RYAN KNUPPEL
Hey, what’s going on everybody? Ryan Knuppel here, Knup Sports Show Episode 202. Thank you so much for tuning in today and giving us a little bit of your time. Hopefully things are going well, you’re enjoying these NBA Finals, or not finals, Eastern Conference Finals and the Western Conference Finals. Um, been kind of blowouts. We’ve got, as of this recording, we’ve got a sweep that’s happened with Denver beating the Lakers, and then we also have a 3-0 series, so it’s kind of crazy to see, um, you know, the playoffs be that lopsided, but we’ll see what the finals bring us, so hopefully you’re enjoying that. Yeah, saw many of you at the conference a few months ago, or a few weeks ago, at this point. Hopefully, if any of you are out and about at the Canadian Gaming Summit, you’ll come up and say hello as well. That’s put on by SBC as well in Toronto. It is mid-June, I’ll be at that, we’ll have a booth at that, so please come up, stop by, say hello, I would love nothing more than to say hello to you at the next event as well. Alright, without further ado, we’re gonna bring on our special guest for today. Let’s bring on Colin Davy of Betscope. Colin, how are you, my friend?
COLIN DAVY
‘Sup, Ryan? How’s it going? Really happy to be here.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Happy to have you, excited to dive in to Betscope, but man, it was nice to meet you a few weeks ago in New Jersey. How did you recover from the event?
COLIN DAVY
Uh, I mean, I need, I don’t know if you can call it a vacation, but I need a vacation after my vacation, to say nothing of the standard Times Square open bars that the conference produces. As I have told many a people, or many a person, you know, conferences are a different animal when you’re a guy fighting for your life at the company, rather than just attending panels for the same thing instead of the whole time and the company pays for it, so it was definitely exhausting, but the right kind of exhausting for while we’re all out here trying to make things happen, and live out our dream.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Absolutely. And I got to meet you for the first time and get to hear a little bit about your story, so, you know, good things come. We’ve got this show going, now we get to dive in a little bit more into what you’re doing, so I’m excited to really learn about Betscope, and hear more about it. So, first, Colin, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, what makes you tick, and kind of your career path leading up to where you are right now?
COLIN DAVY
Yeah, sure thing. So I’m a data scientist by trade and kind of fell into data science accidentally through sports betting. In a former life I was a very bored energy engineer crawling around boiler rooms doing energy efficiency studies, and like ever wanted some mathematical inclination figure I could, I don’t know, maybe beat the sports betting market if I, uh, build a model that was good enough. So, that kind of path led me down the fundamentals of data science, and I’ve always been involved in all things sports betting, sports analytics, just trying to beat the game through numbers, and that has taken me through a lot of different interesting places. One of my low-grade claims to fame is I won the first two Hackathons at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Opened a lot of doors there, had stayed involved in sports betting at some professional capacity on and off, in addition to many of the data scientist jobs I’ve held. Uh, spent some time as the founding director of data science at the Action Network. For those that have ever pulled up their app and seen their live bet win probability charts at the bottom of the app, you can see my handy work and that kind of lives on in the algorithms that I designed there. Um, but I am happy to, you know, return to the space because I’ve learned too much about it at this point to never stay involved in some form, and it is nothing if not the right place and time where I finally have an institution company of my own, Betscope, where I’m really able to kind of capitalize on all of the things that I’ve learned, all of the new developments that are in place to kind of really give, at the end of the day, the sports betting tool that I would want to use myself. I think the classic entrepreneur story is, you know, build something that you’d want to use yourself, and be the change you want to see in the world, and that is exactly what I’m striving for everyday with everything that I put into Betscope.
RYAN KNUPPEL
You said it exactly how I would’ve said it. You know, it’s neat to see somebody that has that experience and now building on all of this experience that you’ve had, and saw something, some way to make something better, and now is putting that into action as an entrepreneur. I love that story and it’s, uh, you know, it’s super cool to see what you’re doing here. So, I’m excited to dive in to Betscope so you can show the audience a little bit more about what it is. I’m gonna pull it up on the screen here, and I’m gonna let you give the pitch about what Betscope is, what it does, who it helps, and we’ll go from there.
