Modern Sportsbook with its key components

In our previous article we talked on how Sportsbooks started and evolved within the time. Current Sportsbooks are shaped by the time, technologies and user experience behind.

In this article we are going to talk about the key components of the Sportsbook which make the player’s experience of entering the website, picking up his/her favorite game and making bet on it smooth, easy and comfortable.

Reaching any sports betting website, we are used to see different sports, mostly on the left part of the site, matches within the sports, classified by countries. This is called Line. That’s actually the Line of sport events offered by the bookmaker, where the players just find the game interesting to them, click on it, and see the markets they can bet on.

For a Sportsbook to provide this basic opportunities to the players, various sport types, regions and leagues should be supported. In other words, any successful Sportsbook solution should be able to offer wide variety of sports with their different leagues throughout large number of countries (regions). The more is provided, the larger is the player’s field of choice, which makes the Sportsbook attractive and competitive in the market.

In this sense, Gamble Beast provides more than 60 sports throughout 100+ countries. Besides providing big number of sports across wide range of countries, it is very important for an outstanding Sportsbook solution to be customized and adapted to the region where it is going to operate. Each country’s players have their “tastes” and preferred sports, therefore Sportsbook solution should be flexible enough to provide the sports needed in the specific region with the demanded depth of leagues. With Gamble Beast Sportsbook any operator can set it up in a way to offer the most demanded sports by regions with the desired order and depth of leagues from the big list of available sports.

Markets, odds and margins

Offering a number of sports first of all means providing a number of markets and odds for the events. What is market in this sense? If we take a football match as an example, there are different types of outcomes the player can bet on:

· The outcome of the game: the 1st team wins the game, the 2nd team wins the game or the result is draw

· The correct score of the game

· The number of goals during the game

· Which of the teams will score the first goal

· Number of yellow/red cards during the game

· Results with handicaps etc.

All these possible types of outcomes the player can bet on are named “markets” in Sportsbook. Flexible and leading Sportsbook solutions are able to offer wide range of markets. Anyway, to offer a market accurate odds should be set in a way that the bookmaker was not the one to lose. Setting odds on the other hand is directly linked with margins.

And what is a margin? It’s the percentage out of the total bets amount charged by the bookmaker. So, ideally if, for example, margin is set to 3% and the total amount of bets is equal to $1,000, it means that in the long run the bookmaker will earn $30.

Markets, odds and margins are quite interrelated. Any bookmaker needs a Sportsbook solution provider able to offer a wide range of markets, accurate odds for each market with competitive margins. Gamble Beast, as a Sportsbook solution provider, provides accurate odds for wide range of markets and competitive margins thanks to its own in-house traders and odds algorithms. Now, Gamble Beast can provide also its odds feed only, as a separate service, both for pre-match (before the game) and live (during the game) bets. For any established betting business odds feed is not something got easily, as it is resource-consuming, both financial and professional. Therefore, even if an operator is not happy with odds and margins offered with the Sportsbook solution currently in use, odds feed with margins can be obtained separately. Moreover, any partner of Gamble Beast has the opportunity to set his own margins for specific games, markets, regions. In this case odds are being respectively updated.

Of course, Odds feed is the core of any Sportsbook, without which it will be just impossible to accept any bet.

Still, there are many other key components for contemporary Sportsbooks, as Statistics, live streaming, live animation, live calendar, live score without which any sportsbook is less competitive and attractive. Times when players needed just their bets to be accepted passed away. The demands of players are much wider now. They need to have the opportunity to follow the game live, to have historical and statistical data on different teams and players to make wiser and more justified bets, to have access to calendar of live and upcoming events. All these “nice-to-have” components have become “must-have” ones highly needed to be available in the same place, where the players make bets, otherwise it’s not comfortable for a player to bet on one website and access the above-mentioned components on another website. That will probably lead your players to a website which provides all together in the same place. Players need Statistics to feel themselves more confident when making bets. A wide variety of information on competitions, matches and even on individual players might be very interesting to players. Statistics is another component of Sportsbook, which can be provided as a separate service. Gamble Beast, for example, provides comprehensive statistics with historical data for up to 20 years covering up to 25 sports across over 100 countries.

Live streaming is another key component which makes a betting website engaging and interesting. Such a website which provides interesting sport content via live streaming may engage more people who like sports. For those people following live streaming of sport events may be the first incentive to visit the betting website, but as a “side effect”, the website owner may gain one more player who decided to make a bet on his favorite team while watching the match. For some sport events 3D live animation can be available instead of live streaming.

Live score and live calendar features of Sportsbooks let the users track the scores of the finished games and the real-time scores and stats of the ongoing game, as well as have access to the list of the sport events they will be able to make live bets on.

Over time the users will go on dictating their needs, tastes and preferences constantly shaping the future Sportsbook solutions.

David Manoukyan

Marketing Communications Responsible at Gamble Beast