00:00 - Mark Hill (Guest)
If I'm a sportsbook operator and I limit every customer under the sun that has a pulse, I don't get to see their business going forward. Circa can, Prime can, Offshores can they can tag those customers. They understand those customers. On the recreational sportsbook side, they just open up another account and another account, and another account. 

00:21 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Welcome to Circles Off. I'm Rob Pizzola. We have a great guest interview today, someone who's been in the syndicate side of things and now on the trading side of things. Lots of topics we're going to go over the betting industry, how things work behind the scenes, market dynamics, even what it's like trading for March Madness. But before we get into that, I do want to tell you about the sponsor here on Circles Off, which is Underdog. 

00:48
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01:48
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02:34
Our guest today is a powerhouse in the sports betting world with over a decade of experience driving innovation and growth in regulated markets. As the director of trading at Amelco, he leads a team of over 50 pros delivering cutting edge sportsbook solutions globally, including Bet99 in Canada. His journey started at Star Lizard with soccer market analysis. Now he's transforming the industry with a focus on automation and customer-centric platforms. Mark Hill joins me today. Welcome to Circles Off, mark. Pleasure to be on, rob. 

03:08
This has been in the making for a while. A little bit of background. I don't know Mark well. We've interacted via LinkedIn. Every now and then, there is a BetStamp Discord, which is, you know, a hot buzzing community. Every now and then, I like to go in there and ask for any sort of guest ideas, suggestions. Uh, mark, your name was recommended by, like the entire discord, basically. So, uh, you have some expectations to live up to, certainly today, as a lot of people did want to hear this. Uh, but you have a pretty long and storied history in the sports betting industry, working both on the syndicate side with Star Lizard, now on the operator side. So walk us through how you got started in the space and what led you to where you are today. 

03:54 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I think, without trying to turn into sort of a spanky, be better bettors type background, I'll give you a little bit of the untraditional route, I suppose, into the industry on this side. So I grew up in Northern Ireland and probably if you know your Northern Irish history, I was an 80s baby, grew up in late 80s, early 90s you know height of the troubles type scenario Came from a very sort of traditional unionist background. Not exposed in any way, shape or form did I think, or my parents think, to betting, however inadvertently I was. So my grandfather grew up on the main street in a village called Moira. He had a pub on one side and a bookmaker's on the other side of his house. He was a greyhound trainer and by default, as a youngster was running around greyhound stadiums, running around betting rings, asked to be a mini runner, doing one pound, two pound bets for people at the greyhounds and things like that. So, plus, they wouldn't have come from the traditional sense of my parents raising me around betting or thinking they were raising me around betting inadvertently. 

04:54
I was exposed to it at a very young age, I guess as well. 

04:57
Then my sporting interest has always been there from a very young age as well, so grew up playing rugby. 

05:03
My father was a massive rugby man and he came in and brought me in to rugby at the ages of four or five, played that through to sort of a semi-pro level in the end and then beyond that I would always describe myself as a footballer stuck in a rugby player's body. So you know, I'm six foot three, six foot four, 20 stone. I'm never taken to a soccer field outside of charityity. And, yeah, fell in love with the sport, fell in love with the dynamics and fell in love with the analytical side of soccer and football as a whole. And I guess, indirectly, it's how I kind of went from having that first exposure of a little bit of the betting side, with the betting shop next door and my grandfather being around the Greyhounds and running around the stadiums and things like that, right through to becoming exposed to what is the predominance, that in sport, if you like, within the the uk and irish market, which is the, the football side of things yeah, um, a lot to unpack there. 

05:58 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I do want to say I mean I didn't know you were northern irish. I've been to northern ireland. I absolutely loved it. I did all the tours seeing like historic sites from the Troubles which you were mentioning. I think it might've been in Northern Ireland and not Ireland, republic of Ireland, where it was like the most bombed hotel in the world, which was really interesting to see like the architecture and how that's changed over time and stuff like that. Anyways, just randomly, I wanted to put it out there that Northern Ireland is actually one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited in my entire life. I'd highly recommend anyone check it out. If you haven't before. I will say I spent a lot of time there, 21 days in total Northern and Republic of Ireland. I got one day of rain in 21 days that is. 

06:46 - Mark Hill (Guest)
That is a shock yes, but yeah do you remember what year roughly you were over? 

06:51 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
yeah, this would have been right before COVID, uh, so I guess 2019 ish it would have been brilliant. 

06:57 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Yeah. 

06:58 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Yeah, game of Thrones tour, maybe exactly coast and stuff, yeah, I was a huge Game of Thrones fan and my wife an even larger Game of Thrones fan, so we saw all the filming locations. It was very Game of Thrones-esque at the time, but I had a blast Some of the most scenic places I've ever seen in my entire life as well. Just very calming, relaxing spot. Yeah, sorry to hijack it, but I heard you say Northern Ireland right away and I'm like I've never really gotten to talk Northern Ireland with anyone before. So yeah, I wanted to throw that in there. 

07:28 - Mark Hill (Guest)
No, I appreciate that. It's a very, very underrated tourist destination. Unfortunately, the only negative is there's no transatlantic flights, so I can't jump on a flight in Belfast and go over to Canada or North America. I have to go via Dublin, which is fine, it's a two-hour journey. It's not the end of the world, but I think for tourist exposure it would definitely help if we had some transatlantic routes, because at the moment, yeah, you have to go via Dublin and a lot of the perception is go to Dublin. Dublin is reflective of the whole of Ireland or the island of Ireland, and really it's cities like Belfast, galway, cork that I think you get the true reflection of what the Irish people are about and what the Irish culture is about. 

08:07 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Absolutely. Galway was a huge highlight for me as well. I know a good friend of mine, sam Paniatovich, was just there recently as well, and he was raving about that whole experience. It's not that bad. I flew into Dublin, I rented a car, drove it to Belfast, like you said, a couple hours, uh, was in and around there. Just a beautiful time. I actually didn't realize how the center of Belfast um, how much it's like a budding commercial uh spot is what? There's lots of office spots now. Um, I didn't really expect that, and that was six years ago as well, so I'm sure it's even even bigger at this point in time. But, um, I'll, I'll get back to you. We did our Irish tourism. We don't get paid for it, but I do love the spot. 

08:51
Star Lizard is a brand that all of the sharp bettors are familiar with Massive syndicate. You spent almost a decade at Star Lizard, certainly one of the most well-known, if not the biggest, betting syndicate in the world. What was that experience like for you? What specifically did you do within Star Lizard and how did it shape your understanding of betting markets? 

09:17 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I think the precursor to ending up at Star Lizard was rooted in my love of football to begin with. I grew up, say in the 90s, I was a Middlesbrough fan for my sins on the soccer side Brian Robson, sort of Giannino Ravinelli, that sort of era of Middlesbrough. Everyone at home supported my night at Liverpool and I got a. There was a magazine at the time called Match Magazine. There was a pull-out poster of the last year at Ayrton Park and I only ever had two posters that I can remember on my wall as a child. One was the Middlesbrough Division One winning team to get into the Premier League and the other was Anna Kournikova. I don't know which one is a better reflection of my future life, but yeah, it definitely set the foundations for the direction I was going. 