COLIN DAVY
Yeah, sounds great. So, when we look at the front page of Betscope, I mean, we have some copy here that kind of explains what we do. Betscope is an odds tool designed to help you to capitalize on all of the weak points in the sports betting market, so if you have an opinion on a game, or you have some inclination of what sportsbooks might be handing out bad prices, we set you up to capitalize on those sportsbook mistakes and exploit them and maximize your return as best as possible. We see a lot of different odd screens out there where you can kind of compare best prices across all the different sportsbooks, line shopping is a standard strategy that people encourage you to use, but I think the way that a lot of the line shopping tools are set up right now, they are not particularly fun to use. It’s closer to doing homework and it misses out on a lot of key concepts that kind of behoove, if you want to attack a sports betting market, the tools are just not set up to help you do that, so one of the foundational texts that kind of drives Betscope is this book, “The Logic of Sports Betting” by Ed Miller and Matthew Davidow that I recommend to everyone when they first use it, or when they first read it. It is a very actionable approach to figuring out how to exploit the sports betting market and move beyond this line shopping and really understand what your full range of beliefs are, so that’s the very high-level, “Okay, great, sounds conceptual”, it’s almost like that probably sounds like reading a white paper, so you might have some questions on what does that actually mean for using the tool.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Well, for me personally, I live and breathe in this space, and back maybe 20 years ago I created some very, very rogue tool that was doing some of this stuff back then, so I love this space and I think anyone that can help better succeed, I love what they’re doing. But, what I want you to explain a little bit more is, is this for the common bettor, or is this more for your advanced bettor, you know? Your tool, who are you seeing that would want to use something like this?
COLIN DAVY
It is closer to the intermediate to advanced bettor for sure. We like to think that we have the capacity to serve both, but I think it’s more the intermediate to advanced bettor that really understands the value of this tool. There’s going to be plenty of tools out there that say “Here are our picks”, and are closer to, you find immediate personality that you like, and you’re going to tail them because, “Alright, ride or die with my boys”, and that has been a part of the betting, and that is honestly a great function of the sports betting market. If you’re just in it for entertainment, then it’s great. But once you’re actually kind of in it to go in it with the intention of winning, like, “I think I can actually beat this game”, we’re more set up for people who take a little bit more serious approach, because it is an imminently more beatable game. The market is wildly inefficient, and there are plenty of people out there that might not even necessarily care about sports, per se, or have an opinion, and just want to put some action on the game, they recognize that this is a market, it has prices, it is a market with inefficiencies that they are able to exploit. You think of even the Wall Street, that’s where the Game Stop craze that happened a while back. At some level, it’s around “I am playing this game that happens to have financial awards”, we’re trying to tap in on some level to more of that, where you either think you know the sport inside out and can make money off of it, or you can just recognize that there’s a market with inefficiencies to exploit, we set it up so that those inefficiencies are as exploitable as possible with as minimal effort as possible.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Yeah, you mentioned several times that there’s different market that maybe there are inefficiencies in. Explain a little bit about the amount of markets that you guys are evaluating, because I think a lot of people when they think about this are just thinking “Oh, I’m looking at the spread of this game”, but, no, you guys are looking at rebounds, assists for a player, and things, all of these player prop type things that are out there that truly, there probably are a lot of inefficiencies that people just don’t see. Explain a little bit about the number of markets in how many there are in this space.
