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This weekend, hundreds of thousands of football fans will be following the Super Bowl not only on TV and Superbowl.com, but through the Data Broadcasting Corporation's sports data network, which sends out the changing odds over networks that span the globe.
More than US$60 million is expected to be bet in Las Vegas alone this Super Sunday, the biggest betting day of the year in the gambling town. That doesn't include more than $1 billion that will be made in illegal sports bets in the other 49 states. With so much money at stake, nothing is more crucial to big bettors than keeping close tabs on the odds, a need that is turning sports betting into a high-tech industry similar to finance.
"The more information people have, the more confident they are about betting," says Art Manteris, director of the SuperBook at the Las Vegas Hilton. "It's just like stocks: The more you know, the more you're willing to invest."
Sports betting is entirely dependent on odds - and the odds (or "the line") in 80 percent of the casinos in Nevada are dependent on Roxy Roxborough. Roxborough calculates the line on everything from football to hockey to presidential elections, and has been sending his information to bookmakers around the world since 1980. Until 1995, that information was primarily distributed via fax and phone to bookmakers.
In August 1995, Roxborough teamed up with DBC, a company known primarily for its investment data network, to launch a sports data network that would send real-time sports odds between the casinos in Las Vegas and Roxborough's odds-makers. The network radically changed the sports betting industry by allowing bookmakers at casinos to not only watch the other's odds in real-time, but to send information back directly to Roxborough, who then adjusts the consensus line.
"Most bookies used to change their odds based on their own take on the game, but as this [technology] becomes widespread, you're standardizing the product," explains Richard McGowan, an economics professor at Boston College and author of State Lotteries and Legalized Gambling.
"The bookmakers can now watch as the odds change at the different houses," explains Larry Kramer, VP of news and sports at DBC. "It prevents them from taking risks," as well as preventing high-rollers from taking advantage of the casino's varying odds to "hedge" the bets and use the disparity between bookmakers's odds to bet heavily and move the line in their favor.
High-rollers hook into the action
High-rollers themselves are also gaining access to the same information as the casinos. DBC now provides the same real-time odds information available on the Nevada bookmakers network to 15,000 subscribers - primarily professional gamblers who bet more than a million dollars a year - for $369 a month. Those gamblers (also known as "handicappers"), who often bet as much as $100,000 on a game, rely heavily on the real-time information to play the games like stockbrokers play the financial market.
"Most people bet based on their gut instinct; but there's another category of people who really study data, and they're going to bet differently depending on whatever information those people have access to," explains Kenneth Dotson of SportsLine, a popular sports Web site that provides DBC's odds data.
"People have to move faster if they're going to catch an opening." Kramer asserts. "It's increasing the betting."
Although no studies have been published demonstrating whether this sports data technology has increased betting overall, statistics show that the amount of money spent on sports gambling has been accelerating rapidly. Between 1994 and 1995, the last years for which statistics are available, sports wagering increased from $2.1 billion to $2.6 billion, and Marvin Steinberg of the Connecticut Counsel on Compulsive Gambling says the rate has continued to increase dramatically.
Information for the average bettor
Not all gamblers can justify the expensive investment in real-time sports data, however, and for the rest of the world, the Internet is now coming into play. Last fall, DBC began making the same information available with a 15-minute delay on its Web site, launching alongside sites like SportsLine and Scores And Odds, which also transmit its lines. The site gets more than 20,000 pageviews a day - up to 72,000 on big games days.
These sites, along with newsgroups like alt.gambling.sports, are creating a new generation of wired-up recreational gamblers. "Jon from Jersey," a 20-year sports betting veteran, follows newsgroups and multiple sports data sites, and affirms that online sports data has allowed him to "bet smarter." Says Jon, "I have been gambling much more successfully as the Internet age has come about. Ask around a bit and you will find that the 'players' are doing better than ever."
Gamblers reaping the most benefits from the new online sports information are not necessarily the legal bettors in Nevada, but those in the rest of the United States who are using local illegal bookies to make their bets, and until recently had to count on the day-old information found in newspapers.
"Competition can be key between bettors and bookies as to who can get the information the fastest," explains David Hobsen, president of the horse racing data software company Track Data System. "The quicker you can speed up [your ability to get odds], the bigger your advantage."
"Illegal bookmaking had an advantage over bettors because they knew what the odds were," Kramer says, "but as bettors have access to the same information on Web sites, they can't be taken advantage of.
"It's making a more honest business out of this."
