The Sports-Betting Traders Deciding How Much You Win or Lose

ChadOtt · Dec 17, 2024

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Traders work at the FanDuel office during Sunday-football events in Jersey City, N.J.

By

Katherine Sayre

Jan. 1, 2024 7:01 am ET

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JERSEY CITY, N.J.—Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill recently marked a 78-yard touchdown with an unusual celebration. He and teammates imitated riding a roller coaster, sitting on the field with their arms waving overhead.

More than 200 miles away, sports-betting company FanDuel’s sports-trading desk was riding its own waves that Sunday afternoon. The traders on duty—self-professed sports buffs with a knack for math—were trying to predict how National Football League athletes and teams would perform that day.

Sports-trading desks are similar to financial-trading desks on Wall Street, which enable investors to buy and sell stocks and bonds. However, the sports desks create odds to influence and entice bets in a live market where hundreds of millions of dollars are exchanged on American athletic events.

The Miami Dolphins celebrate a touchdown. PHOTO: GEOFF BURKE/USA TODAY SPORTS/REUTERS
Hill’s seconds-long run into the endzone meant a $68,000 hit to the sportsbook on customer bets on whether he would score the first touchdown of the game. Immediately, bettors’ money started rolling in on Hill to score more touchdowns and gain more yards.

The Dolphins ended up trouncing the Washington Commanders 45-15. FanDuel lost $1 million on the game.

“You have good days, bad days,” said Will Twinn, a lead FanDuel sports trader that day. “It’s really about getting the prices right and let the cards fall where they may.”

Sports betting has become big business for gambling companies, sports leagues and media outlets over the past five years. By the time your finger taps the glass of a smartphone screen to place a bet, a sportsbook trading desk powered by algorithms and raw data on past and current games has made its best guess of what is likely to play out on the field.

FanDuel’s algorithm simulates each play of a football game 10,000 times to try to predict the outcome, who might score a touchdown or how many yards a wide receiver might get.

While financial markets typically operate within set trading windows, sportsbooks add new markets—additional betting offerings—around the clock. If a trader needs to step away for a quick break, another steps in.

On the recent Sunday, FanDuel took in more than $200 million bets on NFL games. That figure is the total amount customers placed in bets that day, before winnings were paid out.

Betting BigU.S. sports-betting revenueSource:
As one FanDuel trader rushed to shift the Dolphins’ odds after Hill’s touchdown, another monitored the New England Patriots’ matchup with the Los Angeles Chargers. Patriots running back Rhamondre Stevenson had to be helped off the field after an ankle injury.

The trader immediately started adjusting the odds, making it more likely that Stevenson’s backup would score. “That’s information we didn’t know 15 minutes ago,” Twinn said.

Sports-betting companies must strike a balance between protecting the business’s bottom line and setting prices—the possible winnings—appealing enough that customers will want to make a bet. The more accurately a company can predict what will happen, the more money they stand to make. It is a science and an art.

Just as financial trading desks pipe in securities prices from stock exchanges, sports desks rely on data feeds from the NFL.

FanDuel said it takes about 1.5 seconds to receive the data point—what happened on the field—and about 1 second for its model to process the data and push out new odds. That information travels faster than the game broadcasts and streams viewers watch at home.

Sports-trading desks create odds to influence and entice bets in a live market where hundreds of millions of dollars are exchanged on American athletic events.
The basic tenet of gambling—that the house always wins—lives on. While any given day might be a win or a loss for a sportsbook, overall, FanDuel said it makes about 11.5% in revenue from the total bets it accepts, after paying out winning bets.

FanDuel is owned by

Flutter Entertainment
, a Dublin-based gambling operator with popular brands in Europe and Australia. FanDuel was a daily fantasy-sports company when the Supreme Court issued a ruling in 2018 that ushered in a new era of gambling in the U.S. States beyond Nevada could legalize sports betting, and many state governments rushed in.

For Flutter and FanDuel, the challenge was establishing a trading desk from a talent pool in the U.S. with little experience in sports betting. Twinn, who started as a trader at Flutter’s Sportsbet in Australia, moved to the U.S. in 2019. He left the company shortly after the Dolphins-Commanders game.

On the recent Sunday, when several NFL games were scheduled to start at 1 p.m. ET, traders in Flutter’s offices in Dublin took the first shift. They monitored pregame news from around 2 a.m. ET and began adjusting the day’s odds. The Jersey City traders then took over, and by Sunday Night Football, the sportsbook was in the hands of traders in Melbourne, Australia.

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Spencer Diaz, in his second NFL season as a FanDuel trader, sat in front of a half-dozen screens at his desk. One featured a high-speed video stream from the NFL of his assigned game, the Dolphins against the Commanders. Another showed a grid of odds from other sportsbooks for a view of the market trends. A third displayed FanDuel’s automated system, where traders can compare the FanDuel’s modeling with what is playing out on the field.

Diaz, a lifelong sports fan, picked working at FanDuel over going to law school. He said taking over responsibility for a game was, at first, “a bit nerve-wracking seeing all the money coming in.”

The Dolphins were favored to win at kickoff by 8.5 points, which shifted to 17 points as the game progressed. After Hill scored another touchdown, FanDuel decided the odds favored Miami to have a more decisive win, by a margin of about 22 points.

Ed Miller, who co-founded a company that automates sportsbook pricing for gambling companies, said the modern sportsbook is a far cry from Las Vegas-style sports betting in which human bookmakers made the calculations and you might find a white board with a game’s odds written on it.

FanDuel, which is going head-to-head with

DraftKings
for the No. 1 position in the sports-betting market, asserted its dominance with help of a now-ubiquitous product: the single-game parlay. A bettor can string together several bets on one game, including how specific players will perform.

The chances of winning—that each leg of the parlay will, in fact, happen in the game—lean heavily in favor of the house. The appeal of a big cashout, though, has maintained its popularity.

For example, when the Baltimore Ravens played the Jacksonville Jaguars on Dec. 17, FanDuel offered a seven-leg parlay on how five star players would perform in passing yards, receiving yards, rushing yards and touchdowns. A $10 wager would win $457. (The athletes’ performances didn’t pan out that way, and no customers won.)
Sports-betting traders play a crucial role in determining the odds and your potential winnings. Using advanced algorithms, statistics, and market trends, they adjust odds to minimize risks for bookmakers and maximize profits. Traders analyze data in real time, ensuring the betting market remains balanced and competitive. If you’re looking for better payouts, exploring resources like https://kaszinoworld.com/legjobb-kifizetes-online-kaszinok/ can help you choose platforms with the best returns. Ultimately, sports-betting traders influence not only your wagers but also the strategy behind every bet, making their role key in the gambling industry.
A more straightforward bet that total points scored in the game would be more than 41.5 generated about $9 in winnings on a $10 bet.

Spencer Diaz, a trader for FanDuel and a lifelong sports fan, picked working at FanDuel over going to law school.

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The Sports-Betting Traders Deciding How Much You Win or Lose

ChadOtt