The Making of Sports Betting Lines

TVG Network Quenches Sports Fans’ Thirst for Live Content With Horse Racing From Around the GlobeKeith Goldner, Vice President of Data Science at FanDuel, led a workshop on the conference’s second day explaining how sports betting lines were made.

“Most people are just familiar with seeing bet lines on their phones; how does it actually work?” Goldner asked the crowd at the start of his presentation.

Goldner said the main responsibility of FanDuel data scientists is to put out probability and sports betting lines as accurately as possible. This task is accomplished through a series of data sets implemented in a specific model.

First, data scientists ask what target they are trying to measure for the sport. Are they looking to predict points? Wins? Performance?

The following impact variables are taken into account and measured through each simulation:

  • Offensive efficiency
  • Opponent defensive efficiency
  • Weather
  • Team pace
  • Opponent pace
  • Defense efficiency
  • Opponent offensive efficiency
  • Injuries

“The more simulations you run, the more accurate your predictions will be,” Goldner stated.  More on the Making of sports betting lines

The Tells for a Fixed Sports Match

old boxing gloves hang on nail 

Integrity Services analysts working 24/7 and operating from their main base in London to hubs in Montevideo, Melbourne, Singapore, Las Vegas and Minneapolis pore over screens of live sporting fixtures and betting odds.

In 2022, they identified 1,212 suspicious matches within 12 sports across 92 countries.

While reflecting an increase of 34% from 2021, the data confirms 99.5% of sporting events are free from match-fixing, with no single sport having a suspicious match ratio greater than 1%.

Harding has at his disposal “a significant network of reconnaissance photographers” who are sent to stadia. Other members of the intelligence unit can also be deployed on site.

“They [the matchfixers] have to be in the stadium to communicate with players, and at times intimidate the players to go ahead with it,” Harding said…

The Tells for a Fixed Match in Sports

Minnesota Sports Betting Act Balances Interests Among Sports Teams, Horse Racing, Tribes

State Senator Jeremy Miller recently announced his intention to introduce the Minnesota Sports Betting Act to legalize retail and online sports betting in the state. Sen. Miller told Gaming Today that his proposed bill will attempt to “strike a balance between stakeholders” to allow Minnesotans to gamble legally.

No Tribal Exclusivity

Unlike HF 776, which passed the Minnesota House last year but failed in the Senate, the Minnesota Sports Betting Act does not provide local tribes with exclusive rights to sports gambling. While some believe that tribal exclusivity is a necessity for any successful Minnesota gambling bill, Sen. Miller feels otherwise.

The Senator believe…

Kentucky Derby Telecast Ranks Higher Than Two Major Sports

“Many around the sports world are well aware that the NFL is king when it comes to viewership in the United States. Based on a latest report on the 2022 Nielsen ratings data by Sportico, that continued to be the case last year.

The NFL accounted for 82 of the 100 most-watched U.S. TV broadcasts in 2022, according to the report. That smashes the previous record of 75 out of 100, a mark that the NFL reached in 2021.

Other broadcast subject categories were able to break through, but not nearly at the rate that NFL was…”

What is interesting is that the Kentucky Derby telecast ranked higher than any event from two major sports – the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Major League Baseball (MLB).

Check out the complete story

 

Betting on Sports – A Hard Way to Make an Easy Living

Sports bettingThat’s how professional sports bettor Cris Zeniuk describes [sports] betting, though he’s made it look easy in recent years.

The Las Vegas resident has had an astonishing run of success in football handicapping contests that includes winning Station Casinos’ pro Last Man Standing last year ($150,000) and college LMS in 2016 ($52,000), and finishing second and fifth in the Circa Million II in 2020 ($244,000)…

1. Fade popular plays

In my first year covering betting in 2017, everybody seemingly loved the Buffalo Bills over the New Orleans Saints in a midseason matchup.

That included nine of the 10 contestants in the RJ NFL Challenge contest who took Buffalo to cover as a 2½-point home underdog. When I alerted VSiN host Matt Youmans, who had picked the Bills, he changed his mind and bet on the Saints. They crushed Buffalo 47-10.

Zeniuk subscribes to the same contrarian theory.

“If everyone is on the same side, I’ll feel better being on the other side,” he said. “I love it when everyone is anti-everything about players or teams. It’s usually a buy spot.”

Get all 10 of Zeniuk’s tips for wagering on football and betting on sports in general.

 

How UK Bookmakers Exploit Sick Sports Bettors and Restrict the Skilled Ones

These 5 States Look Best Positioned To Legalize Sports Betting In 2021It works like this: when a customer opens an account, they might be given a stake factor of 1, meaning they can bet 100% of the normal maximum stake, for example £500.

