Personalising your betting experience

[Mark_Porter]

Is there anything stopping an online sports book offering different prices to different customers on the same event and personalising their experience?

I.e. Joe Bloggs is a regular customer who punts £50 every weekend with a mix of £5 and £10 bets. When he logs into his account, rather than seeing every sport that exists ever, all he sees immediately is the Premier League betting as that is all he ever bets on. There are various offers to drive up the number of bets he places. The team that he supports has had a price boost.

Versus a shrewd punter who still gets the personalised experience of only seeing sports that are relevent but doesn't get the promotional offers shown to him and the prices he is offered are much tighter.

Rather than restricting bets, just tighten the prices right up.

I know nothing about the industry but it surprises me how generic the experience is for the whole customer base at the moment or am I missing something?

[doubleup]

Frankly bookmakers would be more likely to offer poorer prices to customers they believe are not discerning.

[Doobs]

Coral personalise my experience by offering me 10% of my bet at 1/6 instead of 6/1. 

[SuuPRlim]

basically the sophistication required to change lines and markets for savvy punters whilst offering better lines and prices just too much work to justify it for most places, if you think someone is sharp you can just restrict them and that takes a few hours work maximum, trading different prices for different accounts end up a lot of work and if you're playing vs sharp punters you'll still lose anyway unless you can take big enough volume on all markets to run a fully green book. You don't find many sharp bets on EPL or easy markets to get green on. Mostly on really tough things to green up like Horse Racing, lower league football etc.

It is a good idea though, me and my partners been working on something sort of along these lines - where you can restrict as few accounts as possible whilst offering best service to good customers, it's a huge amount of work though and really complicated (for my brain capacity anyway) restricting winners is kind of bullshit but it's a fairly effective way of doing things from a man-hours vs results standing. As unpopular an opinion as that will be round here i'm sure. That being said I think big companies make huge mistakes even in this.

[arbboy]

I have worked for firms who 'dealt' two different lines to punters.  'Sharp' and 'Square' lines.  Any wagon who loves a fav and over (esp in accas) would be put on the square line to squeeze more out of him and the sharps who generally back dogs/unders etc would be put on the other line.

[SuuPRlim]

I have worked for firms who 'dealt' two different lines to punters.  'Sharp' and 'Square' lines.  Any wagon who loves a fav and over (esp in accas) would be put on the square line to squeeze more out of him and the sharps who generally back dogs/unders etc would be put on the other line.

Such an absurdly leaky way to do it but im sure it actually works out. The less actually thinking you have people working for you the better.

[Jamier-Host]

basically the sophistication required to change lines and markets for savvy punters whilst offering better lines and prices just too much work to justify it for most places, if you think someone is sharp you can just restrict them and that takes a few hours work maximum

It's not as hard as it sounds. You would still have your base prices and then just squeeze/increase the overround as appropriate. Much the same as when people talk about 1to1 CRM experiences, in reality it's just levels of segmentation rather than true personalisation.

It is a bit pointless though as you say, restricting works and is easier. They shouldn't even need much manual intervention for that any more. There are enough data points available to feed a ML algorithm and get pretty accurate predictions on which customers aren't going to deliver a satisfactory ROI over time, and auto flag/restrict them.

The biggest problem (both for sports and casino) is getting that answer quick enough. New customers abusing sign up offers is a massive leak for gambling operators and forces them to enforce all sorts of restrictive terms that end up hurting them twice because the genuine punters get pissed off.

[SuuPRlim]

yeh spot on really.

Bonus abuse is a real pain, but really easy to spot, just a huge drag overall, wish I could have the full time guy we pay monitoring bonus use doing something that actual customers could benefit from, most actual customers dont really give much care for bonuses either as a cost vs acquisition tool they are very inefficient now and defo on the way out. For retention they are much better, it's nice to give bonuses to genuine customers and for the most part they really appreciate it.

I would massively advise anyone looking to bet sharp on a bookie account to ignore all bonuses stuff until you're offered, just another watchlist you don't wanna be on.