Goal

To do some research on online sportsbooks in Nevada.

Notes

Yesterday was the Superbowl and I was surprised to hear how many of my friends were placing bets with different providers. Initially when I moved to Vegas I thought that online sports betting was limited. It looks like I may have been wrong (maybe they just weren't the ones I was seeing on my odds sheet?)

I figured I would take today to do a little research into online sportsbooks in Las Vegas and see what I could find. There is another new variable in this kind of project now (among other things), and that is that I have ChatGPT to help me research.

One cool resource was the Nevada Gaming Commission and Control Board which posts some interesting stats that I might be able to use. Specifically when I looked into the Online Services I was able to find 58 registered sportsbooks. However on the Gaming Revenue Information Page (which might make for an interesting analysis / Blog Post on its own) listed in its December 2023 Gaming Revenue Report that there were 59 total sportsbooks with 38 entities registered under the Sports - Mobile (which I would imagine has a close correlation with online sportsbooks) category that were making more than $1m in an allotted timeframe.

Either way, it will be easier to find a practical use for this information if I can find sportsbooks directly available in the Sports Odds API.

I found out that the most common sport covered by the Sports Odds API was soccer. I decided to try re-structuring the data in a new way that's more generalizable to different sports and formats. Therefore, instead of explicitly picking apart each individual market I allowed pandas to parse the available markets. Next I'll want to use a Pivot Table to restructure the odds in a way that makes it easier to aggregate / compare prices from different sportsbooks to get it into the format I had before for the UFC stats. I used the following when processing my odds originally:

fighter_A_table = fighter_A_odds.pivot(index=['fight_id', 'fighter_A'], columns='bookie', values='fighter_A_odds').reset_index()

so I'd like to find a way to do that again. It will make processing hold values / extracting the best bookies much easier. Ideally this can be generalized to any sport available. That would be a massive win and might just get me somewhere...

Results

• Extracted odds from the Sports Odds API
• Updated the script to more easily process odds than before

Next Time

• Back to Exponential Decay of Priors