COLIN DAVY
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So if you watch the gambling shows on ESPN, you’d be forgiven if you only think there are three types of bets you can make on sports: the spread, the moneyline, and the total. Because that is just how it is spoken about in the common parlance. When you go to a sportsbook, there are a ton of different markets that you can bet on a game. Um, beyond just the spreads, moneylines, and totals, there are things like alternate spreads and totals, where you’re betting on the same outcome, except you’re basically taking more or less risk and changing the payout. Take tonight’s Heat v Celtics game, for example, the spread is Heat -1.5. You can bet on Heat -4.5 or Celtics +4.5, Heat +3.5, or Celtics -3.5, and they just adjust the payout structure and the odds that you’re getting for that. So we’re taking a look at all those markets as well. You mentioned player prop markets, where you can bet on pretty much anything that the player’s gonna record on the stat sheet. Points, rebounds, assists, turnovers, three pointers, anything that you can think of of what appears in a box score, you can bet on. And so, those are more of the markets where you’re going to find a lot of these inefficiencies. The standard spreads, moneylines, and totals, those are among the most policed and regulated and monitored by the sportsbooks because usually they have the highest limits, and so one corollary to that is a lot of these more exotic markets that we’re talking about, you may not be able to bet as much, but for your semi-serious recreational bettor, if you’re still able to get down $100, $200 a bet, you can do some back-of-the-envelope math and if I can grind out a 3 or 4% ROY on average on each of those bets and bet it enough, that’s a decent amount of money, and once you make it reduce the time required to exploit those inefficiencies, it’s on the order of anywhere from $80-$120 an hour effective earning potential. It’s not a lot for, maybe, the Goldman Sachs executive, but for your average bettor that just maybe wants to turn this into a viable side income, it’s a decent amount of money for your time to say nothing of the fact that you’re doing ostensibly that you like instead of just grinding away at a side job. So, those are more the markets that we look at, and one of our distinguishing factors, and one concept we really try to hammer home, if you want to bring your own opinion to the game, is we talk about all those different markets that you can hit. They don’t occur in a vacuum. All of those are very correlated to one another. All equal, take tonights again, keep Celtics game, for example. If you like the Heat to cover the spread, for example, all else being equal, you like Jimmy Butler’s points prop to hit the over and Jayson Tatum’s points prop to hit the under, because what happens when you look at all these bets and you kind of derive some of the implied totals and what the market thinks, or, is gonna happen, they kind of have to add up to the same number, so at the very cursory example, if you have the spread and the total, you can back out how many exact points you think the Heat are gonna score, or how many points the market thinks the Heat are gonna score, and the Celtics are gonna score. Once you have that number, you can add up all the Heat points props, and they basically have to add to the total amount of points that the Heat score, and so if you say “Oh, I think the spread should be different”, you can rapidly figure out that that implies that you think the Heat point total should be different as well. And also, the Heat player props points total should be different as well, so you’re never betting just one thing, you’re betting, once you have an opinion on one thing on the board, you have an opinion on everything on the board whether or not you know it, and so the of the tool is “Let’s figure out your full range of beliefs, and so if you like the Heat to cover, maybe we’re gonna find an over on the assist market for the Heat, or an under for the rebounds market for the Celtics”, that is aligned with how you think the game is gonna go, but that particular bet has such a good price that you’re better off betting a related bet that has a really good price, and so that’s how you really exploit and win over the long term.
RYAN KNUPPEL
I love that. Sounds very smart. Sounds like the tool makes it easy to do a lot of hard things, right? If you’re trying to do that without a tool, it’s going to be very, very difficult to kind of put all of that together and so it seems like what Betscope’s doing is really putting all of that together for you in a good way. Now, I want to go a little, I don’t know, off topic here a little bit, but it still is on topic. I want to talk about the subject of arbitrage in general. I know, you know, your tool kind of shows the arbitrage opportunities. Explain to the listeners that don’t even understand what arbitrage is, one, explain what that is and secondly, is it still a thing, is it a thing? Is it something that people can exploit, or is it something that’s just too hard to really make happen with limits in place and all of the above?
COLIN DAVY
Sure, absolutely. So, arbitrage by definition, and in a classical financial sense, is when you can place essentially two bets on both sides of an outcome, and they bets are priced such that if you wager the right amount on both sides, you can lock in a guaranteed profit no matter what. A classic example might be if one book is offering, say, Heat moneyline at -150, and another is offering Celtics at +160. You can bet roughly around $155 on the Heat moneyline at -150, and around $98 or something like that on Celtics +160, and you can lock in a guaranteed profit, and so by definition if there’s an arbitrage available, that means that there is a price inefficiency. Mathematically impossible for an arbitrage to exist without some mistake that is allowed to be exploited. And there are plenty of services that all they do is look for these arbitrage opportunities on near real-time basis, and their one known strategy is all you do is place arbitrage bets and lock in once you kind of exploit some sign up bonuses, you can get some pretty decent returns. So to answer your question, is it still a thing, yes, absolutely. It depends on sports, some sports have more opportunities than others. I think in the NBA regular season in particular, where lines change so much as a funtion of breaking news and odds change rapidly, some books are quicker to the draw than others, and some books are a little bit slower, and so those opportunities do exist, and it’s not like they will necessarily exist for the entire duration of the market being open, sometimes there are more limited windows. But they do exist in the abstract. So, one of the other approaches that we take that’s a little bit different is, um, and this is just something that you kind of accumulate from doing this for a while, when an arbitrage opportunity exists, it’s usually because one book is wrong and the other is right, and in the long run, what you’re better off doing is identifying which book screwed up and only betting one side of the arbitrage. Like, if you can reasonably deduce that one side of an arbitrage is expected to make money over the long term and the others expect to lose money or maybe break even over the long term, why would you place a losing bet just for the sake of locking in a guaranteed profit? It is basically a function of risk tolerance at that point, and you are free to do that. Maybe you only want to guarantee winners the whole time, I understand the psychology of that, why that is a function of your risk tolerance, but as you get into this more intermediate to advanced levels of knowledge in sports betting, everyone internalizes that you are better off taking a little bit more risk and maximizing your long term expected return. Over the long term, you’re going to make more money if you take a little bit of risk and can reasonably identify which side of the arbitrage opportunity is the “one to take”. And we have basically automated that process as well.
