Sports betting as a driver of technological innovation

Javier Altamirano is the innovation director of Sportradar, a company that provides official data for NBA, NFL, ITF, NASCAR among other organizations. In the MasterClass2020 cycle organized by the Sports Innovation Society, Altamirano described how personalization of the way of seeing sport and the growth of the betting market in the United States, converge to generate the most striking innovations at this time in sport.

"We are moving towards a personalization of everything we do. It is clear to all of us that each one's" feeds "on Facebook or Twitter are not the same. What you see is not the same as what I see. And North American sports Like baseball or American football, they have a 'play by play' style dynamic that allows, in these pauses, to try to predict what is going to happen. The mix of personalization of the experience and the predictions that bets naturally have make many startups work with algorithms on these two conditions: personalization and prediction", says Altamirano.

In certain areas the mere mention of "sports betting" carries a negative charge, from the deep dark side that the activity can have: gambling, fraud and suspicions of match fixing appear at the top of the logical observations. The NBA and the NFL commission Sportradar to ensure the integrity of the competitions. Artificial intelligence tools allow them to detect strange patterns in the betting stream of sporting events, warn in real time the 600 bookmakers they work with around the world and suspend operations when there is a well-founded suspicion.

"Technological solutions can also serve to educate on these issues. Not all forms of gambling go directly to the bookmakers. There is a social mode that can also be exploited, such as gambling between groups of friends. There are different developments that come from that side," says Altamirano. One of the startups that Sportradar works with is called GoodBookey, an application that allows you to place sports bets between friends, but deriving all the profits to charities.

"80 percent of the bets happen when a game is played. A Barcelona game can have a 3-1 favorite result, but if it goes 70 minutes into the game and the score is zero to zero, or it goes 20 minutes into the first half and they are already 2-2, there will be many movements in the bets that in that case they will already go to 4-4 or 5-3. There are mathematicians who work behind those movements and of course artificial intelligence to support that prediction,” Altamirano points out.

The curious thing about the case is that on the same technology that analyzes the betting flows, a content structure can be built: "One of the startups we work with is called Narrative and it is dedicated to sports storytelling: it generates articles in an automated way based on the data and even to warn that a player is about to break a record and produce that content immediately."

During the pandemic Sportradar announced the launch of a solution aimed at sports organizations to help them combat abuse and "trolls" on social media and detect the point of origin of the anonymous stalker. The tool works on the same "engine" as the analysis of strange patterns in betting.