10:02
On the on the football side there's a very, very well-known computer game over here called championship manager. Um became football manager after time over. You know sega and sports interactive sort of deviated and split away. But I played that game as a hobby. And then I got to start working on the research and analytics side for football manager for the Irish Leagues. Long story short, a lot of my colleagues were doing something very similar. So my Italian counterpart, my Polish counterpart, my American counterpart, they all ended up at a company called Star Lizard and at the time I was totally naive. Yes, I was recreationally betting, you know, like growing up around that culture and an unaccepted culture of legalized or regulated betting in the UK and Ireland. I was very much exposed to the poker boom and everything else associated with that. But for my naivety I did not know who Tony Bloom was. I did not know who Star Lizard were. So I was deep in the weeds. 

11:01
My full-time job at the time was working in politics, which again is a whole podcast in itself. Job at the time was working in politics, which again is a whole podcast in itself, being from northern ireland and working in politics. But I was doing the football manager stuff as a hobby. And my italian counterpart said do you fancy flying over to london meeting the guys at star lizard, looking someone for the irish network? So I flew over um, met them, did a trial for two weeks and then they sort of appointed me as the analyst for the Irish football research and that was basically covering everything from sort of under 17 age up right through to women's football and then the predominant leagues, the predominant sort of professional or semi-professional leagues, both north and south of the border in Ireland. So with that we built up a contact network within each club or local journalists. We built up a lot of analytics and research. 

11:49
But the one thing I'll say about Star Lizard very, very compartmentalized Tony Bloom, absolute genius and an absolute pleasure to work for, and we'll probably get into that in a little more detail shortly. 

12:02
But for me the compartmentalized nature and the secure nature of that syndicate meant that the team I worked for was like the analytics side of things and more qualitative work and qualitative research into the teams, the formations, the player form, elements like that and more often than not our department. 

12:22
We're keeping the synd syndicate, if you like, off a bit rather than putting us onto a bet got it. So a lot of the dynamic, a lot of the focus was on trusting the model first and foremost. You know it's well established how good that model has been and how rewarding it has been for the company and every year redefining the edges associated with that. But our network, if you like, was to if they, the model, did indicate a strong bet, we'd keep them off the bet more than so. That you know my information was not to put them onto a bet, which I think some of your, some of your listeners probably find as a surprise. A lot of the edges now come from, you know, reacting quickly to nba team news or something like that, whereas before in the syndicate side model was gospel and you know, any inputs we had from the, the research department, was more keeping them off a bet rather than putting them onto a bet. 

13:08 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Yeah, just I'm going to pick up on that really quickly because nowadays I don't bet soccer much, but I do try to keep up with markets and see how things are going. It does seem to me like there's a lot of action nowadays on lineup confirmations relative to action before that. So as soon as a team releases a lineup I'm a Juventus fan I see them release it on Twitter. I see the betting market start to go nuts. So it still feels to me like it's really information driven. 

13:38 - Mark Hill (Guest)
But I assume that like it is information driven in the sense that you're waiting for lineups but it's just a model number that essentially star lizard is is betting into market that's fair, I think when I like joined the company and I'm not talking about giving away edges or anything at this point, like 10 years ago the edge that star lizard had was that network. They were doing expected goals or a variation of expected goals. Well before that became popular, culture got it, so that that is where they made their bread and butter. As the industry catches up and the, the data collection catches up and the metrics catch up, that edge will be whittled away. You've got a lot of um, not pretenders, but a lot of new syndicates emerging in the space competing against them none less than smart odds. 

14:20
Who was mafie benham and brent at the time? Sort of a bitter rival, if you like, of Star Lizard. So as those metrics advanced and it wasn't down to Star Lizard collecting all those advanced metrics the edge had to change and I think one of the things that I remember most about my latter time in the industry was when I joined. I can't give a fair estimate. I'd say 70% pre-match, 30% in-play, whereas when I was leaving it was almost the inverse of that, where the market was so saturated with pre-match information and pre-match knowledge that their edge became the in-play models and the live models and diversifying into other sports and other leagues as well, outside of just the soccer world. So for me again, not privy to the defined edges that the model had, but enough of an insight to understand the dynamics and how that edge was changing over time. 

15:14 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Yeah, what's really interesting to? I mean, there's lots of things that are really interesting to me about that story. I've heard very similar from some bigger soccer bettors I know nowadays that are moving more to live markets, where actually the limits are extremely high for soccer live markets as well. So that's interesting. Also the fact that you ended up at Star Lizard without any real pro betting experience. I think that's very counterintuitive to what a lot of people would think in terms of how syndicates work and employing someone that may be very raw in terms of their betting knowledge. I find that really interesting. 

15:47 - Mark Hill (Guest)
That's totally fair and, to be honest, that was reflective of the industry or well, certainly Star Lizard on a much wider level. So mentioned about the compartmentalized nature, they have four different floors in their North London office. One floor will have the researchers, one floor will have the selectors, you'll have another floor for placement, you'll have another floor for IT support and you've got the quant division, based out of a completely different city in England, tasked in all their quant work and quant modelling. You've got the coders that code the games and tag the games, based in another jurisdiction entirely. It was a massive, massive world. 

16:24
How many were actually betters within that ecosystem? You're talking probably five to ten percent at most, um, and I would have classed myself as one of those betters, maybe not um, a savvy, sharp better, if you like, um. I reflect back on on my very first bet, which you'll you'll. You'll know the competition, you'll know the. The event I'm talking about is the 2002 world cup, when I had a bet on south or south korea, yep, to beat italy I remember that the biggest, biggest fixed job in the history of sport. 

16:51 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I think right there something like that. 

16:53 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Well, I, very naively at 16 or 17, did not know when I put on the bet slip or got my father to fill in the bet slip and submitted at the bookies that I put South Korea to win versus Italy. The game went to extra time. So I did not, you know, totally naive at the time, did not understand the betting rules and mechanics. I still have to deal with it on this side of the counter now all the time. No disrespect to the general North American public. They're used to betting, including overtime markets, every time we have a World Cup or a Euros or something significant on the soccer size. 

17:27
The amount of customer service queries we have to deal with for uh games that go into extra time or penalties is is insane. But I I learned the hard way on my very first bet, which I thought was a winner, celebrated like a winner, went to cash the ticket and then told no, you've lost. So repeated the bet on uh against spain in the next round and bet to qualify rather than to win. But yeah, I've listened to a lot of your stories as well in terms of your recreational background before you became fully aware and fully conscious of how this industry ticks and what you should be doing and not doing. And yeah, I learned the hard way very fast. 

18:02 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Yeah, I've been there before. I mean, there's been times where I was certain I won a bet and then you log into your account and it's a loss, and you know. I'd like to not learn those through experience, definitely, but it happens. Yeah, I remember the O2 World Cup. If VAR existed at that I'm going on a tangent now but Francesco Totti would have been awarded a penalty instead of a second yellow for diving in the box where he was clearly clipped, uh, but the I always italians remember that game very clearly. The game against spain was actually worse. I believe there was a goal that spain scored, uh, which which they ruled the ball went out about the guy who crossed it. 

