Q&A: Ari Lewski, executive director, Digital Sports Tech

Digital Sports Tech’s customisable player props engine only went live for the first time last week, but the firm already has its sights set on a global rollout of the platform.

The Player Props engine lets customers create their own matchups and markets, using a proprietary algorithm to instantly price up millions of potential bets, such as ‘Wayne Rooney and David Silva to combine for at least four shots on target’.

With interest in player-level markets at an all-time high following the explosion of DFS, and operators looking for new ways to engage punters, Player Props could be primed to take advantage. eGaming Review caught up with the company’s executive director, Ari Lewski, to find out more about the provider and its plans for the future.

eGaming Review (EGR): How long has this customisation engine been in the making and is it trader-heavy?

Ari Lewski (AL): We’ve been developing this product and platform for three years. It was a very challenging build given the need to accept all the unique combinations of players and stats. And with respect to resulting markets, instead of having to verify 300 for a given event, our system needs to be able to result 300,000.

In terms of day-to-day work, we’ve got analysts who are specialists in each of the sports we cover. Our system does the heavy duty number crunching, so 85% of the price comes from our algorithms and then we layer on some qualitative analysis that might affect a player’s performance.

EGR: You’ve described these props as a bridge between DFS and betting. Are you targeting both audiences?

AL: This whole idea was born out of fantasy, because it’s so popular at the minute. Everyone is becoming obsessed with player statistics and they’re following that aspect of the game more and more. And if people are spending their time on this research, we found there was nothing in the market for that person to take that knowledge and wager on it.

I’m a huge Cincinnati Bengals fan and I know the players inside out; the form they’re in and how they’re likely to play against a certain team or matchup, and I wanted a way to bet on that knowledge but there was nothing in the market that let me do that. The ability to do that now adds a whole new dimension to how fans watch and engage with the sport.

EGR: What have the early returns been like with MadBookie?

AL: Participation was unbelievable over the first weekend despite the very soft launch. The user engagement exceeded all our expectations. MadBookie hasn’t even marketed it yet because they’re waiting for the mobile version to go live next week, but so far the numbers have been strong and they’ve been experiencing record numbers of new sign-ups since the product has gone live. People have picked this up just through social media and word of mouth. People have even been posting screenshots of their customised bets on Facebook and Twitter which has been fantastic to see. This product is very social.

EGR: Are you concerned that sharp players could beat this?

AL: We tested this last year with a F2P DFS site in the US called Pickchamps which was based around users creating these props, and that experience was invaluable to us.

Interacting with a savvy user base on a daily basis allowed us to analyse hundreds of thousands of bets, test the tech and review the performance of our pricing. That experience identified the weak spots and we’ve addressed them, to the point where this year, we were ready to take this to operators.

We’re pretty confident that over the long run, we should generate very decent returns. Props by their nature are high yielding if you get it right. We’d like to think we could deliver a margin between 20-40%. We haven’t been running it long enough to see how we do across a season but with MadBookie over the weekend we saw the yields of 50% in certain games. How that translates to a whole season I don’t know yet, but these markets do lend themselves to high margins.

EGR: Who have you spoken to about rolling this out?

AL: Most of the discussions are with the top tier guys and a few of them are quite advanced while I’ve also been speaking to lower tier operators in other jurisdictions all over the world.

I am pretty confident you’ll see this in the UK in a big way by the start of the Premiership season. That would be football, NFL, NBA and a couple of the other European soccer leagues.

EGR: Is it easy to add other sports and leagues?

AL: We’ll be adding more football leagues and that’s no effort on our part because the sport is already integrated into the platform. We should be launching MLB shortly and that’s very close to completion and we have NHL integrated but we’re not ready to release that until we see demand for that, so we’re holding back on it for now.