Episode 15 of the Sports Predictor podcast features Lloyd Danzig who is one of the world’s leading experts on Machine Learning for the sports betting industry.
He is the Founder and CEO at Sharp Alpha Advisors – a full service consulting company for sports betting businesses that are using cutting edge technology. Lloyd is also the Founder and Chairman of a non profit focused on the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence.
Tune in to find out –
- What drew him to a career in the sports betting industry
- The types of start-ups and investors he likes to work with
- How machine learning is well suited to improving in-game betting
- His view on what the perfect sportsbook could look like
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Lloyd Danzig on live betting applications for machine learning:
If you have been a customer of a sports betting operator in the United States where there is legal, mobile sports wagering and you’ve tried to place a mobile in-game wager or even at a kiosk, what you may have experienced is a situation where you want, say Giants -135 on the moneyline.
I want to risk $10 and you press submit and then you see a sort of a pending wheel as a loading screen for 10 seconds. And during that time, the Sportsbook can reject your wager, they can cancel it, they can partially accept it. And that generally is a function of the fact that their models are just not robust and efficient enough to put out accurate real time odds with confidence. So being able to leverage machine learning, which not only operates more quickly in real time, but also has this characteristic whereby you can do some of the processing or the training as it is called ahead of time, will allow your favorite sports books to not only put out more accurate odds in real time, but they won’t have to have such a house edge baked in. Because right now both sides of a spread bet are -110, but both sides of a live bet are -120, -130 or even -140 because they just don’t trust in their information and their models.
So in addition to a more seamless user experience and a lower house edge, there’s also the possibility of there just being more markets to bet on that require more sophisticated modeling. For example if you wanted to sit at Yankee Stadium and every at-bat wager on the outcome of the next batter, even the next pitch, that is not something that operators will really be able to do effectively without leveraging machine learning techniques.
Sharp Alpha Advisors is a Sports Betting business and investment consultancy with a focus on companies deploying cutting-edge technology.
ICED(AI) International Consortium for the Ethical Development of Artificial Intelligence.
