Sports Betting Research Will Become Easier When Blockchain is Adopted

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FansUnite

5 min readAug 31, 2018

Modern sports betting is considered a grind since the average research time required to even flirt with being a successful bettor has increased exponentially in recent years. Simply put, there is too much data to analyze without computers. Common bettors can only realistically make decisions using slivers of data of the larger total state of global sports information.

When I was a kid in the 80’s, sports betting data was collected from newspapers. My dad and his friends would have the odds, a box score of yesterdays game and their collective group opinions gathered from watching games at home.

In 2018, we have market state and game state data that can be accessed on the fly. Bookmakers have this data as well, but just at an asymmetric scale and speed compared to the average bettor.

From 2019 onward, the blockchain will start to take over as the medium for storing, retrieval and monetizing valuable sports betting data. As the world opens up to transparent and integrity protecting distributed ledgers, sports data usage will proliferate like never before. Data yearns to be free.

You would think that bettors are far better off in the near future than they were in the 80’s. After all, they have so many statistics at their fingertips, but the problem is with scale comes more research.

Bettors have to stay ahead of the bookmaker by analyzing a flood of data and do it reactively, while staying awake at late times to pick off early odds. Watching every price change, waiting for the right number and reacting to lineup changes eventually becomes a repetitive full-time job. Sometimes a month can go with no discernible financial gain despite 5–6 hours a day of mental work. Given the time commitment, most bettors simply don’t put in the research and follow someone else who does (or says they do).

Consequently, it becomes quickly apparent that to improve in the art of sports betting you have to learn some database skills, python and maybe some basic data science just to break even. For a lot of bettors, this level of expertise is unrealistic to attain. There is no way around it; to win you must do a lot of manual market research for every game you bet on.

Its just easier to take a punt and enjoy your damn life for 3 hours.

Enter the blockchain.

The FansUnite Protocol is a system for monetizing transaction and resolution data (grading) on the blockchain. By writing statistical and transactional data to the blockchain through the FansUnite Protocol, network participants can exploit near instantaneous betting data, including granular betting volumes.

Bettors on the blockchain don’t need to scrape and watch prices and guess what other people wagered on an event. They can simply query an efficiently indexed smart contract and pull time series data.

This immediately saves the bettor time because they can just see the volume on each side now. If the prediction they make is far in the tails of the spread of bets, they can quickly move on to the next bet or question their numbers and make a more learned pick.

Fig. 1 If your implied odds are far off in the tails of the market distribution of odds, maybe your model is overfitting and you shouldn’t bet. But you wouldn’t know that unless you had volume data from the blockchain.

Secondly, oracles are writing data to the blockchain all the time and this means that rare and interesting data can be queried from the blockchain. Do you need pitch data, field data from soccer or the number of times Lebron runs a pick and roll? All data that is useful in resolving in-play bets and props will be indexed and available on the blockchain.

If leagues partner with fans, the integrity fee can be collected and engage hundreds of thousands of new young millennial fans who want to make money engaging with sports.

Furthermore, everyone knows that useful data is hard to scrape and parse and can be taken away at an instant. in 2016 the NBA took away the player position API from the public to do a deal with Second Spectrum and Sport Radar. Although this was good for the NBA, for fans and hobbyists who bet, this was disastrous as their models were no longer usable.

Blockchain data is open and immutable; once it is written and indexed, those statistics never disappear.

At the end of the day, bettors don’t have time or resources to do research and can’t afford to sift through hundreds of touts and data services to find insightful predictions. On the blockchain, you can just get access to raw data directly with nearly zero effort thanks to the structure of smart contracts.

By betting on the blockchain you own the collective data and the rest of the networks owns it now as well. Aside from this obvious value of retaining your own personal data, bettors benefit by:

accessing lots of organized and aggregated historical data in a single place at an increasingly larger scale;
avoiding questionable bets when their calculations are computing win probabilities (implied odds) that are extreme values;
knowing how much money is bet on all bet types in a event; and
monetize their data and get paid by bettors to do useful sports betting research.

At https://fansunite.com/ we believe that data should be open and highly available to anyone who wants to query the blockchain. With a fair playing field of useful data, bettors don’t have to spend dozens of hours trying to guess what asymmetric advantage the bookmaker has over them.

With the Blockchain Vegas knows…