Making smarter and better decisions when betting real money is a constant in the industry of sports wagering. Big data comprises a lot of smaller branches, including AI-driven interpretation tools, odds calculators, user-behaviour analysers, and predictive betting systems. You have the option to choose these and enhance your winning probabilities, but the chances are higher for your day-to-day sportsbook to have already used your preferences to craft features and functionalities using them.
If this sounds like alien technology, you are not far from the correct conclusion, but it is human-made and ready to revolutionize the betting branch. Let’s discuss how all these tools rely on user data to create better betting experiences in return.
Big Data In The Context of Online Gambling
If you take information from a single source, you can call it data. If you collect different types of data in different formats from various online and offline sources and put them together, that is big data.
In the context of online gambling, big data can be translated into user behaviour, payment actions, time spent betting, sports betting decisions, social media interactions, and even social gambling initiatives.
To contextualize this definition better, let’s have a look at BetBrain. After providing flawless odds suggestions services and sports events analyses while also giving daily betting tips, this actor took advantage of big data collected from their own audience and developed the free-entry social tournaments.
We are not saying they revolutionized the market with this initiative, but it is definitely proof of a business move you take based on your audience’s behavior and gambling preferences. For BetBrain, it made a difference in the personalization of the betting experiences sector. But there is more space for big data to make an impact in the online gambling sector:
- Customer Retention and Marketing
- Cybersecurity
- Fraud Prevention
- Customer Behaviour
Customer-Centric Retention Strategies
Knowing how to use big data to your own company’s advantage is pure gold in the long run. The ultimate goal is to know how, when, and what to do in order to retain your customers when their intention to leave, close the page, or stop the betting session appears.
Darshana Desaid perfectly dissects this in her study from 2018, “An Empirical Study of Website Personalization Effect on Users Intention to Revisit E-commerce Website Through Cognitive and Hedonic Experience: Proceedings of ICDMAI 2018” where she starts with:
“Personalisation has been used as an emerging strategy to reduce information overload, attract users, and leverage business through online web portals in recent years. However, less attention is given to studying the different design aspects of web personalization and how they impact users’ decision-making. To address this gap, this study draws on both stimulus–organism–response theory and information overload theory to propose a model for users’ information processing and decision-making.”
Having access to their decision-making processes, casino operators develop custom journeys for each player. For the casual user, it feels like the website always delivers what they expect or even better; with only two clicks, they can engage with their favorite games. The same goes for promotions, where each player receives bonuses and incentives based on game preferences. If you like slots, you will receive rotations. If you are all about sports betting, you will receive cashback or free bets.
Artificial Intelligence & Predictive Models: Turning Sports Data Into Real Insights
Collecting huge amounts of information from thousands of sports events every day is not a job for a human being. Artificial intelligence does an excellent job of collecting all these segregated categories of information and compiling them well enough for predictive models to use to deliver reports on team performances, player performances, odds calculations, and so on.
- Analyzing team statistics and player performance metrics, weather, and even the smallest variables in a matter of milliseconds help these models forecast likely outcomes for users to bet on.
- Machine learning: These algorithms adapt to patterns; they get better over time and constantly learn about user behavior.
- Custom alerts: If a user is more likely to jump on a trend because he is inclined and prefers it, a custom alert based on his previous behavior is the key to triggering both his dopamine and FOMO.
Bet Smarter
We have talked about team stats and player performances, but outcome prediction is something you may already be familiar with. There are several expert analysts out there conducting comprehensive analyses every day based on available statistics and data. The process only got faster thanks to how we can process big data.
At the same time, if you wish to bet smarter, big data can help you identify arbitrage opportunities. If it sounds peculiar, it is because you have to learn about it. Arbitrage is the strategy you apply to find big enough discrepancies between same event odds and place multiple bets at different bookies to secure that difference as a profit.
People who focused on developing big data processing tools with the purpose of permanently crawling bookie platforms are now making a fortune by taking advantage of automated arbitrage. For some of you out there, this may sound like a dream.
Security And Fraud Prevention
If the whole gambling scene is switching from chance-driven to data-driven, this does nothing but put a bigger target on the back of data processors and, due to their high volume of financial transactions, casinos.
“The role of big data in detecting and preventing financial fraud in digital transactions” study from the World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews perfectly underlines how we can leverage big data for fraud detection. We can track transaction logs that contain detailed financial information and records of financial transactions, amounts, timestamps, and even transaction amounts.
By looking at all these indicators and analyzing all the logs, casinos can identify patterns and indicators of fraudulent activities. This can translate to frequent financial operations, unfamiliar account detection, or suspect user behavior.
What To Expect From The Future?
In present times, data is more valuable than anything. Companies use data to understand customers and craft customized services and pathways for them to remain loyal. From a betting standpoint, the experience only gets better and better with time. However, the complexity of a standard sports bet will increase. Since AI tools will be able to predict outcomes in a more effective manner, we expect bookies to come up with more difficult odds.
This is just our honest opinion. How about you? Meet us in the comment section and tell us if big data helped you achieve a better betting experience.
