Every second a sports betting line is suspended, a sportsbook risks losing potential revenue and customer loyalty. It’s a simple equation: fewer and shorter suspensions lead to more betting activity and, in turn, money.
The numbers from Bettormetrics paint a picture of the sheer volume of money left on the table. Four major sportsbooks missed out on $160.7 million of potential revenue in the 2023-24 NFL season. NBA suspensions have historically led to books missing out on hundreds of millions in handle.
Bettormetrics CEO Robert Urwin and Chief Revenue Officer Sabin Brooks bring their expertise to sportsbooks and provide actionable data to limit suspension times and dial in pricing strategies that keep operators in the black for as long as possible.
“Having worked in the back-end services of the sportsbook trading floor, I know that there’s a massive complexity of data and a lot of bookmakers have pricing and suspension issues,” Urwin told GGB.
Urwin founded Bettormetrics with other partners to address these issues.
“We can measure how sportsbooks suspend around certain events like touchdowns, baskets, goals, and so on,” he said. “Then you can roll up the data into big aggregate views to see which sportsbooks suspend longer than others, for example.”
The issues are multifaceted, but long suspension times and anomalous events take the cake, resulting in the biggest potential losses.
“Even the biggest sportsbooks do some very strange things around certain periods in each and every game,” Urwin said. “When you look at the data at a granular level, it shows a very surprising picture. There are endemic and systemic issues everywhere.”
Brooks put it into simple terms: “We identify efficient and deficient trading practices, and in theory, help sportsbooks optimize every second of any game that they’re trading. It’s not easy, but if you follow the data, you can improve margins and make more money. That’s our end goal with any customer.”
The journey to unlocking more handle and profits starts with awareness. “You’ve got to be aware that you even have these differences,” Urwin said. “There’s almost an arrogance or stubbornness with some operators because they have excellent trading teams, but they don’t realize they can miss anomalous events to impactful suspensions.”
That awareness starts as a panoramic view, then zooms into the intricacies of each market. A minutes-long suspension mid-game can obviously be a big loss, but smaller increments add up, too.
“Ten, 30, 40 seconds matter and can cost customers and revenue,” Brooks said. “You’re missing out on high turnover during that time.”
The total dollar amounts are staggering, representing millions or even billions of lost potential handle and revenue. Money is the language all sportsbooks speak, but there’s another hidden cost that can be just as crucial to a bookmaker’s well-being: customer loyalty.
Imagine wanting to bet on a particular in-game market at your favorite sportsbook and finding it suspended. Wait a few minutes, and it’s still not available. The experience is frustrating.
“Bettors will lose interest and move on,” Urwin said. “Most bettors have five accounts with five different companies. If they’re not getting the service they want from one, they’ll move to another.”
It’s all fine and dandy in theory—collect the data, uncover the issues, and implement fixes. In practice, sportsbooks require an extra push. To get a sportsbook on board—especially a well-known operator—takes a lot of convincing.
“Ultimately, who wants to have the quality of their work audited?” said Brooks. “It can take much more convincing than you expect at first.”
On the other hand, Urwin and Brooks noted that progressive sportsbooks looking to hustle and carve out a name in saturated markets are more than willing to look inward and leverage Bettormetrics to fix any glaring suspension and pricing issues.
When sportsbooks take a vested interest in lowering suspension frequency and instances, the results are palpable.
“One huge European operator was suspending in certain scenarios for very long periods of time,” Urwin said. “They first thought, ‘This is impossible.’ Then we were able to shine a torch on the issues, pick out the gaps in performance, and identify ways to fix it.”
Bettormetrics targets other areas, too. It’s not just suspensions and pricing. The company’s solutions can identify inconsistencies in margins on a two-way bet, for example, to flag when one book is out of step with the market. Additionally, the business is working with AI and machine learning in tandem with the human touch to fuel better and faster gathering of data.
Brooks asserted Bettormetrics is in the early stages of its capabilities as a business. “We’ve only just started driving more accountability and improvements in the industry that have been absent for far too long.”
