What We've Learned In Our First Month of Betscope
Not all of our users are using our tools to their full capability. But the ones that do are winning money.
We’ve had a lot of fun getting user feedback since Betscope launched a month ago. It builds upon a lot of different concepts we’ve been writing about in this newsletter well before the product launched, and we weren’t sure how people would take to it. Our first month has been encouraging on the whole: we’re getting clear feedback that there’s enough users that are getting great value from Betscope, as well as some definite signals on what we need to improve for our users. We thought we’d share some of the things we’ve observed in the first month of our product going live.
The Good: Engagement is above benchmarks
There are some standard metrics every site uses to measure engagement among their user base: how often users return to the site on a daily/weekly basis, how many pageviews does each user rack up during each visit, etc. We had some initial benchmarks we wanted to hit to validate that there’s a viable user base for our product, and we’re exceeding our engagement goals. I give a lot of credit to our Discord server: people are asking really smart questions there on how to best use the product, and it’s really helped other users get comfortable with all of the Betscope tools. If you haven’t stopped by yet, I definitely encourage you to do so.
The Bad: Low utilization of the full product set
Now, on to the interesting part: about half of you are looking at odds data for each game on a daily basis, but you aren’t using the correlations engine to help understand your full range of views and select the best bets to attack. To be clear: odds shopping is a perfectly good use of Betscope, especially if you’ve been used to only betting at a single book. However, there are a ton of good reasons to incorporate the correlations engine into your process as well:
Running the correlations engine also triggers our ROI calculator immediately after, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of understanding which lines are inefficiently priced. Take an example from last night’s Blazers/Suns game, where Cam Johnson’s assist market had different over/under values with different prices:
Which of the highlighted markets has the bigger inefficiency: the PointsBet line that has a lower price than the other sportsbooks? Or the Fanduel line that has a higher number, but a price that’s potentially not shaded enough on the under side? In other words, what price would the Fanduel line for under 3.5 assists would be equivalent to the PointsBet over 2.5 line: -180? -160? -140? Unless you’re intimately familiar with prop distributions and can do that math on the fly, it’s difficult to make those assessments just by eyeballing these prices. This is why our ROI calculator is so valuable: it utilizes distribution-based math to evaluate those prices for every market at every sportsbook to assess which markets are inefficiently priced on the fly.
The ROI calculator results also contain embedded URLs to the exact page for each bet, allowing you to get to the bet you want to place in a single click. This is a quality-of-life improvement that is strangely missing from most betting tools, but we think makes a bigger difference than you might think. Once you get to placing 10-20 bets a night, even saving a couple seconds per bet not only is a nicer experience, but may also be the difference between getting your bet down in time or not before the lines change.
Understanding how the bet you might want to make is correlated to other outcomes is a critical concept to internalize to expand your ability as a sports bettor. The more you practice that concept, the more secondhand it will become.
There are likely other reasons why our users aren’t using the correlations engine as much as we’d like, some of which are on us. We’ll do our part to try and make sure it’s an indispensable part of our users’ betting process.
The Good: The people that do fully utilize it are winning money
The reason why we’re so bullish on using our full set of products as much as possible is we finally have some validation in the wild: it’s helping our users win money. Some testimonials from our Discord:
Betscope admittedly has a little bit of a learning curve, but so far, the users that have gotten on on the other side of it have had success finding value in the markets and increasing their win rate. It definitely embodies a different approach than many people are used to, but those that have been willing to give it a try have found a lot of success with it.
We’ll be doing our best to spell out our envisioned use cases for maximum success in the coming weeks, in addition to expanding markets coverage and building out support for additional sports. The early success our users have had is incredibly encouraging, and we look forward to improving our tools even further.