Zero Latency - Ep 26 Matthew Trenhaile

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Podcast Link:
hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-03-25 08:27:37
Rating: 7.75

Notes:
My bias is that all Trenhaile stuff is great. Clearly one of the more clued in people in the space. This pod is more from the betting business perspective than betting. Matt's connection isn't great so his mic pops a bunch especially early, makes it a bit of a tough listen, but for Trenhaile you persevere. Ep 81 of Circles off with Trenhaile is probably better from an entertainment perspective, but Trenhaile is a must listen.

1:40 - "What do good trading rooms look like?" Has dramatically evolved once you realize what goes on *outside* the trading room. Understanding "what is the cost of taking the bet in the first place?". Taxes, data feeds, etc. once you know those parameters then you can start to think about the rest of the trading picture. "Do you want odds that are designed 'optimal margin captures' for entertainment bettors".

10:40 - Market Making discussion - "If you want to make sure you see as many as possible sharp bets to provide feedback loop to see how good your product is, you must dangle that big number but for how long?". Brings up a great golf anecdote where "you should only pay for this type of information once" which is an amazing point about MMing. A bunch of American Exceptionalism hat talk, these colors don't run Matt.

14:00 - "I absolutely cannot believe there's no one tracking these Whale Bets." Hosts follow up with it and Matt was tagged post podcast as well, but that's at @sporttradenow. Would be cool if SportTrade had an API w/public endpoints for this?

17:00 - Why did Betfair stagnate?

22:40 - Tipico - new cash back scheme. 3% on straight bets, 5% parlays. "When Rome is burning do you just try weird random sh*t?" God, Trenhaile is the best. "Profiling in that environment becomes much harder. It looks like beatable business, but is it beatable by 3% business?"

26:30 - "It becomes a trading tool rather than a customer acquisition tool as you get below the threshold" when talking about price sensitivity. Summarizes it as "incredibly hard to quantity, just be baseline competitive before you throat slash price unless you're looking for alpha."

31:00 - How would you build out ESPNBet. Trenhaile then describes what I would consider a personal hell where journalists would write their articles with clickthroughs to prebuilt bulletproof SGPs. 40:15 - "Take some LLM that takes game writeups and turn them into SGPs and it's one click betting into prebuilt SGPs". God, Trenhaile is so good at coming up with absolute Meteor of Death ideas, he's just a machine for ideas that will surely happen that will make life just a bit more intolerable (but make some overlords a lot of money).