Gambling is a brilliant, seductive, maddening game. A game that works best if you know a lot or very little. Being moderately well informed is the worst place to be.
Knowing you are going to lose but being unable to do the things required to win is not fun. Understanding the odds but not how to beat them is a dreadful user experience. When it comes down to it ignorance really is…well, not bliss, but a lot more fun.
People have to lose for the industry to function. And you need to at least try to make it fun to do so. It’s easy to forget this. We need lots and lots of losers losing lots and lots of money and if they do so happily then we’ve really cracked the code. Making losers happy is good, making happy losers is even better.
So how do we do this? Well there are lots of ways, but you could argue the simplest is information asymmetry. Is this actually the secret to making gambling fun? It’s certainly true that the two biggest new products in the sports betting sector have been masterclasses in it.
Same game, different rules
The first of these is cash out. Cash out was a game changer in Europe. It’s the fourth biggest “sport” in most markets now, but it’s far more than an incremental revenue driver squeezing a few more pennies out of ingenuous dopes. What it created was a super-light version of trading, a way of being engaged and involved throughout the game.
An absolutely absurd volume of time on app these days is users checking their cash out offers while the game is in-play. It’s hard to fully imagine the productivity loss due to fingers hovering over some derisory cash out offer on a £20 bet, but I can assure you it’s substantial. “Just wait until it ticks over to £50 then I am definitely cashing out…”
There is clear utility to cash out too. Being able to reverse out of a speculative multiple bet you made is a genuinely useful tool for your average recreational consumer. Sure it felt like a good idea to place a five fold at the time but now you have £2k riding on some 20/1 shot you know nothing about and there’s a cost of living crisis going on don’t you know?
But the real beauty of cash out as a product is how well the cost is hidden from the customer. The offering is wrapped up as a new market and users generally judge it from that perspective. What is this cash out offer worth to me and my initial stake not what is it worth relative to the true price at the current time.
Very few players have the ability or the inclination to calculate a) what the actual cash out value should be or b) what the margin they are being charged for clicking cash out is. And that, arguably, is a good thing. It’s not a cold EV calculation it’s an emotional reaction. Knowing the cost in some ways reduces the value of the exchange.
Here comes the man
Gambling is supposed to be fun isn’t it….isn’t it? When everything is just a cold EV decision then the tank starts to run out of gas a bit. The key is to keep the margin at just the right level that it pays the bills without ruining the customer experience. It’s not an easy task, and honestly not one most operators are getting right at the moment.
One area this is observably true is in bet builders, or same game parlays if you live west of Bermuda. The explosion in popularity in these is down to a great deal more than information asymmetry, but it is a key part of the appeal for both players and operators. Bets are placed much more on “feel” or instinct than on some deeper analysis of true probabilities.
This is primarily due to their reliance on less understood “player performance” metrics rather than the slightly better understood to-win, handicap or totals markets. Very few people truly have any real sense of what the true odds on player A scoring twice, or player B assisting three times in a game. There’s a huge range of acceptable pricing for this in most bettors heads and that’s the magic.
If you as a losing player want to place a good bet on the football or NFL simply wait until near game time and place a bet on one of the liquid markets. You’re very unlikely to have a “bad” bet here, just pay a couple of percent in EV for the privilege of having a guess-up. And that’s fine. That’s a healthy part of the betting ecosystem. But what if you want more than that?
What if you want to kid yourself you have an edge? What if you want to at least feel like you are using your judgement? What if you want to just place some mad bet on a bunch of things that probably won’t happen but will be fun to watch play out? What if you just want to make a bet without worrying if was “good” or not? There should be a place for all of these things.
That is not to suggest this is the only way to bet. Far from it. There should also be a place for smart thinking bettors to engage in the contest too, and a massive pile of other reasons players want to bet, but that is not what we are talking about here. What we are talking about is optimizing gambling products for fun, not just for profit. Because what happens is the two tend to go hand in hand.
But it’s not fun…is it?
I realise this is a contentious point on at least two levels. Firstly that gambling is more fun for the people who matter, the engaged, happy losing players, when they have less of a sense of what the right price is.
The common view both within and outside the industry is that sports betting should only ever be a contest of wits, a battle of judgement and insight. But this simply isn’t the case for a large number of bettors. Gambling is often impulsive rather than considered, thoughtless rather than thoughtful.
Trying to make gambling fun while selling the idea of a skill-based game of low margin, low volatility betting is also doable but it is a much bigger ask. What a lot of gamblers want are products that allow an element of escapism, or wondering “what if”, perhaps even of willing suspension of disbelief.
And, honestly, this is OK so long as everyone involved is aware of what is going on and operators are honest and careful. The game is supposed to be fun, supposed to have swings and big highs and a lot of lows. What is important is that players are still able to win, and that players aren’t lied to, or misled and are treated with respect and care.
This leads screeching to the second point of contention. That fun in gambling too easily resembles a path to addiction, and operators can wittingly or unwittingly push players into destructive habits if they aren’t careful. And if operators want to sell these kinds of products to their customers then they have far more a duty of care than those selling 102% handicap markets.
There is no denying this is the case. And you can certainly say that most operators haven’t really got it right in terms of providing this volatile, controlled and fun user experience yet. You see a lot of talk of over expanding margins, ever bigger multiple bets and nobody seems to be thinking about what this means for the player.
Player performance betting and bet builders (Same Game Parlays) have revolutionised recreational sports betting. They connect with players in a way the industry hasn’t seen for years, while having the additional benefit of being a high margin product where the ceiling doesn’t feel like it’s been reached. Everyone is optimizing for player performance betting now in a race for MOAR MARGIN.
But let’s just stop for a minute and think.
There is a very fine line between a fun gambling product and one that caters only to the compulsive side of human nature. The problem is the latter is usually more profitable in the short term. And it’s imperative the sports betting industry doesn’t forget how things feel for the customer in its race to reinvent itself.