Edition 25: Tech Stack Troubles: A Look Under The Hood of theScore
Building tech isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Hey friends🎄,
Welcome to Christmas season! For those who attended SBC Summit North America, we hope you enjoyed your week of networking and events before gearing up for the holidays.
This week, we’re going to be diving into some of the newer released tech, and we are a bit disappointed, specifically in theScore app. Bettors have certainly gotten used to a high standard of product, us included, and overall we’re disappointed in some of the emerging tech stacks.
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Two of our writers (Spencer and David) were back at home in New Jersey last week for Thanksgiving. In addition to all the usual catch up with family and seeing some people from high school we probably would have preferred to avoid, we decided to try out some of the new operators in New Jersey, specifically theScore app. In August 2021, Penn National Gaming announced their plan to acquire Score Media and Gaming to expand media and grow its brand in Canada as well as integrating their in-house technology.
Over Thanksgiving week, we tried out a few mobile applications and with theScore, we were a bit disappointed in the app functionality and user experience. It is half-baked, unusable for anyone who is a somewhat serious bettor, and not a real competitor to DraftKings or FanDuel right now. If Barstool & Penn National think their customer base won’t notice the difference, trust us, they will. The product is simply not up to the industry standard right now, performing worse than most PPH books we’ve seen.
So what’s going wrong for theScore?
No Web Interface
This one is almost a free space and we honestly hope one is in development. There is simply no way to place a bet on theScore in New Jersey on your computer. I may use my phone for most app based betting anyway, but there are times when my phone may be dead, in the other room, or I simply may want to see more of the screen and offerings at once. This is impossible on a mobile only interface and incredibly disappointing. Releasing an app without a website feels a lot like giving up on a group project and just deciding to hand in what’s there and hope it works out (it did for theScore, they got acquired by Penn National for $2 billion).
Incomplete List of Sports to Bet On
As any self respecting gambler does, I was looking to get some action down on Tuesday during the day. I saw that there were UEFA Champions League matches on, and even though I knew I would have no edge (Champions League on match day is among the deepest liquidity markets in the world), I decided I had nothing better to do and wanted to get some action down. Much to my surprise and dismay, theScore wasn’t offering lines on Champions League matches! These are some of the biggest soccer matches in the world! This isn’t a match in Romania’s second league or something, but the most prestigious club soccer competition, and theScore didn’t have lines up on match-day. Additionally, theScore has no odds on any “weird sport” you can think of, or standard leagues like the England Championship. Honestly, this is just incredibly disappointing and again makes me feel like the product is half-baked and got released anyway. With competitors embracing more alternative sports like table tennis throughout the pandemic and in recent months (Colorado boasted $11.1 million in table tennis handle for September), the fact that theScore lacks Champions League lines on match-day seems preposterous to us.
Incomplete Markets for Offered Sports
theScore is also not offering lines on every single college basketball game that happens, and is not posting overnight lines for college basketball. Look, I get it, there are hundreds of college basketball teams and so many games per week. But that’s the beauty of it! Hang them overnight and hang every game (even if you just copy from offshore, that’s what everyone else does anyway!), it’s better than looking for a game and not finding it. Of course, they don’t use rotation numbers but that is more or less the industry standard at this point. Nothing is worse than scrolling through an app with no command F search-ability only to find out that theScore hasn’t even hung a line on the game you are looking for anyway.
Cash-out Functionality
On a $10 bet, theScore offers the cash-out at $7.94 if the line hasn’t moved in either direction. This is both heinous and insulting, and theScore shouldn’t even be offering a cash-out function if that is their default offering. That is more than a 20% haircut if I decide that I no longer want the bet even if it is still available at the same line on the app! I’m better off just betting the other side and losing the juice on both sides than using the cash-out function. Worse, if the line moves 4-5% in your favor, the cash-out is still under $9 at this point! What if I just want to take the line move in my favor and pocket a few cents of profit? It makes everyone better off, the bookmaker gets off hanging a line that is no longer +EV for them, and I get to pocket a few cents. Not even close to worth it at theScore with their anti-player cash-out function.