18:42 - Mark Hill (Guest)
The ball was on the line they crossed it and they said it was out for a goal kick instead well, that that was the my first. I I mean that that those two matches sent me on a tailspin of uh of conspiracy theories for a long time in sports but we'll hopefully not stay on that theme too much if we're going to get into talking about regulators and stuff later, because if we give them any ammunition they're gonna gonna run with it. 

19:04 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
So I'm moving I'm moving on right now, mark I'm moving on right now um what ultimately made you transition from the betting side to the operational and like risk management side of the industry full transparency. 

19:20 - Mark Hill (Guest)
It wasn't through choice. Um, so, if I reflect back on on myself, in 2019, I just bought a new house. I was expecting second child. In early 2020. We were over for a star lizard annual conference with the, the rest of the team um, in october 2019, nobody envisaged covid coming along in early 2020. 

19:41
Um, just the whole world of sports shutting down. Like everything was on such a high. I was on such a high. Star lizard were thriving. We just opened up new offices and or expanded the office in in london. I was covering a few extra leagues for the, the company as well. It was just brilliant at the time. 

19:59
And then, like a ton of bricks, in in may 2020, they made the decision to let over 100 from the, the company go. So it wasn't through choice in terms of leaving star lizard at the time. Um, and, to be honest, that sort of period post star lizard left me in a very, and a lot of my colleagues and friends in a very difficult position because we we worked in such a niche area and, yes, reputationally working for Star Elizabeth is great, but you're in such a niche area overall and if the world of sport is shut down, you have very little options to all of a sudden pivot and go to somewhere else. All the other competitors, if you like, in the syndicate space were also shut down or, you know, reducing costs. At that time, really, I was left going well, there's Belarusian soccer and there's russian soccer and there's not much else at the minute. I need to diversify. So I was a massive, massive fan of of north american sports um, nfl predominantly, but then by by default sort of falling into nba, nhl and um to an extent mlb, not not religiously mlb, but obsessed with a college level of football, obsessed with the, the NFL, and I basically spent that 10 months oh, it was 10 months in the end out of work grafting I'm not grafting for money. 

21:14
I did sort of set aside some of my syndicate payout from Star Lizard to say, right, that will be a bankroll to get started. But you realize very quickly when you have a mortgage and you have a second child just born and all the real world scenarios, that working off what was a respectable bankroll but not a bankroll that's sustainable for growth when you have to dip in and out of it, I had to make the decision to say, right, I'm learning about this industry inside out. I'm very conscious post-pasta that there's going to be expansive growth within that US market or the North American market, post-paspa that there's going to be expansive growth within that US market or the North American market. How do I upskill myself, not just to be limited to football or soccer or just be seen as someone who works in the analytics side and not so much the wider industry? So I basically spent that 10 months consuming content, doing courses, learning as much as I could to understand how that North American market operated and it sounds very like naive, if you like where I'm now moving on four or five years. I'm in a very luxurious position within the industry now but back then I was like a lot of your listeners are a lot of these people that are discovering sports better in the US for the first time where you get left behind if you're not consuming the content, if you're not listening to podcasts, if you're not keeping up with the latest trends and the latest courses and latest developments within the industry. And I have to pay tribute to some of your predecessors, I guess in the bet stamp space. 

22:39
You know V-CIN at the time very much changed when the DraftKings piece happened and you know they've gone in a different direction to a degree now, but back then, that sort of early period of 2020, 2021, etc. Gail alexander's show and other shows, like they paved the way for you listen to a nugget of information and you're going okay, I'm going to follow up on that. I'm going to research something else, I'm going to model something else or try my hand at knowing more about what direction he was thinking whenever he stated this is why I'm playing that bet or this is why I'm interested. So I spent a lot of time doing that, got to sort of Christmas period of 2020 and a lot of the family looking at me going you're grinding, you're doing all this. I hope it's worth it. You're doing all this. I hope it's worth it. You're doing 12, 16 hours a day, but we're not making money. You've got to put bread on the tables table. So I I honestly got to the point where I was like I'm applying for amazon delivery drivers, postman jobs, anything that could just start to get the bread and butter money in. 

23:38
While I grafted the hobby on the side, I applied for an overnight tennis tutor job um at a company called poker store. You'll know poker stars um at the time based out of dublin, um, overnight tennis trader job paying probably eighteen thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars, something like that. Um, they turned me down. And they turned me down saying I was too experienced. Now, I had never worked on that side of the counter or the industry and I basically basically went on a LinkedIn rant, redacted the email I'd received saying you're a brilliant skill set, blah, blah, blah, but you're too experienced for the role, which, now that I'm a manager in a team of 50, I would never reject someone based on being too experienced. You can never have enough experience around it. 

24:24
So I went on a rant and my predecessor, adam Elko, amongst three or four others, reached out and said do you fancy a call? Did it call? And it came down to two questions. They're looking for two individuals to join the team. One is on the risk side. Do you have any risk management experience, which I didn't at that time whatsoever, you know, based on the syndicate side. And then the second side was you know, do you have an interest in US sports? And that was the end of that. I could say, yeah, 100 percent. 

24:54
I was able to rattle off stuff from the interview and walked in the door there back then. 2021, march 2021. So it's like four years now walked in the door um 2021, march 2021. So it's like four years now walked in the door and, by default, I was the only person in the company who really understood us sports, um, and that's kind of just ultimately paved my way then to do what I'm doing now. Um, and timing was everything. That period of 10 months was horrible, um, yeah, but do not regret a second of it because it's led to a job that I love now, good foundations and hopefully, a long-term career on on this side where did the love for us sports come from for you? 

25:34 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
because traditionally I have a lot of friends who are uk-based. Uh, my friend fabian somers in germany. He loves the nfl because he saw it on king of queens, a sitcom, and he's like I gotta into this. But he doesn't keep up with other North American sports because of the time difference. I've spent some time in Europe as well. It's really NHL game 7 o'clock Eastern time. It starts at midnight, sometimes 1 am, 2 am, depending on where you are in Europe. So where did that love for North American sports come from? 

26:05 - Mark Hill (Guest)
We were quite lucky. Growing up in the uk I think it was channel four and channel five at the time their coverage of the nfl in particular was was quite extensive. We, you know they had a lot of highlights packages and you know, if I go through my teens years, I was sitting there late at night anyway and it happened to be on and you know you're you consume it. At that point, yeah, I properly properly fell in love with the sport. I would. When I found my team and my team that I fell upon. A lot of UK and Irish people and European people will fall on the team for various reasons. For me it was the Saints, the whole dynamic and the story around Katrina at that time. 

26:39
I've been following the sport Drew Brees, the Reggie Bush draft, just everything around that, the no-hopers with all the hope now of reborn out of Katrina. I just fell in love with the place. I fell in love with the team and the rest is history. So by nature I started to sit up at night watching the NFL. Sunday, Monday, Thursday sort of transitioned away from watching WWE during my late nights to watching the NFL. Sunday, Monday, Thursday sort of transitioned away from watching WWE during my late nights to watching the NFL, and then by default it sort of fell into some of the other sports as well. I'm just just given my nature, I'm quite inquisitive. So I started to want to know the narrative behind these NFL players before they get to the NFL. So then started to track the college game and look into that in more depth and yeah, just sort of snowball effect from there that's cool, very cool. 

