 50 means it’s something that you have some expertise in or some competency in; under 50, not so much. And the numbers don’t relate to win percentages too much. Edge scores of 54 or 55 are pretty good.
You’re distilling a lot of information on your own before you pull the trigger and make a bet. And it’s just one more piece of data, and that data is how you do in this particular bet. So, there’s nothing outside. We don’t have an opinion on the game. We don’t have an opinion on the team. There’s no outside data.
We’re not looking at trends; we’re not looking at anything except how you do in the past in these similar situations. And you can use this information any way you want. You can decide to bet less, bet more, or hold off on betting. It’s just another data point for you. And what we’re trying to do here is find
Russell Karp: So, obviously, there is a lot of technology behind what you’re pulling together. You mentioned an algorithm. Do you do anything around AI or machine learning?
Steve Rubenfaer: We need to. We’re a baby company; we’ve been self-funded. And that’s the next thing we need. If anyone has $1,000,000 out there they want to give us, we need to add AI. Because our program would be perfect for machine learning, and it would learn which variables are more important.
So, we have it. We know what we want to do with it; we’ve gone through it. We know the place we went to it. It’s just we don’t have the resources at the moment to go through with it, but our program is perfect for that.
Kevin Twitchell: I was just thinking about your roadmap. We work with a lot of startups; we work with FanDuel and some of the big players. And what we’ve also seen is some of the startups that have their platform and then are off building a white label type solution. Do you envision working with some of the big players?
Steve Rubenfaer: Absolutely. And we’re talking to a couple of sites for such B2B relationships. And I’d love to do that. Basically, we have this product. There’re people out there that would find it very valuable. I don’t care how that connection is made; if it’s through white labeling, through another site, if it’s through a partnership. Partnerships on whatever kind of relationships. That’s always been my main way to grow.
So, white labeling, someone like the Action Network, would be a perfect customer because they have a very weak bet tracker. They just have this how-to afterthought, things like that, and we could beef it up for them and offer a lot of value to their customers.
Our product offers an incredible amount of value to the customers. Some of them are going to win more money immediately, and there’s nothing else like it. So, yeah, we would love to do white labeling and another kind of B2B relationship; however, they work out. For sure.
Russell Karp: When we started talking about your app, the first thought that came into my mind was the Action Network, and I started thinking about what you are doing. They do have that content that draws people in and a pretty seamless experience moving to your sportsbook from their app. But what they are missing is what happens before I want to move to that sportsbook to put in the proper wager, and that’s where you come in.
Steve Rubenfaer: And our app can drive an incredible amount of affiliate revenue because somebody says, “Hey, I like high point plus six,” and we say, “That’s a great bet for you.” But here, if you go to Caesars, it is six and a half. So, it’s a great call to action to get affiliate revenue. Our app is telling you, “Yeah, bet this thing, and here’s where to bet it.” “Oh, you don’t have an account yet? Well, here’s the offer.” So, it can drive revenue for someone like FanDuel. “Yeah, hook us up a fan. Call your guys at FanDuel.”
Russell Karp: We usually finish off these interviews by asking everybody what do you see happening in the market over the next 12 months, 24 months, and as far in the future as you’d like to go? Where do you see the future of sports betting as a whole? And if you have a perspective on companies like yourself that are going to work in the sports betting ecosystem but are not sportsbooks.
Steve Rubenfaer: I don’t have a great industry outlook like that; I’m not so tapped into the industry. I can just say the things that are obvious, the sportsbooks and the operators are going to move into the world of personalization. The land grabs are over. Obviously, the industry has built-in growth because -I’m negative about the American economy right now.
I think things aren’t going and might not be so well. And I think this is going to be one of the bright spots because with more states legalizing all the time, there’s this built-in increase in audience. And so, it’s a great industry to be in at the moment. And the sportsbooks are played out.
I’m interested in this peer-to-peer betting. Anything that reduces the commissions on sportsbooks, I actually think this is where the industry is going. Commissions that big are just too high, and that is going to have to drop. And these peer-to-peer sites that hook up to people and have an escrow with almost no commission, I think, could take off.
Steve Rubenfaer
CEO at BettorTakes
And the sportsbooks are in trouble. There’re too many of them; they’re all selling the same thing. And it reminds me of all the hard drive companies 30 years ago. There was Western Digital and all these hard drives; there were 20 hard drive companies that were going to have a 30% market share. And I feel that’s what’s coming in now.
A lot of these guys aren’t going to make it. A lot of them are going to drop off. There’s going to be consolidation. They’re going to have to lower their rates to attract people because, at the end of the day, that’s all they offer: prices. And I’m not bullish on sportsbooks. I think the sportsbooks are going to be killing each other off and trying to find new ways. They’re being too proprietary right now; they need to open up a little bit and try different things. The land grab for people is ending, and now they have to try something a little more; they have to be a little more daring. They’re going to have to offer other services, more personalization. They’re going to have to cut their rates. There’s just not enough business for them all to succeed like this is. There’re going to be some changes there, some consolidation and some changes.
And I think the informational side, my side, is going to be good, too. As more and more people become more informed and more professional types of bettors, is going to be the informational side. Right now, it’s like 99.9% operators. But I think the informational side is going to grow and grow and grow. And the little sports, I think the WNBA, women’s sports are going to have more of a future as people look as they’re not so played out and people look for edges. So, the main sports are going to get a little played out, smaller sports are going to grow, and things like peer-to-peer betting are going to be like the next phase.
Are you looking to elevate your sports betting operations to the next level? DataArt is here to empower you with cutting-edge solutions that can boost efficiency, expand your market reach, and provide a technological advantage over your competitors. Our team covers every aspect of sports betting software development, from scalable and secure platforms to advanced analytics. Explore DataArt’s strategic sports betting solutions.
By Russell Karp,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt
Originally published at https://www.dataart.com.
