Matthew Davidow joins the RAS podcast to talk betting, NFL wild card round
This week's guest on the RAS podcast was Matthew Davidow, CTO of Huddle and DeckPrism. Matthew sets NFL odds for Circa, Pinnacle and other major sportsbook brands.
On this particular show, he was asked a series of questions (partial transcript below) about the sports betting market, the difficulty of being a bettor vs being an operator, and his place in the sports betting world (are his products making the market more efficient?). From there, he gave his take on all six NFL Wild Card round games.
Listen to the full episode here:
What’s the biggest difference from where you are now from where you were as a bettor in terms of what you’re doing on a daily basis?
When you’re betting, so much of betting is about finding one thing that you know better, that you do better, than the entire market. The only way to win betting, especially at scale—whether it’s an angle, or just this bet or that bet—the bet has to be a decent bit better because you have to beat everybody. When you’re on the operator side of things, when you’re making the number, it’s all about playing defense. You have to put up a number of different markets, and your goal isn’t so much to be a lot better, but rather to not be a lot worse. So instead of having one thing that you’re better than everyone else on, you have to do everything as close or as good as everybody at the same time. So it’s going from offense to defense.
Are you a better bettor or bookmaker?
I’m a better bettor.
I saw a tweet from Spanky yesterday, he said NFL betting is a complete coin flip. Do you agree or disagree with that?
Well, I definitely disagree, although the market has gotten a ton—a ton— sharper, especially on gameday, than it was 5-10 years ago. But I still think there's edges to be found in the NFL if you work enough resources into it.
Do you think the work you've been doing on the bookmaking side has contributed to making the market sharper, not just in the NFL but other sports?
I think a decent bit in football. We're still trying to find our feet in a lot of ways, playing defense when it comes to prop markets and various derivatives, because it gets very difficult. We're working on our version of a same-game parlay product. Once you get into that stuff, it eats into your time. You don't get exactly that top-level trading that you used to have.
Is the correlation the most difficult part about that or what's the challenge?
We've got simulations we have had to make a lot more detailed to make more things come out of it. So there has been that work, as well as the hard and very overlooked work about delivering the odds from the back to the front end in a speedy manner.