27:29 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Um, you've worked on both the b2b side uh, business to business side, with Amelko, with where you are right now, uh, b2c, when you were working at Star Lizard. What, what are the biggest differences for you in, in how each of those operates? 

27:45 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I guess technically I wouldn. For me I wouldn't class Star Lizard as B2C, so to speak. Okay, I can definitely draw comparisons between working for a syndicate. That is a super well-oiled slick machine, very defined roles, very defined process and you know very process, orientated and organized and diligent Yep process, and you know very process, orientated and organized and diligent yep. And on the syndicate side, like I've already talked about tony bloom being been fantastic, but we wanted for nothing. You were there, you had a very clear goal and focus, the culture was fantastic and because you were well looked after and everyone knew that they were contributing to something bigger than themselves. On the B2B world, it's not that we are not culturally sound, but you have so much diversification across multiple verticals and multiple platforms and multiple jurisdictions that it's very hard to have that consistency and robustness that you would experience with the syndicate side or even if you were B2C and you only had one sports book to look after. 

28:46
On the B2B world, you know I'm training director. 

28:50
I have a lot of focus and interest in the North American market and it's just by default. 

28:54
The growth of Amelco in that space has been hand in hand since I've joined the company, so it's been very helpful. But we're also active in Africa. We're also active in the UK and Ireland, we're also active in Asia and having to not just my side and the trading side having to diversify and have conversations one minute with a casino in Arkansas and the next minute have a conversation with a sports book that's very horse racing focused in South Africa. Those calls could be back to back and it's the same for a developer. If you're working on a piece of code or a product innovation in the B2B space, you have a ticket one minute for a bet slip upgrade in Africa, or, let's say, nigeria or Kenya or one of those African books. They want 30, you know 30 bets on a bet slip and the one you know one cent or $1 bets, whereas the same developer a week later or even the next day could be working on a ticket. That is about enabling cash out on an SGP. 

29:49
You know, something like that. 

29:50
You know, the contrast in this B2B world is is massive and, yeah, it's the. 

29:55
The benefit of that, if you like, is the growth that me, the growth of the team, the growth of the company over that period has been much bigger than I would have probably experienced that had I stayed just in the syndicate space, because I'm getting exposure to the global picture and new markets and new products every day and that's that's a blessing on this side of it. 

30:14
And still, for us, it's a private, family-run company. That's, yes, done very well over the last three, four years, but we're still intimately involved in the product direction, the trading direction and having our voice listened to, whereas in the syndicate space or a lot of the b2b space, if I reflect on interviews I've done with people who have only worked for bet365, for example, I don't think I've hired anyone directly from there because they're so, again, compartmentalized or isolated on one area that they don't get the growth and experience. Our best hires have come from people who have, yes, worked on the syndicate side, but also that have diversified and worked B2B before or worked for other white label companies, and, yeah, it's been massive in terms of that growth on that side of it, from the Sportsbook side of things, what are the biggest challenges that a sports book will face when working with a platform provider like Amelco? 

31:10 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
And then I guess, as part of that Mark as well, just give the audience a general. You can explain Amelco a little bit more and specifically what you guys do over there. 

31:20 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Yeah, sure, biggest challenges is alignment of those roadmaps and visions. So, not to reflect too much on Amalco, but I can talk, certainly, around the trading department I came into the company, as I said, in 2021 with 13 traders and whilst a lot of those guys have moved on and done good things, we were stuck in a rut as a department where we were pretty much just watching a bet ticker. We were pretty much you know, know a little bit of that settlement. It was a redundant role, if you like, where there wasn't the back and forth with the operators, there wasn't the back and forth with the other departments within Amelco and we were very, very isolated. When I look at the growth now, where we have a over 50 in the team, we've sped across sort of four or five sub-departments and the direction we're going, it's totally, totally different. 

32:07
The biggest difficulty we have, I guess, is aligning what we'd call our internal roadmap with the roadmaps of the expectant customers. And if you look at Ontario, for example, where we've had Bet99 and Fitzdares there, two very contrasting remits and sportsbooks Bet99, very much seeing themselves as a sports entertainment brand If it's theirs, rightly or wrongly, wanted to target champagne sports and make a mockery, if you like, of them being British and different. You've seen some of the billboards etc. That would have been up there. Couple that with the change, not just in two sportsbooks, that with the the change, um, not just in a, in two sports books that operate in the same market, but then couple in, as I mentioned, those, those books in sub-africa, or the books in the uk and ireland, or the books in other jurisdictions. Just such a contrast in terms of what they would like as the next product feature versus what we would try to drive as an internal roadmap as well. So there's pros and cons, um, nine times out of ten, most of our operators can sort of piggyback off the internal roadmap, which is a benefit to them. They may have to wait a little bit longer if they want to prioritize earlier in time. They can sort of play pay, what's called tnm and you know, can have dedicated developers and they'll develop those product features which a company like Bet99 certainly do. And then, just to reflect on Amelco, just again, a lot of people will not know the name and that side of things we're probably best known within the space at the minute for laying some of the foundations for hard rock and fanatics, I guess, to get off the ground, and I work predominantly in the white label space, but that was what we call a source code deal. 

33:46
So at Melco historically we've done a lot of component parts for the industry. We've worked with most of the industry leaders doing could be anything from the palm to the wallet side, to the sports book, to the front end to the back end. We've done a big, big range. But when Hard Rock came knocking initially, and then Fanatics after that, they needed something to get them off the ground. That just gave them the foundations to take a platform that's ready-made as end-to-end and then they can do their own development on top of that and sort of take the source code their own direction. That undoubtedly has paved the way for Amalco's security, if you like, as a company for the next five, 10 years potentially, but also help with the reputation, because we've seen the growth of those two sportsbooks, not necessarily on the level of DraftKings and FanDuel, but certainly in a short amount of time building up a reputation. Yeah, I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit more at some point. 

34:40 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Yeah, so I'm not referring to Bet99 or Fitzdares Hard. So I'm not referring to Bet99 or Fitzdares Hard Rock Fanatics when I ask this question. But a lot of bettors assume that sportsbooks operate independently of one another. Right, each sportsbook runs their own thing, but many of them actually rely on the same trading and risk management infrastructure. Right Canby, for example, with BetRivers and Unibet, would be one that maybe people know about, entain owns several properties in the space as well, which have, you know, similar odd sets. How much do sportsbooks actually have control over their own product? And like, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using a white label sportsbook setup versus an operator building everything in house? Kind of a loaded question, but I'd like you to go into that a little bit no, no, totally fair question. 

35:33 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Um, again, from my side of things, I've been very blessed to work for a company that is a little more dynamic than the traditional white label space, if you like. 

35:42
There's a lot of players out there in this space that just give plug and play sports books and don't allow the operator to really have the flexibility to pick the product, the direction they want. Um, you've mentioned a few there, like if I go on a can be sports book, I know immediately it's a can be sports book. If I go on a melco sports book, I think you can navigate if you're, if you're savvy with the industry, you'll work out it's in a milk with sports book fairly quickly, but you can't tell instantly it's in a milk with sports book. Potentially that for me is has allowed me the, the insight, if you like, into listening to those customers and seeing them, the personalization that goes ahead with that right but also makes me detest the actual plug and play space of just another generic white label, just another generic trading desk, etc. Thankfully I'm at a company that doesn't encourage that type of direction. Um, long way to go but the the positives for me, and I know that based on some of the exchanges on the discord channel. 

