By Dmitri Agapov 
In the latest edition of Trader’s View, our Head of Trading, Dmitri Agapov, outlines how our enhanced in-play tennis trading service is driving uptime and revenue growth for 100s of sportsbooks globally.
As the ATP Finals brought the tennis season to a spectacular climax this month, it’s the perfect time to analyse our in-play trading performance. The good news for our sportsbook partners is that tennis market uptimes are at their highest ever thanks to a series of refinements made to our live tennis operations this year. During the U.S. Open, our market uptimes were the best in the industry by some margin.
So how did we do it?
- A streamlined live data process to arm our traders with even lower-latency feeds
- Trading setup improvements to ensure markets open earlier and for 4% longer in-play
A 4% increase across a two-hour tennis match equates to an additional five minutes turnover opportunity for operators, which at major tournaments provides extra revenue growth. Scaled to thousands of tournaments across the year (we trade on average over daily 100 tennis events), this becomes even more exciting.
Additionally, from January 2024 our traders will start leveraging the official courtside WTA and Australian Open venue feeds to further strengthen our in-play tennis service.
Automated tennis trading
The speed of tennis means live pricing can be more volatile than most sports. Odds change with every single point and, for example, if a service game is broken within four points, momentum can have a real impact on key markets. As a result, our traders need to be able to weight supremacies in real-time to be first with any adjustments.
A key reason we can deliver sharp pricing and record-high in-play tennis uptimes is our automated trading technology. Automating key parameter updates ensures we maintain equilibrium with the market while minimising the need for manual trader intervention.
Powered by ultra low-latency match state data, our tennis trading model includes automated ‘Smart Suspend’, ‘Key Point Boost’ and ‘Confidence Parameter’ features that enable instant, real-time trading optimisations at scale. Our model consistently outperforms exchange market pricing, with our unique approach to predictive momentum changes playing a key role.
Smart Suspend evaluates the next point’s impact one point in advance, enabling sportsbooks to automatically optimise suspension times. You can pre-select suspension thresholds market-by-market, triggered based on changes to odds probabilities. If you choose to suspend at 10%, the feature enables you to do so automatically. But if you want to keep markets open and adopt a more aggressive suspension strategy at 20%, you can do that too.
This ensures the in-play betting experience is as frictionless as possible; limiting market suspensions to critical moments; and enabling operators to confidently take bets more of the time.
Meanwhile, our Key Points Boost feature adjusts odds based on which player is most likely to win high-impact points, such as break point, game point and set point. It allows for accurate updates to Match Winner odds much faster, without impacting micro-markets and side markets.
By simulating key live events, such as first serve, our model flexibly adjusts to specific match states based on ‘Confidence Parameter’ settings. By adjusting the parameter, traders can swing modelling calculations to consider the current match momentum. This is reflected in our real-time pricing.
Tennis is a 24/7 live betting sport with high-concurrency scheduling, sportsbooks need confidence in their trading technology and their tennis betting product to secure strong and consistent revenues from the sport. The recent enhancements to our live tennis model builds on our core in-play tennis product to provide expanded, stable content for 2024 and beyond.
