Online sports betting favoured by gamblers in Asia Pacific is overwhelmingly focused on the “big three” wagering categories – ‘winner’, ‘over-under’ and ‘handicap’ –, says Oscar Brodkin (pictured), managing director for Asia Pacific at Sportradar.
The region’s bet volume, speed, and consumer preference for live betting make the maintenance of operator margins and game integrity just as challenging as in markets favouring more exotic betting categories, he told GGRAsia in an interview.
Sportradar Group AG, founded in 2001, describes itself as a global sports technology company, providing data and related services to sports federations, news media, consumer platforms and sports betting operators.
On behalf of online sports betting brands, Sportradar supports their trading and risk management via its Managed Trading Services (MTS) division.
It is a turnkey, business-to-business platform that sits between a bookmaker’s consumer-facing front end and the wider betting market: to optimise pricing, manage risk, and guard against fraud in real time.
The system is also a good argument for permitting regulated online sports betting, suggested Mr Brodkin, because it’s “a perfect tax calculator for the government”. That is on the basis the management system can “see every single ticket that is placed”.
Mr Brodkin also observed that while its MTS can assist the universe of bookmakers, it enables individual brands to maintain their unique identity and differentiation in the market.
“With our Alpha Odds, we are giving a unique price to each bookmaker based on their customers, which means that we are optimising the margin for that bookmaker based on their customer base,” he told GGRAsia. “Whereas before we only went with a general live odds price.”
In the context of MTS, “margin” means “gross gaming revenue margin for our clients,” stated Mr Brodkin. “We actually measure internally how good our margin is against the margin that you see on the bookmaker’s website. We are trying to maximise the full margin for our clients based on unique products that we have within MTS.”
AI’s role in bet management
Alpha Odds is an artificial intelligence (AI) -driven Sportradar platform said to adapt to real-time liabilities in betting markets. It is described as having the capability to predict changes, anticipate customer behaviour, and collate live market data, with the aim of delivering optimal pricing that increases turnover and boosts profit margins for bookmakers.
Mr Brodkin stated: “AI is in everything that we do. MTS was a pioneer of a lot of AI and BI – business intelligence – that we were able to put into our models.”
That makes possible the rating and handling management-wise, of millions of players, via machine learning, a process Sportradar says it was already doing “three or four years ago”.
Asia Pacific was “the pioneer of live betting,” said Mr Brodkin. “It starts at around 75 percent live betting versus pre-match, but it creeps [to] over 90 [percent] on some sports such as cricket,” noted the executive.
One of the most popular categories in the region is ‘Asian handicap’, which in broad terms levels the odds by imposing a handicap on a team either winning or losing by ‘adding to’, or ‘subtracting from’, their final goals or other score tally.
Sportradar says that its MTS also offers sportsbook operators protection against the problem of “data latency” – the elapsed time between when data is generated and when it becomes available for downstream use – and protection against “courtsiding”. The latter is when people physically present at a sporting event try to take advantage of information they receive in real time, before the betting market has caught up.
Match-fixing or attempts at it, “happens in half a percent of games,” said Mr Brodkin. “If a game is fixed, then by design, [some] people are 100 percent aware of the eventual outcome, which means your margin will be zero as the operator,” stated Mr Brodkin.
“We’re able to remove a game faster because we believe it’s manipulated based on our experience. Whereas a normal bookmaker without Managed Trading Services would say, ‘Oh, this looks a bit strange. Something’s happening, we’re losing money, but we don’t know why’.”
Sportradar has an AI-powered universal fraud detection system (UFDS). “Our integrity services are pretty much AI-generated, the alerts, the crawlers… but the decision to physically remove [an event from the market] has not been outsourced yet – it is still a human decision,” noted Mr Brodkin.
Higher margin products
Certain high-margin betting options that Sportradar can manage on behalf of operators, include its Custom Bet and a bet builder option.
Custom Bet allows players to combine up to 10 bets on a single ticket. A bet builder in sports betting is typically a collection of odds and selections from a single sporting event, compiled into one bigger bet.
Mr Brodkin told GGRAsia: “When you have a high margin product like Custom Bet or bet builder, you do want customers to play that. One [way] is on the user interface, and we call it a bet recommendation tool or a similarity model. We are able to push a certain market to a customer as soon as they log into the platform because we know that they like that particular market.”
One big-picture potential of AI, said Mr Brodkin, is that “eventually there will be personally catered content for absolutely everyone,” when it comes to betting.
The challenge there for the industry, is that bookmakers “still have to win on the event,” noted Mr Brodkin. “It’s not just about providing the price or the market.”
Though he added: “We are coming across certain [operator] customers who don’t need to win on every single market.”
“Operators are becoming more and more patient, saying ‘It’s okay to lose on a certain contest for that month. It was more marketing’, as we call it” in the industry, said Mr Brodkin.
He added: “You [the industry] want to get the content out at a reasonable price and obviously trade it efficiently. You don’t want to get beaten up on every single price. But you don’t have to win to the absolute on the smaller contest.”
