I’m writing to update and to apologise for the delays. We are waiting on some of our supply chain to come through and will hopefully put the platform up on Friday. You will receive an email once the competition goes live. While I have been sitting on my hands with this I have had some extra time to pen a few thoughts on the state of the industry, and why we are creating LevBet. Hopefully it is of interest and feel free to deliver comments to .

The fundamentals of most casino games do not evolve. Roulette will always be roulette, black jack will be black jack, poker, poker, pokies, pokies, and lottery, lottery. The dressing can change, i.e., the lights, the payouts, the internet, the table but the game is always the same. That is except for sports betting. Sports betting, uniquely, is a “markets” based game, and because markets financial, sports betting, grocery or otherwise permeate many parts of our lives outside of a casino, we see them transform, evolve, and improve constantly.

By markets I am referring to systems which establish a price through accumulated information and supply and demand. This is how we get to “market price” or “market odds”. Markets evolve because their participants champion a) the increasingly efficient transfer of wealth from one state to another and b) causing as little leakage of that wealth as possible during the course of a transaction. What a casino champions is having wealth enter and causing as much of it to become stuck there as possible/tolerable and of course this means that markets and casinos are opposed.

What sports betting is then is a market built with the mentality of a casino and this is the problem we face with getting people who take markets seriously, to take sports betting seriously. To argue about overrounds (spreads), exchanges, lay betting (short selling), and the temptation for corruption (insider trading) the way the sports betting industry does, is to treat as new, concepts which have been addressed in financial services in an increasingly intelligent, effective, and complex way for more than a century.

Just comparing retail for retail, Bet365 (after a bumper year) can make 1.28 Billion pounds of revenue with 2 million active users but IG Markets can make 362 million pounds of revenue with only 126 thousand active users. And that is because IG operates in markets which are highly developed and enormous. More importantly, symptoms of those markets becoming more developed and more enormous are overrounds/spreads that are tiny (not large), market makers who are paid not taxed, short selling (lay betting), exchanges and of course the properties of derivatives products which allow you to move huge amounts of capital while tying up only a tiny portion of that capital.

While some of the bookmaking old guard might have you believe all of these things will destroy the industry, they will in fact give market participants (their clients) what market participants champion, increase the size of the industry, increase revenues for firms, and create a larger pool of money to subsidise racing.

This responsibility/opportunity extends past firms to government. Understanding and treating sports betting as financial markets (i.e. an industry that the UK wants, supports and values in terms of its contribution to GDP) instead of a slightly stigmatised, infinitely taxable, blue collar past time, will attract these firms to exist and develop in the UK instead of overseas.

If you are not building a sports betting market to be as large, effective, efficient, and lucrative as a financial market, then what are you building?

Happy punting,

LevBet team