36:40
Some people don't like it, but we have insight to a wide range of betting patterns globally and certainly within that North American market. You know we've got insight on when a RAS release happens. We've got insight on when something significant happens, when a syndicate might bet into us on another jurisdiction or another book. That sort of insight if you are a standalone sports book you do not get. And my frustration with that is trying to marry the two of. I want to take the bets, I want to see the bets and I want people to sign up with their own identities. But then if you're confined by some of the elements of a white label ie you know you're using the same generic feeds on both operators or something like that then you're starting to get restricted in how dynamic you can be and how tolerant you can be onto the the limits overall. 

37:29
So I think there's building in house. If I look, if I look at the tier one side or tier one, tier two side, and I look at what hard rock and and fanatics have done and then obviously fanatics acquiring points, bet and everything else associated with that, I'm a little bit biased. I think that has been the direction to go. I don't think you can build it solely from the ground up without some foundations. Um, and from a melco's perspective it's it's about maintaining those relationships and maintaining those going forward, that hopefully they come back to us and say we like that. 

37:59
Now we're going to launch horse racing or now we're going to launch our I game and suite in a new state. Would you be prepared to you know if we outsource that development to you? Would you be happy to take that on and give us dedicated resources and things? So it's it's for us, it's more about just personalization and reputation. Yes, we've had those source code deals, but it's very, very hard for a sportsbook to organically grow out of nothing these days. You really do need some sort of stability. And are we the best in the field? Potentially not, but we do win business from the personalization, nature and being able to. 

38:34
As I mentioned, I've got Saracen Casino, for example, in Arkansas. We've got 50 to 60% market share there and I think that's down to the hand-in-hand operations of them having a very clear vision about what they want with their sports book and us being flexible enough to deviate them away from the can be book we're up against or the play tech book we're up against in that space. Um, so yeah, it's double-edged sword. There's definitely benefits to it. There are definitely shortcomings. Um, I think. Reverting back to your previous question about you know, can the sportsbook really control their product? They absolutely can, but it does come at an expense. Again, you know that the sportsbooks that are able to innovate the most come to the table with the ideas, but they also come to the table, rightly or wrongly, with the financials to really back up and invest in the product. 

39:20 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Right, you talk about building a sportsbook from from the ground up, and you've been involved in launching several sports book products bet 99 fit stairs hard rock. Um. What does it actually take to build a sports book from scratch? 

39:37 - Mark Hill (Guest)
yeah, interesting couple of books. You've right, you've rhymed off there, because with both bet 99 and fitz theirs, it was a migration versus a full build, so they already had 99 had a different trading platform when they first came. 

39:50
Yeah, I remember that, yeah they were on um, altanar and dantia, believe. At the time they they kind of migrated across and we're seeing more and more of that. If I'm perfectly honest, we're seeing a lot of companies that are in the space, or a lot of sports books in the space, become disgruntled with the current provider or need to change direction or have a change of management. They recognize the shortcomings in the current platform and need to migrate and I think over the last two, three years we've done a lot more migrations rather than, um, you know, full builds from scratch. In terms of what it takes to build a sportsbook from scratch, unfortunately in this regulated space in North America, a lot of hurdles. Again, I think we'll get into it. But the platform migration in itself and pulling across player data and the regulatory and the GLI side which is your certification, which is your certification there's so many component parts that have to go through robust, regulated checks that for a full launch from scratch you have so many hurdles to get over to actually get off the ground You're probably talking realistically two to three year lead in times before you can actually launch a sports book successfully. Now, yes, there's fast track ways and we've seen that in a number of jurisdictions, another state might open up and then all of a sudden you've got 78 players lining up to to get off the ground but a true from scratch build. 

41:15
We did that with sarson in in arkansas um, completely new tech stack, um, brand new market entry, the whole brand positioning. You know that for us was a success story, but it really helped that the operator themselves knew what they wanted and were able to lay out to Amelco. Yes, we're going to take a white label solution, which is effectively what we are, but we're going to help you also improve your North American platform for all your providers. We're going to have that feedback loop that allows us to engage and listen and then make sure we're building upon the expertise that they have and the expertise that Hard Rock have and everything else. Biggest considerations when launching a sportsbook choosing the right third-party partners. In our space. A sportsbook partner is not just confined to who is providing your odds feed or who's providing your trading services. We're talking CRM, we're talking KYC, geolocation. 

42:16
Customer service is all sorts of stuff, you would wonder why so many people are trying to get into the space and run in the space. It's an extremely competitive area, and one of the barriers, if you like, is when I came in as sort of four years ago I look at some of the sports we had then and they had already gone through that whole due diligence of selecting their providers and working with them. Out, though, and working with X, y, z third-party feeds, and it's only when the likes of myself came in and some of my colleagues came in and really got under the hood and said why are we partnering with this odd service provider? Why are we partnering with this product that the customer wants? But why has nobody at Amelco sort of pushed back on it and said this doesn't make business sense, this doesn't make product sense. Nobody's going to bet that in X market or Y market. So, yeah, it's the third party partnerships, as well as building a team that really understands the regulatory restraints within each jurisdiction, is key and crucial to that. 

43:20 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I do want to talk about some of the regulatory hurdles, but before we do, I'm curious how does the sports book, in your experience, decide which technology to use, which trading models to use, which market making strategies to use? How much of an input comes from your side of things versus the sports book? And I'm just going to level with you the sports book, and like I'm just going to level with you some of these brands in particular. Um, that that you've worked with before would be known for limiting customers and and that's most of the brands in the space are known for limiting customers. But when it comes down to having those types of conversations, is it a recommendation from your side that says, hey, you know, maybe we should explore this route, or is this the sports book that's making the decisions on their end? 

44:08 - Mark Hill (Guest)
hopefully a collaboration for the most part. Um, it doesn't always play out like that. You'll have very strong-minded operators that don't even necessarily come from the space, or maybe come from, you know, land-based casino, and they have a very clear vision about this is how we want the sports booth to be right. And you will have others, um, like saracen, like 99 to an extent. It's like they're very open-minded to innovation and being creative and trying to do something a little bit differently. So the ideal compromise is you meet somewhere in the middle and you just have open discourse, very like a podcast like this. You just have open discourse, you chat back and forth and you you come to decisions. Some of them will be commercial decisions, some of them will be be based around trying to differentiate or trying to do something a little bit less vanilla in the space In terms of that sort of planning. You know, before they go to market, you know what tech stack, what trading models, what market making models. 

45:01
For me, that conversation, as I said, typically will happen two to three years in advance. Um, if you've got the opportunity to not have a rushed, you know operator lead and I, you know I look at states that aren't regulated at the minute, like texas and california. Probably not surprising to you, but conversations are already going on for two, three years with the local tribes, with license holders. You know they are doing their due diligence now and that comes everything from a request for proposal or an RFP where you basically outline. They'll send a, you know, a documentation out to potential tech providers that will cover everything from Palm Wallet, risk, kyc, et cetera that we discussed before. We will fill that in and then at that stage you go to like a demo stage. They'll start to whittle down the potential tech partners or third parties you'll deal with. 