20x Rollover on Deposit Bonus
theScore claims to have a deposit match, but it really is returned to you as bonus cash at a rate of 5% per dollar wagered, or a 20x rollover and not really a deposit match because you do not get the cash once you deposit. A 20x rollover is something that you might see offshore, and at a hold percentage of 4.54%, basically making the deposit bonus itself net out to zero-EV assuming coin flip picks. This is offshore-level bad, and especially not something we would want to see in a competitive, regulated market.
Weaker Football Offerings
Everyone who is at least tangentially in the space has seen the power of Same Game Parlays (shoutout to our friend Cal Spears for his Thanksgiving +26555 SGP hit), specifically in football. theScore offers “preset parlays”, which are similar to same game parlays as they are wagers that occur in a parlay all in the same game. However, to us, this is again a half-baked solution. The whole fun and point of Same Game Parlays is that I get to make a -EV pick about all the different players I think that are going to score a touchdown, not that I get to pick from an assigned bet list that is already offered. Additionally, theScore is not hanging player props for football games during the week, something competitors DraftKings and FanDuel do offer.
Overall, this product does have a decent user interface, but is just not ready to compete in the broader market with the offerings that exist. The Penn acquisition likely bailed out an app that would never have been able to take hold in a competitive market. On the other hand, if Penn does try to transition users from their current platform to this version of theScore, it will not be a pretty day for customer retention numbers. We hope the product gets better, but as it stands, we are withdrawing our money and wouldn’t recommend that anyone else deposit any of theirs with so many better, more robust options available for both the casual and more sophisticated bettor.
Listen, while we may not be too fond of theScore’s latest product offerings and Penn’s move to own and integrate their tech, they’re not alone in purchasing their tech stack. In May of 2020, DraftKings went public after merging with Diamond Eagle and SBTech, a play to vertically integrate their product offerings. During the three-month period ending September 30th, DraftKings unveiled their in-house tech platform and began migrating off of Kambi’s technology platform. DraftKings now possesses end-to-end trading and technology control over their product, a trend we’re seeing across the industry with prospects such as PointsBet often mentioned as potential acquisition targets.
DraftKings also purchased Golden Nugget Casino for an estimated $1.56 billion, aiming to leverage SBTech’s platform to reduce costs for Golden Nugget and increase profitability. DraftKings also purchased Blue Ribbon Software, a Tel Aviv-based provider of global jackpot technology, to bolster their iCasino and sports wagering technology.
To migrate from Kambi to SBTech, DraftKings completed the process way ahead of schedule. According to Matt Rybaltowski of Sports Handle, DK completed the migration for 11/12 states by August of 2021. That doesn’t mean there weren’t hiccups along the way. Brad Allen of Legal Sports Report noted issues with SBTech in New Hampshire in April. When Paddy Power Betfair combined into one platform in 2017, they suffered a year of negative growth and declining market share due to the massive resource and time sink into the migration process.
While not impossible (some good examples overseas), purchasing another operator and migrating their technology and product offering together with your own is a more difficult task than it seems. And for operators like Penn National, it doesn’t help when your acquired tech stack is behind the industry standard.
Miscellaneous Content Consumption
Press
Sportradar and PointsBet have agreed to a multi-year partnership to bolster PB’s in-play and pre-match capabilities. Read more here.
PrizePicks, a Single Player Fantasy operator, announced a funding round adding athletes Matt Ryan and John Collins to their cap table. Yahoo Finance has more here.
Stephen Marche wrote a really interesting piece for the The Atlantic on America's Gambling Addiction, definitely worth a read here.
Twitter
Interesting nugget from SBC:
Chris Altruda with 2021’s TYD financial breakdown:
Folks are struggling with some of DK’s SBTech product offerings on an NFL Sunday. Not great looks here.
Pods
Stats Bomb CEO Ted Knutson joins Rufus and Jeff Ma on Season 5 Episode 17 of Bet The Process. Tune into this really interesting discussion with some of the finer minds in sports betting.