RYAN KNUPPEL
That’s cool. Man, I could talk about this stuff all day long, Colin. I love this whole space, you know, anything that’s really using math and data with sports betting, I love it, but I want to get back on track and really talk about Betscope. So tell us about where you’re at in the life cycle of your product. I mean, is it a free to use, is it a paid service, is it a website, is it an app, tell us a little bit more about the logistics of using it, how to use it, where to find it, all of the above.
COLIN DAVY
Absolutely. So, right now, it is on the web, uh, at betscope.io. Uh, we will always have a selection of free games, so you can kind of get a sense of how to use the tool, or at least the version of the tool that allows you to bring your own opinions and kind of tinker with it in discovery or correlated outcomes. We do have a separate feature where we basically reasonably deduce what is the market consensus for all of these lines, where are the off market lines, and basically have kind of an automated feed that is all recommended list of bets that you can access. That’s kind of more of a spoon feeding, just tell me what to bet, tell me where the inefficiencies are in the market. So, it is web only right now. We do not have an app, we’re pretty happy with the mobile version of the website, that it’s good enough for an app, and we think it works fine that way. We currently support all of the major US sports, all of the pro leagues, as well as college football and college basketball, and we are happy, where it is and the ability to serve consumers as a stand alone tool. We are exploring a lot of B2B opportunities as well. I think one of the things that we kind of boiled down to was “Okay, what is, what really makes this company go?”, it is our ability to take odds data and do things with it. Transform it, understand it, how it’s correlated, analyze it, instead of just kind of mindlessly feed it in through a widget. And again, those widgets are great for certain sections of the market, but what really sets us apart is knowing what to do with the data, essentially. There are other companies that are interested in leveraging that tech stack, kind of for their own behind the scenes purposes, so we are very open to maybe we’re a B2B company, that kind of has a showcase product that can show not tell what we can do, or maybe the product is viable on its own, or maybe it’s just a multiple revenue streamed business, but at the end of the day, we’re in a flexible enough position where we don’t have to be anywhere other than where we just find the most traction, so my philosophy has always been just build interesting stuff that works and figure out how to make money off of it later, because if it’s interesting enough, the money finds a way.
RYAN KNUPPEL
And are you guys integrated with, what are some of the operators you’re integrated with? Are you sticking directly or only with the regulated sportsbooks in the United States? Are you working with any off shores, any of the peer-to-peer operators, tell us a little bit about the operators that you’re working with.
COLIN DAVY
We are mostly, we are only with the on shore domestics right now, and all US regulated sportsbooks. We get asked all the time around offshores, but you know, for a lot of different reasons, people are still only going to be comfortable with the on shores, and we always have the capacity to add offshores to find additional overall value in the market, but as we’re trying to operate as lean as possible, it’s just a question of what is the best return on our time to do stuff for the business in general. I don’t think it’s going to make or break Betscope if they don’t have betonline, it will make or break us if we are not more fully integrated into the broader sports betting B2B and B2C businesses.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Absolutely, absolutely. So, what’s the future look like for you guys? What, is it just continuing to put out the best tool ever, or what’s the immediate future look like for Betscope?
