On his way home after attending an event at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center a few years ago, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred received a phone call from his NBA counterpart, Adam Silver. The call was ostensibly about another topic, but Silver couldn’t help but note some recent headlines in which Manfred had been advocating for faster pace of play in baseball.
Silver then told Manfred, “Just remember, your pace of play is perfect for in-game sports betting.”
“And he’s right about that,” Manfred said at last week’s SportTechie State of the Industry conference, which coincidentally was also held at Barclays. “I do think that it gives us an opportunity. There’s a natural flow to our game. Lots of lots people love that natural flow the way it is. I think the development of the sports betting landscape provides an opportunity to fill in those slow moments in our game that not everybody loves.”
Just two hours later, in fact, PointsBet chief innovations officer Seth Young opened a panel on sports betting technology to announce his company’s new venture: Batter’s Box, an MLB product that will allow fans to bet on the outcome of every at bat. There are an average of 76 plate appearances per big league game, and users can wager on one of three results—hit, out, or walk/hit-by-pitch—for the next two or three batters in the lineup.
“In-play is just an incredibly engaging experience,” Young said, adding: “It’s incumbent upon the existing operators to create really exciting new markets to engage the customer.”
Ever since the Supreme Court ruling last May that enabled states to legalize sports betting, the Holy Grail sought by every team, league, and sportsbook has been fan engagement. Pregame bets on the final score help, but in-play betting is the real hook. Estimates on the share of bets that take place after the start of a game in Europe are 70 percent or higher. In Nevada, that number historically has been around five percent.
In the new legalized market of New Jersey, however, Scott Kaufman-Ross, NBA SVP of fantasy and gaming, said sportsbook operators have told him that the in-play market accounts for 40 to 50 percent of total betting. Gaming commission reports indicate that roughly 80 percent of all bets take place online.
“You’re already seeing in New Jersey how much having mobile and having that better technology means for in-play betting and the access to the league data,” Kaufman-Ross said.
For now, those bets mostly have been relegated to spread, over-under, and money line predictions on the final outcome based on the changing circumstances of the game. If, for instance, the Nets are five-point favorites over the Mavericks but trail by three points at the half, the betting lines will change accordingly.
Most of the bookmaking technology in Europe is based on soccer, the predominant sport on the continent. Soccer’s fluid flow and goal scarcity limit the opportunities for component bets on smaller moments. Betting on who receives the next corner kick is hardly as enticing as wagering on whether Warriors teammates Stephen Curry or Klay Thompson will sink more three-pointers in the next quarter. Basketball, baseball, and football all offer more scoring and plenty of discrete breaks in the action to facilitate in-play bets. That’s the in-play betting 2.0 that’s becoming more pervasive.
Sporting cultures are also a bit different in North America. MGM Resorts president of interactive gaming Scott Butera deemed betting in Europe to be “very transactional. It’s almost like a trade. In the U.S., it’s a very different experience. It’s much more of an entertainment experience, and I think a lot of the new technology is going to create that really cool entertainment, that really cool level of statistics that people in Europe so far haven’t experienced.”
MGM has licensed official league data from the NBA, the NHL, and MLB, and each deal will include some advanced tracking stats that will both inform the lines they make and offer potential bets on increments of the game, such as who threw the fastest pitch, took the hardest slapshot, or hit the longest three-pointer. MGM has also invested in the Alliance of American Football, whose app includes a predictive gaming product predicated on data obtained from athlete wearables.
“We were really in it for the technology,” Butera said. “They have a technology that’s eliminated latency. If you actually watch the game in the app, you see the play before it happens on TV.”
MGM and European sports betting platform GVC Interactive have also launched a joint technology venture but other operators, such as PointsBet, have prioritized developing all of their tech in-house. The Australian sportsbook with a U.S. headquarters in Jersey City, N.J., has its own development team working on the introduction of its signature points bet product as well as new ones like Batter’s Box.
“It really can’t be understated where the only constant thing is constant change,” Young said. “Having the ability as an operator to rapidly adapt and be flexible to potentially 50 different regulatory schemas in the country [to implement] a really interesting new product into the market—it’s paramount.”
Some care will need to be taken to ensure what in-play bets are offered, Kaufman-Ross said, as some actions can be more easily manipulated than others without affecting the final outcome or garnering any obvious attention—wagers such as who will commit the first foul in a basketball game. “That’s where we have to be thoughtful but we also have to be careful and think about what types of bets are appropriate to bet on versus what maybe is not appropriate,” he added.
Just as Silver predicted to Manfred years ago, baseball’s regular intervals of action have enabled live in-play betting, with PointsBet’s Batter’s Box the latest product in the marketplace. Even small wagers on an outcome, for as little as a quarter, will keep fans watching longer.
“Everything is a lot more meaningful when you have skin in the game,” Butera said, before adding: “Betting is what creates some of the octane for this entertainment experience that we’ve already seen.”