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Twain Sport: hybrid sport skill games
In a significant pivot for a company that has built a reputation for its live dealer fixed-odds betting games, BetGames secured the exclusive betting, broadcasting, and technology rights for Twain Sport from the Hybrid Sports League earlier this year. Twain Sport offers competition games that create a new form of sport entertainment with live, high-frequency matches in head-to-head tournaments between two athletes.
Te thinking, explains BetGames' CEO Dr. Andreas Köberl, is for the product to serve as an action-packed add-on for traditional top sports in-between content to overcome dwell time and off-peak hours while building a new standalone betting category with a portfolio of sports over the next years.
A simple case could be half-time content. Currently, when NBA games finish the second quarter and Premier League matches reach the half time break, operators lose a lot of players. Twain Sport can be positioned into this gap through streaming multiple games during this interval, keeping players engaged until the match resumes.
Te first offering out of the gate was T-Basket on August 8. Set in a custom-built arena, T-Basket delivers head-to-head basketball tournaments every hour with a match every three minutes, totalling 6300 monthly, with bettors able to enjoy an extensive range of betting markets via an intuitive mobile-first designed UI.
T-Basket features professional athletes competing head-to-head to score the most points in 60 seconds. With eight players in a tournament and a new game every three minutes, a full tournament experience is broadcast in one hour with 14 tournaments and many hours of action every day. With a host of additional launches in the pipeline, Twain Sport will deliver a similar sporting schedule to esports and virtual sports, with plans to extend its product offering significantly in 2023 and beyond.
To allay potential integrity concerns, BetGames and the Hybrid Sports League partnered with
Dr. Andreas Köberl CEO, BetGames
Sportradar to integrate its Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS) - the same system used by UEFA, the NBA and the NHL - into the hybrid sport tournaments. UFDS monitors and analyses the worldwide betting market for suspicious betting patterns to support integrity in sport, law enforcement and state authorities to monitor, detect and analyse betting-related manipulation.
Looking back on an action packed 18 months spent manoeuvring Twain Sport into a serious betting proposition, Andreas Köberl describes the 'super expensive, painful, and time consuming' process of ensuring the hybrid sports tournaments are comparable integrity-wise to any tier one football competition.
When did talks with the Hybrid Sports League begin? Who approached who and what was the focus of the original discussions?
Talks began around Q4 2020 shortly after I joined the company. It was more a coincidence than anything - Lithuania isn't a big country and Vilnius is a rather small capital city where
everyone knows each other. However, it's a basketball-crazy nation and we were made aware about the Hybrid Sports League. We saw an interesting opportunity, so we approached them to learn more about what they were up to.
As it was, they were on the lookout for partners, more specifically in betting, as it's no secret that the biggest sponsors of sports worldwide are betting operators or suppliers. Frankly, they were looking for the big bucks which we quite quickly told them wasn't going to happen, but we were keen to explore potential synergies between both parties.
Tese talks came at a time when we were internally discussing a new three-year strategy for BetGames. After two months of strategy workshops and discussions, we concluded we wanted something unique away from creating Roulette Table No. 3000, so why not investigate sports? We decided to diversify our product portfolio into three verticals - classic BetGames, game shows(ShowGames), and Twain Sport.
Where do hybrid sport skill games fit within BetGames’ product suite? Is Twain Sport to be positioned as a standalone brand?
Twain Sport is positioned as a complete standalone brand. With Twain, we are addressing the sportsbook side of the operator when it comes to our direct customers and our end user is the sports punters, whereas BetGames is generally on the casino side. BetGames usually sits between these two segments within the player nurturing cycle to cross sell casino players to the sportsbook. Twain Sport is something else entirely.
In fact, the Twain betting product is more of an To allay potential integrity
concerns, BetGames and the Hybrid Sports League
partnered with Sportradar to integrate its Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS) - the same system used by
UEFA, the NBA and the NHL - into the hybrid sport tournaments.
NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE / MARKET DATA P81
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