“As soon as people start winning or losing, that gets adjusted,” said Cameron, formerly of William Hill. “It starts with 50% and if they keep doing it [beating the bookie], it’ll keep going down. At William Hill it went down to 25% to 10% and eventually down to 1%.”

One gambler, Bernard Henry, shared the results of a demand sent to Coral to see what data it held on him, known as a subject access request.

“He’s allowed to lose 40 times what anyone else was and it was astronomical what he was punting. There was no conscience to it.”

It showed he had won just £38 over four years but had been prevented from placing sports bets after the bookie realised he had beaten their odds 73% of the time. He was still allowed to bet on casino products where the house never loses over time.

Henry believes bookmakers shared data about him with other operators, via software that companies are permitted to use which is intended to prevent fraud but might also be used to shut down a smart better.

Everyone the Guardian spoke to said accounts were rarely closed completely, for good reason.

According to Paddy Power’s manual, “warm” customers are “of use to us as marks”, meaning they are worth monitoring to assess if your prices are wrong. Even arbers, seen as cheats in the industry, would be set at a factor of 0.01.

One former employee of Betfair believes this is about satisfying City investors, who see customer numbers as one measurement of success. “If they close all the bad customers, you go from 50,000 active users to 10,000,” he said.

The flipside of factoring down winners is that losers have, over the years, been given more leeway to place ever bigger bets.

The biggest stake factor Rory recalled a customer being allotted was 40. “He’s allowed to lose 40 times what anyone else was and it was astronomical what he was punting. There was no conscience to it.”

One former employee of Betfair believes this is about satisfying City investors, who see customer numbers as one measurement of success. “If they close all the bad customers, you go from 50,000 active users to 10,000,” he said.

 

More on how UK bookmakers operate

Runhappy’s Owner Shakes Off Losing $9.5M on Super Bowl 56

Mattress Mack may have lost $9.5 million betting on the Cincinnati Bengals to win Super Bowl LVI, but he’ll sleep well tonight. That’s because Mack, whose real name is Jim McIngvale, sold $20 million worth of furniture thanks to a Super Bowl promotion he hedged with his wager on the Bengals…

McIngvale has been running these types of promotions and hedging against them with sports wagers for about 15 years, so he says he’s not feeling too sore about losing his $9.5 million wager.

“The biggest thing I’m disappointed with is the fact that my customers didn’t get free furniture,” McIngvale says minutes after Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp caught a pass from quarterback Matthew Stafford in the end zone to win the game 23-20.

Last week, he laid out a $4.5 million bet on Cincinnati to beat the Rams at +170. On Friday, which happened to be McIngvale’s 71st birthday, he wagered another $5 million on the Bengals. According to Caesars Sportsbook, with whom he placed the bets, his $9.5 million stake would’ve paid $16.2 million.

More on Mattress Mack and his Super Bowl wager

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Meet Dr. Alan

Dr. Alan got his start in football handicapping and sports wagering over two decades ago through his enjoyment of watching and attending sporting games.

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RunHappy’s Mattress Mack’s Super Bowl Wager

Texas furniture salesman Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale has placed a record-setting bet of more than $4.5 million on a Super Bowl LVI win for the Cincinnati Bengals over the Los Angeles Rams…

To make the bet legally, McIngvale drove from Texas to Louisiana, which officially launched legal mobile sports betting on Jan. 28.

“They were very accommodating and made it easy for me,” he explained. “The rest of them wanted you to bet smaller amounts and every time you bet, they lower the odds. So Caesars is a grown person’s gambling place.”

More on Mattress Mack’s Super Bowl Wager

Sports Betting Stock News – Why Some Are in the Tank

A bevy of top companies in the sports betting space, headlined by DraftKings, ended 2021 near 52-week lows as losses for some of the companies accelerated in December.

The continued sell-off presents a buying opportunity for bullish investors in the nascent U.S. sports betting industry, with several prominent states in line to legalize sports wagering in 2022. At the same time, the slump among top gaming stocks gave short-sellers another chance to thump their chests in December.

DraftKings ended the year as one of the most heavily shorted stocks on the market, as concerns about the company’s long-term profitability persist. As of Dec. 15, short interest in DraftKings topped $1.1 billion, according to Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of Predictive Analytics at S3 Partners LLC. With more than 39 million shorted shares on Dec. 13, the company set fresh record highs for short interest as percentage of float, Dusaniwsky told Sports Handle

More on the latest Sports Betting Stock News