SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
In part one of a joint interview with SBC, Ondrej Silhavy – Senior Sales Manager at Bayes Esports – and Rohini Sardana – Business Development Director at Pinnacle – discuss the shared values that underpin their partnership and the importance of official data in delivering a top esports betting experience.
SBC: Tell us, how did this partnership between Bayes Esports and Pinnacle come about? And what do you hope to achieve through this collaboration?
OS: The partnership between Bayes Esports and Pinnacle was established thanks to having common goals and vision. As the official data rights holders, and leading source of in-game esports data, we have an obligation to secure proper distribution across the market. That being said, to establish a partnership like this, you need to look further.
Understanding where our paths align was a key. Pinnacle has been building a top esports betting experience for the last decade. In order to do that, elements like latency, granularity and precision are the key.
In such a rapidly changing industry, alignment of these values has made it possible to have such a great partnership. We’ve been building our distribution platform, BEDEX, with all these requirements in mind…
RS: With 10 years pioneering in the esports betting space, we’ve shown our commitment to taking the best esports betting action to the end user. These bettors want an experience that matches that of the standards found in traditional betting spaces, and to deliver that from a trading point-of-view requires access to the fastest and most accurate data.
We identified Bayes Esports as sharing a common goal in pushing esports betting forward. As a rights holder and distributor, they’re well suited to underpin our market-leading betting solutions with the vast data sets needed for our esports trading team to provide the breadth of content, the sharpest odds, and the ultimate betting experience.
Without working with a partner like Bayes, it’s simply not possible to deliver a good betting experience, with manual workarounds and unofficial data both inefficient and error prone.
SBC: So, Ondrej, what benefits does official data bring for your partners, such as Pinnacle, when it comes to the odds making process?
OS: The amount of data points distributed in a single game of Counter Strike is larger than during the whole Tennis ATP season. Time delay plays a crucial role, and the depth of data points goes far beyond what you can see on the screen when you watch the match itself. All these things combined make it impossible to build a good betting product without having access to official data.
Without official data, your feed will be built on delayed information, and you will lack access to crucial information, which would lead to errors. A lot of them. When you don’t use official data, you are effectively trading half blind, and you have to close markets very often. That eventually leads to your customer not having the chance to even place a bet, resulting in them leaving for a competitor.
Thanks to their great models and trading teams, operators like Pinnacle are able to leverage official data to increase both the profitability and the uptime of their live betting product.
SBC: And Rohini, How is the data you are receiving from Bayes Esports allowing for greater protections in terms of integrity?
RS: Integrity has come so far in the esports space in recent years, partly due to the efforts of organisations, such as ESIC, pushing education and alerting systems, but also due to rights holders, like Bayes, that are able to monitor and analyse – in real-time – the millions of data points running through a single match. This data set, combined with our in-house, pioneering bet monitoring systems, allows us to highlight suspicious activity quickly and effectively.
Our esports traders are all experts in their fields, many being ex-pro gamers themselves, and they can quickly assess unusual betting action, and having the data to correlate to betting action transforms a trader’s deduction into a more tangible occurrence, which we are then happy to share with ESIC to alert the wider industry.
