Circles Off - Gringo

Podcast Release Date:
Podcast Link:
hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-05-14 19:04:44
Rating: 6.00

Notes:
Bias - Generally like non-American based guests, obv familiar with Snowstorm.

Summary - not sure there's a ton actionable in here or even maybe anything actionable. If you had to FF through this 31-45ish is probably the chunk you want to listen to. Not much applicable, but you get a very brief, shallow glimpse behind the curtain of one group and possibly get some ideas on how groups should think about implementing tech for scale.

8:05 - Gringo interview starts. Based in Columbia (originally from Pittsburgh). Has worked for Snowstorm, betting on his own now. Ex-pro poker. Worked in affiliate industry, content, SEO.

11:10 - South American Betting Market: Emerging market. "Venezuela bookies, PPH style that we aren't sure they're doing risk management because it might be a front for something." Oh yeah, let's go always good to send your clean dollars into criminal ops! 12:35 - "There's quite a bit of physical locations to bet around Medellín. You can pay your bills at the same place that you can bet." Efficient!

14:45 - Betting Syndicate: Started as an agent, getting/giving accounts. "I was a good agent, you want to build a network don't be a scumbag." Simple, accurate. Gets interviewed by syndicate, ends up doing a trading job. "People would send plays, would put them on the bot and quote them their fill." Eventually gets let go because it became much more automated (my ears are up and forward now). Current betting is your typical market inefficiency / pricing approach, halftimes you can some find more inefficiencies.

31:10 - Syndicate Betting vs Alone: Still playing through the syndicate. Doesn't have many personal accts, accountable still to the syndicate to earn. "There's a % that each bet takes in an account, you can run out of credit." Not a high volume, major sport group, more low volume, higher ROI which matches Gringo's betting style. 36:18 - "If you're way up on the week, for instance, when I worked there, they would be up a lot on the week and shut off the bot on Sunday for maintenance, but really we don't want anyone to play anything." "Don't want to see on the last day a bunch of props, max win set on the account up to the account holder to tell you the specifics to follow which then gets automated."

39:00 - Snowstorm Bot: "How many cappers would a group like that have?" "20-30, but they aren't active all year, many have specific niches." "Cappers now have direct access to the bot to place their own bets." (this remains the coolest part of this story obviously you're not going to get a ton of specifics, but this is how you try and scale). "Goes sport by sport or skin by skin." Johnny asks "how important is the technology?" "Super important, if it's not working you can't bet." Lol. 41:35 - Rob asks about actually using the bot and there's some interesting tidbits to me. 42:00 - "They are loading these accounts into the bot, the bot auto logs in, sometimes with a delay and then they are usually placing the bets at the same time ... this hits all the accounts immediately." Rob asks a great Q about the level of sophistication of the bot and the answer talks about the slider and the max win, but didn't really address Rob's question about, what I would call, "account specific sophistication" so my guess is the answer is not sophisticated to that level (yet).

(Sidenote - I spoke to someone who has seen some backend bet logs and user data at PPHs who is as technical as me, we talked about “fingerprinting” a bot like this, interesting chat. Would be very curious how you would go about the OpSec of a bot like this. Also, curious if someone will come out with PPH software that does this and if there’s any real market for it - probably not, not a lot of compute thrown at many of these operations. Think OpSec discussions around a bot like this pretty interesting. He also raised some legal questions about running a bot like this, but IANAL so couldn’t speak on validity of the argument.)

48:35 - "Sometimes groups will offer the agent more than the 10% to keep the account going (and get new accounts for you)." Great point by Rob, *almost* everyone has a price.

50:30 - Other Groups: Someone asked a great question about other groups & I thought we were going to get a few more at least name drops and conversation gets derailed into talking about not betting futures on PPHs. I'm so confused by this whole section and the secrecy angle (have a pretty good guess as to what these points are, think they can be presented publicly but whatever), you can pretty much stop listening here, the audio for me got really bad around here at times.