COLIN DAVY
I think the roadmap is driven, again, by there’s so many things and products and concepts and things we want to do with sports betting data that we’re looking to spin off and basically find the right channel for it. It could be anything from the ability to demonstrate better, just aggregate pricing, and figuring out what the comprehensive pricing looks like, it could be automated recommendations really guiding people to up-level in their sports betting abilities and making a more engaging product, but all of it flows downstream with a lot more things that we just want to do with the data in general, and figuring out “Okay, do we integrate that into our product, do we make it an additional B2B service?”. It just boils down to doing more stuff with data, like I just need five more of me and then we’ll be able to get it out in a reasonable time frame, but, no, I feel like I’m constantly shopping on an empty stomach with all the stuff that I want to do with this data.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Well, while we’re talking about what you need, that leads me into kind of my next question. There’s a lot of business owners, other CEOs watching this show that kind of love to learn about some of the new products that are coming out. What do you need, if you had an ask or if you’re looking for something that you need help with, what is that? What kind of things are you looking for to help you move the needle?
COLIN DAVY
Uh, the number one is distribution for basically our entire tech stack. It is basically just having people know what we can do, and finding the right channel to showcase that. Like, this is why we’ve been pretty excited about some of the B2B deals that we have in the works. At the end of there, a tech stack can just do stuff, and so we provide a lot of value add for companies that don’t necessarily have the deep expertise and the data science knowledge of all the sports betting data stuff. It does take some specialist to really get it to sing as opposed to your standard bootcamp graduate data scientist, or even some of the people you can get, I say that as an former Facebook employee myself, [inaudible], but it only takes you so far until you need to [inaudible] this expertise. So, uh, we’re just looking to leverage all the cool stuff we do with our tech and figure out how we can be of service to, whether or not it’s things like affiliate revenue, and integrate our product into your content, whether or not it’s you have your own data sources and you wanna figure out how to plug in our data to make your site sing, it’s just figuring out who is in need of the stuff that we can do behind the scenes.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Amazing. Well, Colin, this has been an amazing interview. I can tell that you’re very bright and have a lot of passion for what you do, which really makes me happy. I love seeing people doing what they want to do, so good luck with everything you’re doing. Hey, any last words, anything we missed, anything you wanted to say to the audience before we jump off here?
COLIN DAVY
Nah, I think we covered it. I really appreciate your questions, Ryan.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Yeah, absolutely. How would somebody get a hold of you if they needed to get a hold of you? What’s the best channel?
COLIN DAVY
Uh, you know, there’s contact forms here on the website at betscope.io, but otherwise you can always shoot me a note at colin@betscope.io.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Amazing. Betscope.io. Colin, wish you all the best, and thank you for giving me a little bit of time on here.
COLIN DAVY
Likewise. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Alright. Take care.
Alright, that was Colin Davy of Betscope.io. I encourage you all to go check it out. Um, awesome tool, and doing some amazing things. I’m sure over the next 12 months, we’re going to see a lot more development going into that tool, so I’m excited to see where Colin goes with that. Clearly, a bright mind in this space, so that’s super exciting. I could do a whole show off topic just talking about that and learning and understanding what’s going on there at Betscope. So, really, really cool. Alright, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening, watching, however you’re consuming this content, really appreciate you all for giving us a little bit of your time here on Episode 202. Like I said, I’ll be at the Canadian Gaming Summit in mid-June, excited to see you all here. If you haven’t gotten your ticket for that, I think you can use promo code ‘KNUP23’, that’ll get you a little bit of a discount if you’re planning on going to Toronto. Alright. That’s all I got. We’ll talk to you soon. Stay safe, talk to you on the next one. Bye-bye.
Relevant Links:
- Learn more about Betscope on their site.
- You can connect with Colin by emailing him at colin@betscope.io.
More Knup Sports Links
- I refer to Knup Sports often in my show. That’s our sports passion site. Check out KnupSports.com here.
- If you are looking for sports content services you can find more information on the Knup Solutions website.
- Listen to more episodes of the Knup Sports Show.
- Want to be a guest on our show? Setup a time that works here.
- Subscribe to the Knup Sports Show on iTunes here.
Contact Ryan Knuppel
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanknuppel
- Email: ryan@knupsolutions.com
