SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Following a busy 10 month period Colossus Bets’ Chief Operations Officer David O’Reilly reviews the 2014/2015 football season from a business perspective, detailing operational learnings and commercial highlights for the Mega Football Jackpots operator, who are bringing much needed game and market innovation to the online sports betting industry.
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Looking back on the football season which has just finished, these are some of the obvious highlights I would nominate from our pools.
- At the start of the season we launched the £2,000,000 HDA15, which instantly became the world’s biggest 1X2 football bet. It only took until early October for 2.5 winning units to land the jackpot and lots of players have gone very close to winning it again since.
- In September we saw our biggest Cash Out offer to date, with £320,000 offered to one of our players who was on the cusp of taking down the £2,000,000 HDA15. The player Cashed Out just 10% of the offer (banking £32,000) and watched the bet sunk with Man City’s failure to beat Roma in a Champions League group match.
- In October we had a player bank over £5,000 from seven separate Cash Outs on a £14 Pick 6 ticket. This meant however that by the time the final whistle in leg 6 had blown, the player had sold in full, a ticket which at that point would have produced a dividend of £100,000 and a free pick in the bonus leg at another £100,000. I’m not sure if that counts as a highlight or lowlight!
- In March we had a £1.20 bet which subsequently went on to lose, being Cashed Out in full for over £58,000 after leg 6 of our headline bet, the Pick 7 £10,000,000 Colossus. Timed to perfection.
- In April we hit £20,000,000 of stakes into our pools since our August 2013 launch.
- We had a record Pick 4 Rollover pool in May, which grew to over £1.1 million and produced a dividend of £104,500 from each £2 winning unit. Not bad for just 4 correct scores.
Partial Cash Out learnings
Colossus Bets launched with Partial Cash Out, the feature which enables players to Cash Out part of a ‘live’ ticket whilst still playing for part of the jackpot, so we now have over 18 months of data to consider. Probably the most interesting finding from this data is that around 83% of Cash Outs on our platform, whether coming via our B2C channel or via one of our B2B partners, are ‘partial’ in nature. So, the vast majority of players are choosing not to Cash Out a bet in full, instead they are banking profits on a live bet in increments. Further, many players are making multiple cash out transactions on the same bet as the matches in a pool resolve over the course of an afternoon/weekend. It is intuitive that Partial Cash Out is likely to be ‘sticky’ in nature and the data supports this.
It’s notable that in recent months that each of Betfair, Paddy Power and Bet365, companies whose lead is typically followed by other sports betting operators, have either moved from ‘Full’ Cash Out to Partial Cash Out, or announced plans to do so.
Multi-sport and B2B rollout
Although we have no major summer football tournament this year, we’re not going on a long holiday until August. This week Ladbrokes Australia are scheduled to go-live with multi-million dollar Colossus pools on AFL and NRL. This is the first step in taking Colossus from a football-only offering (or more accurately a soccer-only offering), to a multi-sport pools betting product suite. US sports will follow in the coming months, with racing towards the end of the year. The Colossus formula of lottery-sized prizes with Partial Cash Out between legs, works well on each of these sports.
Over the past 6 months we have continued to sign B2B deals for the distribution of our pools. Through a deal we have signed with ONEworks, the sportsbook software provider, we expect a number of that firm’s Asian licensees to be live with our pools for the start of the new football season. The obvious advantage to us of a deal such as this, is that through a single integration a series of end operators will have access to our pools. We have signed similar deals with Bet Construct and Bit8 which will enable their operator customers to take Colossus pools in a ‘plug and play’ manner.
Finally on the subject of B2B distribution, if ever there was a territory which is suited to a product which offers life changing prizes for small stakes based on top-tier European football, it is Africa. By far the most populous country in Africa is Nigeria and one of that country’s leading operators, 1960bet, is in the process of integrating our pools. We are in dialogue with a number of other African operators and hope to finalise further deals shortly, each of which will form part of helping us to build a centralised pool proposition with global reach and multi-currency liquidity.
Applying Cash Out to other gaming verticals
We have always believed that whilst Cash Out has to date been a sports betting phenomenon, enabling players to extract value from a live ticket/position in other forms of gaming and even lotteries, will become industry standard sooner rather than later. One of the reasons this is an area of particular interest to us is because we have been granted a series of patents in relation to Cash Out functionality across all forms of betting, gaming and lotteries.
In this context we have entered into a partnership with CORE Gaming for the build by CORE of a series of Cash Out slot games. The first of these is a Colossus branded game which we expect to be live with a major UK-facing operator by the end of the summer. We think that enabling a player who (for example) has landed the first four jackpot reels, to bank £50,000 at that point while the game is paused and still play for half of £1,000,000 jackpot prize based on the resolution of the fifth reel, could be a game-changer. Slots, after all, is a vertical where innovation has historically been limited to advancements in graphics and audio.
So a busy 12 months for Colossus Bets and potentially an even busier 12 months ahead.
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David O’Reilly – Colossus Bets – Chief Operations Officer