45:50
If you get past the demo stage, you're usually in a statement of work stage and that's when you start to get down to the commercials and really deciding right, is this the viable partner? And that theme continues even when an operator is off the ground and inactive for three years. I've got one of my operators at the minute is about to go up for a three-year renewal on their feeds and on their KYC partner and different things. They're going through that whole process again. They've had their three years, they know what's worked, what hasn't worked and they're now trying to revisit. 

46:19
Do we need to switch a provider in this part, or is there a particular league where we're, uh, where we have a lot of leakage or we're shedding money because of inefficiencies, and then, yeah, the process at the very start is not too dissimilar to the ongoing process. Once you're live, you're constantly looking for new partners, you're constantly looking to scrutinize the partners you have and make sure you're holding them to account. So it's very much a repetitive nature but exciting at the same time got it makes a lot of sense. 

46:47 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Out of curiosity, what are the biggest differences between running a sports book in in north america versus running one in europe? 

46:57 - Mark Hill (Guest)
uh, probably going to sound a little bit like tren hale and stuff here, but a lot of the same things he will have mentioned before or other colleagues you would have had on, or counterparts you've had on from, from the, the uk and ireland, or the, the european space. The market maturity, for one for sure you know, without the arrogance that some european operators will display, they have been doing it for 20, 30 years in the space, so that with that comes a market maturity and it comes a maturity in terms of what the product looks like, what the expectation is from the bettors and the gamblers, what the regulatory stability looks like. I contrast that with the North American market. It is a regulatory mess. The state by state variation alone is bad enough, but then there's so many other factors within the regulatory side that is just to the detriment of the North American market versus what the European markets do. 

47:49
Naturally, the different sports interests and a little bit of different behavior. A lot of betting in the UK and Ireland, for example, and Europe in general, has sort of transitioned towards live betting and in-play betting a lot more quickly than the traditional American market post-PASPA has. That is starting to change. We're definitely seeing a shift towards the micros and towards the in-play markets. But for the UK and Irish market that's been well-established for quite a while and obviously we have the. I guess we are facing some hurdles, if you like, in the UK and Irish space and the European space that I think will come in North America in another three, four years. It's scary what you're up against in that time period. You know affordability checks in the UK, for example, liquidity just dropping A lot of the same themes that you're experiencing to an extent in the North American market right now is definitely playing out in the UK and Irish market and the European market currently. 

48:46 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I think if you were to ask uh, a casual better, or just like the average better, not even casual, let's say, I think a lot of people assume that once a sportsbook launches it's just about setting the odds and and taking bets, basically like it kind of runs itself. You always hear, you know Vegas, it wasn't built overnight, it's a printing press. What's something that happens behind the scenes that most people don't realize is happening? 

49:14 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I think for me, most of the operators and a lot of the sports books, especially in Melco anyway, we are what we class as feed agnostic, so we may have four or five different feeds servicing one NBA game or one NHL game. 

49:30
We're not dependent, if you like, on one sports book provider providing the odds or providing the graphics or whatever else might be on that front end. The end user will see one set of markets or, you know, one match menu or game menu. Behind that might be four or five different contributors to the the odds alone, like we've got also obviously on the the platform side, and some of our trading team will price up some manual markets and specials. You've got the main lines and derivatives might come from a radar or a genius um who have the official rights for a certain league. You might have a player prop provider, like Swish analytics plugged into the player props. You might have a micro market provider like Simplebet or Kiro or Invenu providing your your micros, and there's just sort of extra layers that come into what that final product looks like versus how many different contributions are coming from multiple different providers to get to that one end product that sits there. 

50:27 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Yeah, makes a lot of sense and definitely for those that use products, it would probably would be intuitive to them that you know they might be at one sports book and the prop betting is the same as another sports book, but everything else is completely different, and that's what Mark is speaking to here. A lot of times, mark, you mentioned a few times now hurdles, regulatory hurdles, so I know you have a lot to say on this. How do regulatory hurdles impact sportsbooks, particularly sportsbook launches as well, and do you think regulations in North America are helping or hurting competition in the space? 

51:10 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I think up to now you're probably hearing in my underlying tones and verbiage that I'm not the massive fan of regulation. I'm an advocate for regulation, but you have to understand what you're regulating to be a strong voice for whether it works or doesn't work. Unfortunately, the pace of regulation in the North American market has meant that a lot of the stakeholders involved on the regulatory side and on the compliance side don't actually understand what they are regulating, and that's you know. I would love to sit down with them, I'd love to work with them, and that's you know. I would love to sit down with them, I'd love to work with them and you'd hear other voices in the industry emerging, if you like to say we want to sit and talk to regulators and really help them, but there's a lot of naivety and a lot of strong will on their side that no, we are this state, we are going to do it our way. And then you know you go across a border and you have a totally different implication. Now a person can sign up on one side, sign up on the other, they can move across and they can have a very fluid sports betting experience on one side of the border and then on the other side of the border they have something totally different and that that can be in every facet. 

52:20
We've seen the edge cases come to the fore and discussions around you know, offering G League players on two-way contracts, or, you know, should we offer college props and things like that. You asked me earlier, like what's the big difference between the UK market or the European market and the American or North American market? As much as the UKGC or MGA or any of the licensees or the regulators within those jurisdictions have their flaws, they do put the trust in the operators to make the judgment call around what should be offered and what shouldn't be offered. I'll give you one very clear working example and I'll call out the regulator on this one, because it was front and center and I think there's a bit of news about it. At the time we had, uh, uefa nations league in michigan. Yep, you had, just for the benefit. You understand your football and soccer a bit I do if a nations league emerged out of friendlies not being competitive right. 

53:18
So in most states you will have an approved wagering catalog what leagues are allowed or what competitions and what level of props or whatever can be permitted for a wager to be placed in that state Michigan had the night of I think it was England against Germany in front of 80,000 people was not permissible because it was Classes UEFA Nations League. It was not listed on their approved wagering catalogue. But I could bet on Cambodia against east timor the same week. Like totally ludicrous bureaucracy and oversight. That should never happen. And it's interesting like I look at the agco and I go and stuff in toronto, they have a completely different way of doing it. They ask the, the operators, to submit a list at the end of the month of everything they've offered and you list off who the regulated body is or the governing body is for those individual leagues. 

54:12
And again, that process is flawed. That needs to end up in a big, big way. But it does allow for those kind of cases to not happen and not have issues because you're putting the control a little bit back to the sports books to say, yeah, done our due diligence, we're going to offer that and ludicrous that england, germany front of 80 000 can't be offered, but you know friendlies in cambodia and east timor and things like that could be offered the same week in front of you know a few hundred fans. Or you know third division lithuanian soccer can be offered but you know v Germany can't. It's just ludicrous and unfortunately that is definitely not in isolation. There are so many cases like that that come up and my biggest frustration on that Michigan one was they wrote to nine I think it was nine sportsbooks at the time and said they were going to be fined for offering an impermissible event. It's just ludicrous. It is an enhancement on a club or an international friendly. 

55:08 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Yeah, and the game actually has, or the match has some significance as well. It's not like it's completely meaningless. So, yeah, I can see that being a frustration, mark, if you Sorry, I was just going to say. 

