Every weekend during soccer season in Britain, security personnel find them in stadiums, tapping furiously at their phones or talking nonstop into a mic — mysterious customers often wearing hoodies to conceal earpieces and their identity. While focused with unwavering intensity on the action of the game, they show none of the engagement and excitement of the ordinary fans around them.
The unofficial data scouts — or data thieves, depending on who is describing them — are quickly ejected once they are discovered.
The fleeting data they are collecting — the minutia of what is happening in the game — is the lifeblood of sports betting, perhaps the most crucial and valuable element of the entire industry. If gambling operators are to monetize sports betting fully, they have to offer wagers on far more than the outcomes of games. Data on the second-by-second action — exactly when a goal is scored, where it landed in the net, who had the assist — creates manifold betting opportunities.
In Britain, this so-called in-play betting market is robust. In the United States, it may be the greatest hope for betting operators after the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting and as states scramble to accept wagers. That means accurate and reliable data must get to betting operators like casinos, websites and phone apps fast, usually in a second or two — well ahead of the roughly five-to-10-second delay baked into television broadcasts.
“For betting, it’s the difference between having value and having no value at all,” Steven Burton, a veteran lawyer in the rarefied field of collecting, using and protecting sports data, said about the necessity of rapid data distribution.
The sudden premium on sports data is likely to set up an array of conflicts in the betting industry that have been mostly unknown in the United States. Adrian Ford, general manager of Football DataCo, the official handler of data for the English Premier League and others in Britain, said that in dozens of stadiums each weekend, the hooded scouts show up for companies aiming to collect the data and sell it to betting operators without buying rights to the league-approved stream originating in the press box.
“It goes to the heart of this issue, the data debate,” Mr. Ford said. “Clearly the data from the source, a stadium, it’s valuable. Some people believe it’s appropriate to cheat.”
That shadowy cat-and-mouse game in Britain gives a small preview of battles to come in the United States over how the data should be collected and whether the gambling industry should be required to use “official data,” a league-approved tabulation of what happened in a sports competition.
The debate over official data is one facet of a still broader set of questions: How should sports data from any source, official or unofficial, be regulated, monitored and purchased? Who should settle a dispute over whether an in-play bet was won or lost? Does real-time data from a sporting event, like the sounds of a musical performance, have a claim to royalties and copyright protection for those who produce it? By creating a sort of monopoly, could a mandate for official data actually do more harm than good?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/sports/sports-betting.html sports betting that isn't covered often. Books utilizing real time observers to update live betting odds and beat the 5-10 second delay inherent with live sports broadcasts. It is possible there is a flipside angle to this where sports bettors could use their own observers to make live bets and profit. If this ever becomes a real issue, I wonder if we'll see stadiums employ cell phone jammers or communications jamming equipment to crackdown on attempts to beat the tape delay.
Many of the things said about gambling are not very up to date or knowledgeable and so I'm posting this in the hope that people might gain a little bit of inside knowledge as to how gambling is not necessarily throwing darts at a board or a flip of a coin. There are actual attempts to transform it into something where a person can win consistently and attempts to do the opposite. If only a person is willing to scratch a little beneath the surface.
