As we continue on with our series on innovation in iGaming, the focus moves back to sports betting as we examine the innovative technology behind Sports Action Charts.
Licensed in Singapore, Sports Action Charts is one of the only—if not the only—patented-sports analytics companies in the world. The company’s founders are former stock derivative traders and identified an opportunity when they pegged the sports betting markets as years behind the financial markets.
In short, the innovation works like this: by providing sports bettors with the tools that financial traders use, Sports Action Charts enables bettors to make informed, educated trades. Unlike the other sports analytics companies, no picks are sold, just information used for making smart decisions.
To find out more about Sports Action Charts, I spoke with Co-Founder Ryan Mastro about the story behind the company’s innovative technology, their use of social media, their soon-to-be-launched Pitcher Product and their best piece of advice for other innovators in the online gambling industry today.
Becky Liggero: Thank you for joining me, Ryan. Can you tell me the story behind how you come up with the concept for SAC?
Ryan Mastro: I met my partner in 2000 after I left the Philadelphia Stock Exchange floor to start an off floor derivative trading desk. After taking our separate paths we met up 10 years later to discuss this concept. Our concept was to measure the irrational behavior of the sports bettor. Much like the stock market bubbles, lines on sports teams become overpriced and underpriced. The bookmaker sets a line that he thinks is fair. The public perception will move that line by placing money on either side. The final line is based off of the public perception from both the buyers and the sellers. The spread line is supposed to equalize the team’s performance, but the public often pushes hot teams and cold teams in opposite directions. Lines can be mispriced on a hot team or cold team for any number of reasons, but when hot team matches up to a cold team the irrational betting starts. This is why we measure the team’s historical performance and divergence between the two teams. This measurement allows us to gauge the potential for a mispriced line. Once a sports bettor understands this concept then they are thinking more like a trader with probability on their side rather than a gambler.
Becky Liggero: What were the steps involved to develop your idea into the concrete product that it is today?
Ryan Mastro: Our first hurdle was protecting our innovation. After seeking legal counsel and applying for our patents we began the process of building our product.
Our product is based in stock market technical analysis so we needed a way to see and measure the irrational behavior of the sports lines. We created our first product which gave us the ability to graphically plot historical sports betting data and see our divergence calculations. This product alone is innovating because no other service does this, but to us: this was just the beginning. Just like the stock market where we created scanners and filters, we wanted the ability to quickly see every sports game and every wager line and every high probability irrational betting opportunity. This led us to create a multi-time frame color coded scanner. The multi time frame gives us the ability to see the pattern unfold over time and the color coding is scaled to show the highest probability of mispricing. The user can then dive into historical lines, scores, performance to make an educated sports trade.
Becky Liggero: Sounds like you have a top-notch set of tools to offer your customers. How have you used social media to educate bettors on your concept?
Ryan Mastro: Social media is our main source of spreading our concept. We wanted to go where our clients communicate. Most of our clients use twitter and our “whatsapp” chat room. Communication is critical and social media provides easy way to get information to new users and users that have been with us for years. It is great for us to see our users share their success with their friends. We believe that is one of the best ways to grow a product…through word of mouth.
Becky Liggero: Word of mouth is always the best way. So tell me about the Pitcher Product that you are working on right now?
Ryan Mastro: The pitcher product is unique in that baseball is one of the only sports that one position plays a critical role in the outcome of the game. Baseball lines move depending on which pitcher has the start. We applied our concept to each team’s performance when each pitcher started. By breaking the data down we could then look at the overall performance of both the team and the team when that pitcher starts. It also allowed us to gauge the public perception of that pitcher which is critical to finding the betting opportunity. This has been a great addition for our users to really focus on hidden opportunities.
Becky Liggero: Another innovation from you and your partner- well done. What is the best piece of advice that you have for other innovative entrepreneurs who want to get a product off the ground?
Ryan Mastro: Just get started. There are tons of ways to get your product or parts of your product created for next to nothing. Once you have something to sell, get feedback. The feedback from your customers will tell you if you are on the right path or if you need to change something. It will highlight the good stuff and make you change the bad. It may even change your product completely, but that is ok because there will be many iterations of your product. The main goal is to get started and sell something your customers want!
Becky Liggero: That’s great advice Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today- best of luck to you and your team.