55:21 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I can go on the problems and the state of the industry. Monopolies is another massive, massive one for me. I can complain about the regulators and the regulators not understanding what they're regulating, but we have a massive problem with the leagues and we have a massive problem with the state by state variance and the rights holders for the data, rights holders for the data. We are in a very precarious position on this side of the industry and as a knock-on effect to the betters, where in two or three years you're only going to have maybe two sportsbooks, maybe three, because all the others are being held to account or being told you must work with official data rights holders to offer our product. Genius Sports paid massive amounts for the NFL. You've got Radar sitting with rights to the NHL, the NBA. They are incompetent when it comes to the actual data collection side of things, but you are forced in certain jurisdictions to partner with them to take their data. Ontario is a prime example jurisdictions to partner with them to take their data. Ontario's prime example. Not that you're forced there, but you're encouraged to use the, the nhl official, official licensee, which is with sports radar, the amount of times their data collection has been wrong, or a goalkeeper or keeper is pulled, you can clearly tell they're covering it off tv pictures. They're not doing the enhanced data collection they're supposed to. We're getting pounded because a goalkeeper has been pulled and it's very obvious that the totals are going to go over here. Or the price is wrong and they're reacting data feed wise two, three minutes later, or they send the incorrect goal, score or assist maker and we're settling bets off that, but the poor data collection is totally wrong or incompetent or, you know, not to the level it should be. The one thing I would love to see is a really active discussion around that. Should sportsbooks and, by default, bettors at the end of this, be suffering and have to pay over the odds for data collection in stadiums instead of making that space much more competitive? Because that will drive innovation, that will drive people to be more held to account? 

57:31
At the moment, the advantage on that side is 100%, with your advantage, players. It's 100% for the betters. And then we have the full circle conversation. Well, if they have a clear advantage over us because we have to use the data rights, but they can use the eye test or they can see that that's you because we have to use the data rights, but they can use the eye test or they can see. That that's you know. We're still offering a prop on over 0.5 goals on hockey because the data collection is wrong, but the regulator insists we have to use them. All of a sudden, that customer that better becomes limited. That could have been a very good long-term customer but by default, we are forced into the limitation discussion and it's horrible. I default, we are forced into the limitation discussion and it's it's horrible. I don't want to be there, but it's unfortunately the nature of this, this side of it at the minute this is a fascinating conversation because I've lived through a lot of these experiences firsthand. 

58:14 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I I do bet a lot of hockey. Some of the biggest edges I've ever had in hockey my life were around live situations with goalie pulls where sometimes you'd even be watching on TV and the goalie would be coming out of the net and still the sportsbook was offering a price on like the puck line minus one and a half, which was as if the goalie was still in the net. It was really weird situations like that. This provides a lot of context. I mean, I've told this story before many times, mark, on this podcast. I'll tell it really shortly. 

58:44
But I was at a points bet uh christmas party a couple years back. Points bet uh still operates as points bet in ontario fanatics right in the us. But, um, there were regulators there from the alcohol and gaming commission of ontario, agco. It was right around the time where there was a um mma coach who was betting on or against his fighter couldn't remember exactly what it was. But ontario pulled and ufc fighting all the ufc right, and they were saying that well, the governing body for the ufc is the ufc themselves. It's not like other sports leagues, it's it's just the ufc. We cannot uphold the integrity of the uf UFC events. 

59:26
Meanwhile, everybody is now going back to place bets offshore for the events where they can't place them in a regulated market. And it's like sometimes we just need to use some common sense here. Like it is a professional league, there was a one-off incidents incident, but there there was like no rational explanation. I mean you, you ask regulators. They say the number one goal is to get as much money from offshore um, underground, you know pph accounts into the regulated market. We want people betting regulated. Then you're taking markets away because of you know, one one-off incident and everybody's just running back to off. 

01:00:05 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Yeah, it's the. Unfortunately, the edge cases dictate the narrative and that becomes the prominence. You know it's the UFC coach. It is the you know G League player that you know does something nefarious. It's the college team that have suspicious betting. Now there's 300, 350, plus other college teams that aren't coming up in any integrity radars. Why are we hyper-focused on the one edge case and letting that drive the narrative that all of a sudden we shouldn't be able to offer college props, instead of looking at the 95% that have no issues, no integrity concerns, and that people and bettors enjoy betting? 

01:00:44
We're coming into March Madness. 

01:00:46
We enjoy player props, we enjoy SGPs. 

01:00:49
We're going to have a little bit of a recreational punt, or potentially you're going to play a little bit more recreationally because it's March Madness, but now you're limited on the sportsbooks where you want to bet or the sportsbooks won't allow you to do it. 

01:01:00
You're going to just drive that money offshore again. 

01:01:08
And with respect to the offshore and let's say, the sweepstakes models and certain other PPHs and everything else, the money is still flowing there. The money is still flowing there and it will continue to come back there in the next two to three years if there is not a serious conversation around the data collection, around people who understand the nuances of the sports dictating the direction of the industry, not people on the regulatory side or people with vested interests who are going to be the culprits in the end whenever there is government hearings and people are wondering why is? Why are we, why are we not getting the returns from the, the industry that we were anticipating? It's it's clear and obvious to the likes of me and you right now, but it's not clear and obvious to the people who are actually regulating. And, in fairness, we've got again. We've got cases where the Massachusetts Gaming Board and some others are really actively engaging in that conversation but then they're doing another action on the side or another department within that is doing something that's completely in contravention. 

01:02:04 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I'm really worried about that, mark. Like I've heard the stuff about not offering prop bets anymore, and that's the problem. You know, there are betting groups out there. There's American Betters Voice it's, you know, run by Spanky a few others as well, where you know, I've talked about this before and I appreciate that there's people that are advocating for the better out there. You know, should everyone have fair and equal limits? I believe that they should. Right now they don't, but I like that there is someone advocating for the better. 

01:02:41
But you run the risk of going back to regulators now and you have people who are not really well versed in how sports betting works, who are now going to take away these discussions and they're going to make rulings. I hear stuff like yeah, just let's, let's take prop betting off the board, type of, and I'm like where did this come from? Like this isn't. This wasn't even discussed, um at any other level, and I I really fear that a lot of people are trying to do good for the space might end up having the inverse effect, where there's like over regulation at some point yeah, and don't get me wrong, I don't. 

01:03:18 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I don't expect the better to empathize with the sports books. You know I I don't expect doy kanish all of a sudden to go oh, I'm on the side of the sportsbooks here. The sportsbooks, we're going to support them, like I. I fully comprehend, understand the world that it is sportsbook versus better, but there are a lot happening on this side of the fence that there probably just isn't visibility to the, the general sports better out there. You know the higher operator taxes. 

01:03:45
You've got states that you know the barrier for entry was respectable and you had a number of providers entering that space. Now, all of a sudden you look at New York and they're going oh, a 51% tax rate, we'll have a bit of that. The prices get worse, the product gets worse, the data fees and the leagues drive up the charges and the costs. All of a sudden, everything goes back offshore, like people, if we're at the point post-possible, where it's now culturally acceptable to bet, those people will find somewhere else to bet. Now you know it's whether it's sweepstakes, whether it's offshore, whether it's crypto books that will organically happen and I just think it's going to come two, three years years, four years down the line and the regulators are going to realize too late and we're going to be left with four or five players in the market, in the regulated market. Yes, too late at that point. It's too late for product innovation, it's too late for competitive pricing. It's too late for those discussions. The money is still going offshore. 

