After a highly successful career playing and coaching college basketball at Winona State, Southern sports betting itch.
“I started betting a little bit and said, ‘Huh, there’s nothing easy out there for people who want to use predictive analytics,’” she recalled, adding that “horrible” Excel spreadsheets were about all that existed.
Lanham didn’t want to pay for picks, either. Rather, she said, “I wanted my own instincts back-tested.”
Fast forward to last week when, after a significant period of beta testing, Lanham and her cohorts launched Rithmm, an app with varying subscription levels that allows bettors to build their own wagering models and algorithms as they strive to outfox sportsbooks.
“We have two types of s,” she said. “We’re going after people that bet every week. They’re using some type of information, possibly scraping their own data — and we built a version for those type of people who understand modeling and don’t have the time or resources to produce their own.
“Then we have the other type of bettor who wants prefabricated factors that our quants (quantitative analysts) and engineers have created to be able to say, ‘I think these things are important’ without having to go into more depth than that. We exist because people are betting, and we want to provide them with a tool that has predictive analytics and modeling. Wouldn’t it be cool to have what a sharp had access to, a team of quants?”
UConn? You bet 6e1x
While Lanham maintains that Rithmm is “agnostic to sportsbooks,” she concedes that the company is “on the other side” of them as well.
“Right now, what we’re trying to do is help the bettor,” she said. “We’re trying to help them beat the book and track the bets and track their model performance and stay away from games when we show a caution sign.
Rithmm’s beta testing began during last year’s college football season. It continued with a men’s March Madness bracket generator that Lanham said had people “blown away.” Essentially, the generator took each tester’s customized prediction model and spit out winners for each game.
When several brackets produced the University of Connecticut as the tourney’s winner, the response was negative. And then, of course, UConn went on to win the national championship.
As for the Rithmm name, Lanham said, “It’s short for algorithm, and the extra m is for models. And it’s also a good play on when you’re an athlete or even as a sports bettor, you can really get into a rhythm.”
Honestly, probly 4c3k5h
Rithmm’s not the only new company looking to throw sportsbooks off rhythm.
After stints at Barstool Sports, Stokastic, and Football Outsiders, Chris Spagnuolo decided it was high time to develop a subscription-based product to help people “not get abused by sports betting.” So he founded Probly, a company named for the most honest response a tout can give a bettor when asked about the likelihood that a bet will cash.
In a nutshell, Probly combs top probability markets around the world to determine what the “true probability” of a given wager is, said Spagnuolo. From there, he explained, “We grade that out through legal sportsbooks and evaluate live opportunities. There are going to be a lot of bets that have negative Probly value.”
“The amount of people who don’t get basic sports betting concepts that we take for granted is huge, and I believe we have a lot of utility in Probly for helping that through a simple, fun, mobile-forward UX,” Spagnuolo added.
As with Rithmm, Probly is hell-bent on beating the books, of which Spagnuolo said, “I think they’re doing what they have to do for themselves right now. The thing they’ve messed up is the way they’ve approached A (cost per acquisition) and budgeting. There shouldn’t be any sportsbooks losing money with the way consumers are losing money.”
