BetBooster
Source: LVision

Ido Lazar: Tracking the development of the LVision BetBooster

The realisation that it was sitting on an “endless amount of unique data” across many sports triggered the development of the BetBooster product by LVision, said company co-founder and CEO Ido Lazar, who spoke to SBC News about his plans for the product’s future. 

Lazar tracks its evolution from a betting and animation widget for tennis into an automated insights feed soon to be across more than 15 sports, including the major US sports, with personalisation to fit each player and complete with full betslip integration.

He also explains the ease of integration from a technical perspective, how BetBooster presents data to the end user and why it is helping operators to make big gains across four different performance parameters: number of bets, stakes, speed of bets and turnover.

SBC: Firstly, can you tell us more about LVision and the connection to LSports?

IL: LSports is a family business that I founded more than 10 years ago. At an early stage of the business, both my father and my brother Dotan, the newly appointed CEO, joined me in running the company. I used to run all the technical aspects as CTO, but as the company grew I decided to start my next venture, which developed into LVision. 

Both companies worked closely together until we recently decided it was time for LVision to venture on its own. Now, we strictly work together as B2B partners whereby LSports sells our solutions as its bet stimulation services.

SBC: Looking more specifically at LVision then, let’s talk about the BetBooster product. How did this come about? 

IL: It all started from our Betting & Animation Widget product for tennis, which uses computer vision and AI to extract data by tracking players and the ball from tennis videos in real-time and is fully automated. 

As a sports data company, we are sitting on an endless amount of unique data across many sports. For tennis, it’s shot by shot. For soccer, it’s information like cards, corners and free kicks. From this, we thought about how we can create a product which will benefit operators.  

We began by using our AI knowledge to find patterns in the data that we had extracted from the tennis videos and produce insights, and it worked extremely well.

Let’s say that I see that Federer is serving but Nadal won the first point with a backhand down the line. We know that the last nine out 10 times Nadal has won a point with a backhand down the line he won the entire game, and that’s golden information for punters.

Our BetBooster product is stand-alone, but it’s also integrated in our Betting & Animation Widget. From that point in time we thought, why just tennis when we have heaps more data and an excellent algorithm? We began taking other pieces of data from other sports, such as soccer, and basketball, and using the same algorithm. It went from being a tennis-only product to now covering multiple sports. 

Most of our employees are in tech. As a team, we have a very strong knowledge of sports, betting, AI and technology. We then thought about how we could make BetBooster a unique product that will stand out from similar services. The solution was personalisation. 

BetBooster is served as a widget and comes with an API. We track the user ID. This is completely anonymous. We take this information and rapidly learn player habits and behaviours, for example, whenever players click on a market or sport or add a bet to their betslip. 

Using that information, we create a recommendation system which has been specifically designed for each user. If two players were to visit the same website, it’s very likely that they will see different tips, different recommendations and insights.

SBC: You mentioned BetBooster is provided as a widget. Why is that important from an ease of integration point of view? 

IL: The biggest issue for operators is the fact that they have a lack of resources. Everyone likes the product, but no one likes to invest a month or even a week in integration. They have more important things to do. 

We solved that issue by using our widget. It fits like a glove and can be integrated within hours. There is no back end integration – which can often be the most painful part. It’s only a front-end integration. We give you three lines of code, you put it into your front end. And that’s it! 

Then, you can play around and adjust designs. This can take more time, but the widget will be there on your front end. We do the rest of the work including creating background and odds integrations, markets and mapping. Then simply add the three lines of code and you are in production ready mode.

SBC: What does it mean for the end user? How does all this data you have translate to usable insights on the player’s screen?

IL: We have mountains of data stored internally. We run our predictive models on all the data combined, then we find patterns and wait for an incident to happen in real time. For example, let’s say Mohamed Salah scores a goal for Liverpool before the 10th minute, but from our data we know that they have won 95% of their matches whenever they go ahead and go ahead as early during a game.  

As soon as we identify the fact that Liverpool have scored a goal, and Salah is the scorer, we immediately then trigger the tip, and push it across all platforms including web, push notification, email, and so on. This depends on the marketing channel(s) each operator prefers to use.

SBC: What about pre-match? Is there a blank space waiting for the data to throw up live insights, or something already there?

IL: For live games, we change the insights depending on how the game is progressing. There will also be pre match insights but, realistically, the first five minutes of a game doesn’t really change anything unless a goal is scored in the first few minutes. Then a live event is triggered. 

So, after several minutes, once we have collected some data and we can see where things are moving, we start triggering live tips. You then have one tip per market for the entire match.

SBC: You talked about building on tennis with soccer and basketball, where are you going next in terms of other sports?

IL: Right now we’re live with soccer, tennis and basketball. By the end of the first quarter we’ll be live with many more sports including all the major US sports such as American football, hockey, baseball, as well as others such as table tennis, volleyball and esports. 

Eventually, we plan to go to every sport. So, when we speak again after the second quarter, we expect to be live with more than 15 sports including golf, horse racing, greyhound and motor racing. We plan to cover everything from a niche UK market to the US and CIS regions. 

We have clients from all over the world, and each one has their own requests. This is basically why we are here – to always offer and deliver value for clients.

SBC: If we look at the clients you’ve launched with already, what are the numbers telling you? How successful has it been so far?

IL: So far, it’s been amazing. I won’t reveal names, but the numbers are rapidly increasing across four different parameters: number of bets, stakes, speed of bets and turnover. 

People are more confident because they have more access to statistics. As a result, they are more confident in spending more on different things.

One of our clients has seen a 10% decrease in traffic in December, but a 10% increase in turnover and that’s very telling. They compared December to previous months and noticed that it had a huge impact.

We’ve seen operators generate more turnover on pre-match rather than live markets when using BetBooster, but some brands generate more turnover on live than pre-match. 

It also depends on the region. This is one of the key impacts for the personalisation mechanic that we are using and improving right now. It doesn’t act the same in every region – each one has its own conditions.

SBC: And finally, what is at the top of your timeline for this year from a development perspective? Is this mainly about the addition of the new sports?

IL: First and foremost, it’s about the addition of new sports. We’re planning to cover 100% of the main sports like those that drive 80 to 90% of turnover and make them aligned. Next up is creating player props tips across different sports, and specifically American sports.

Our personalisation mechanic is really important for us and always needs to be improved and maintained. We always check and run analysis on the data we have because, after all, LVision is a purely data-driven company. All our clients see the value from day one, we provide them with dashboards, and don’t hide anything. 

We show our clients the value that we bring, and work with them to create a better product to fit their needs. The operators know their clients better than we do, but thanks to our data they don’t miss a thing.

SBC News Ido Lazar: Tracking the development of the LVision BetBooster

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