01:04:43 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
In the market right now we pretty much have two different types of models. We have what I'll call, you know, the circa model of risk management, where it's take bigger bets, hold a lower percentage, fair. You know, there's obviously profiling happening behind the scenes, but not profiling with the sense of cutting limits for certain players. And then you have more of the recreational model, obviously, the DraftKings MGM type of model, which is pretty high level of risk management, cut anyone with a pulse type of thing. There is kind of a hybrid there as well with, I would say, like FanDuel's, sort of a hybrid type of model where they give a little bit of a hybrid there as well with, I would say like FanDuel's, a sort of a hybrid type of model where they give a little bit of a higher bet, maybe less likely to to limit customers. From your experience, what do you think is the right balance between, you know, risk management, profiling customers and offering just a competitive product as a whole? 

01:05:45 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Yeah, it's interesting If I look, my answer might be different to an Adam Bjorn or a Matthew Tran-Hill or an Allen Berg or other people who run sportsbooks maybe Jeff Benson. They might have very different answers to me. Number one out of that list, if you like, is competitive product. If you don't have an attractive product, nothing else matters. Number two, risk management ensuring sustainable profit without suffocating the customer base. And then number three is the customer profile. At the end of it it's important but often misused as the excuse to limit players. So from my side, the competitive product as a foundation is absolutely key. 

01:06:23
The difficulty in this industry and on this side of the fence is people consider a competitive product to be how quickly can you copy what DraftKings and FanDuel are doing? There's very little innovation in the space right now that differentiates the product and offers something different or niche. And unfortunately and we're guilty of it at Melco too, where we will get to the point where the customers when I say customers, the operators we work with, the partner operations that we work with they will see something on a DraftKings or a Fando and say, oh, we want that. And then we'll go through the development cycle, which might take two to three sprints might be five, six weeks, might be five, six months. By the time we get to the release of that product feature that's already on DraftKings or Fando, they're on to the next innovation and they're dictating the pace of innovation within the industry. So one thing is to have a competitive product, but if the benchmark is constantly against the two guys who have the most money and the biggest teams and the ability to consume simple bet, like draft kings did, or be able to really carve out a niche, like fan duel have done on the player prop side, where people are divigging the fan duel now they're not looking at a pinnacle or or bookmaker or whatever. They're divigging the fan duel like that. In fairness to them, they are doing that and it's it's working for them. 

01:07:44
But our benchmark should not just be those two books. Our benchmark should be how do we differentiate? And, in fairness to hard rock and fanatics, they've tried to do something a bit different. I think in the space not, but I'd say if you were sitting in those stakeholder meetings, it's a lot of the same themes they're. They're still going to ask well, we've seen a different layout for player cards on draft kings where you know how do we achieve that or how do we do that? 

01:08:08
And I'm sure our competitors in this space might say, our competitors, like can be, for example, amelko sort of built a foundation of very quickly modulating what we deliver. So, as I said before, we can do palm, we can do sports book, we can do risk management services, be modulated, all that. That's what probably got us the theDuel deal, hardrock deal and some others associated with that, because you didn't necessarily have to take our PAM, you could just take our Sportsbook or vice versa, offering modulated services. If you like to go up against a melco to make sure that they can get into hard rock with one pricing feed or they can get into fanatics to work with them, and it's it's, it's tricky, it's the balance is, is is difficult. I think the risk management side again I've touched on it we are judged very, very quickly and I you've had Shipper on here who prided himself and I have a lot of time for Shipper, but you had him on here and he prided himself on how quickly he could restrict the customer based on one or two bets. That is not the benchmark that me or my team or this industry on this side of the fence should be aiming for. We need to be leading the conversation about how do we improve the feed, the latency, the price sensitivity, how do we improve all that to ensure we do get to a position where we can offer equal and fair limits? Circa model I'm a big advocate for what Prime Sports are doing, which is pretty much piggybacking off the BetChris or Bookmaker lines. But Adam Bjorn and the team there have done fantastic work to really carve out a niche. But, by their own admittance, they're carving out a niche because they're openly arming themselves to the sport trade exchange. They're providing something that I think has legs and definitely has a space in this ecosystem, but they don't have to offer all the bells and whistles that we talked about. 

01:10:08
The syndicate side earlier. So many syndicates, star lizard included. I've moved into this b2b world, if you like, where they're offering services now to sports books. The big difference in the syndicate world, um, is you have to pick and choose your spots, your edges, but very much like the, the top down or bottom up betters you know the sharps pick and choose your spots, your edges, very much like the top-down or bottom-up bettors, the sharps. You can pick your spots. 

01:10:31
On the product side. The expectation is you have to offer everything, so it's not hard to find the flaws and the holes. Circuit to their credit, prime, to their credit, you can book like an old-school Vegas bookmaker when you don't have to offer the bells and the whistles. But the expectation of the recreational punter or the recreational bettor that you want to pull across to your sports book, they have the expectation that you're doing SGPs, that you're doing cash out, that you're doing the deep, deep menu, above and beyond the spreads, the money lines, the totals and a couple of player props. I think there's a world where both can coexist. And I think there's a world where both can coexist. 

01:11:28
And my that is subpar, and the theme carries over to the sportsbook side. There's elements of sportsbooks is subpar because so many people strive for market entries, or this state might add I game and at some point. So we're going to introduce a shit product and limit customers just so as we can hang around when the i-gaming is is legalized, then, oh well, pat on the back. We can either sell on the business or we can now uh, you know scale at a much bigger level. So it's, it's unfortunate. The pace post-passport has been significant, but it's led to a lot of inefficiencies and, by default, the better expects more, and I totally empathize with that, but also the platforms and the sportsbooks for the most part. 

01:12:14
If you're on my side of the fence, you want to take a bet, you want to raise a limit, you don't want to limit customers, pass posters or courtsiders or something like that. Yeah, okay, yeah, that's different and that's unfortunately. You probably watched or picked up on the massachusetts gaming board when they invited people to come along and speak, both from the sports books and from the um and from the sports betting side. Thank you, joe brennan on there at the time, from from from the, the sports betting side and a few other advocates. But unfortunately, every sports book that went on there with the exception, I think, of Caesars had legal or compliance doing the discussions, not traders, not people who have to manage the customers, people reading off scripts, and that, again, is a really poor reflection on this side of the industry. We've got a lot of passionate folk, we've got a lot of talent across various companies, but we're stuck in the shadows, if you like, and not being the advocates for the direction this industry should go. 

01:13:10 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Yeah, I forgot that that happened, but that was pretty sad to see just every sportsbook issuing a statement beforehand and, yeah, I mean that's not going to get the industry anywhere. We've had a lot of operators that have struggled in market. There's many that come to my mind. There's Fubo, winbet, playup, betfred. Recently in Ontario, coolbet made a very quick exit from the regulated market, so lots of these books are pulling back. I'm listening to you talk, and I've had these conversations with other people before, and a lot of them just think it's related to marketing and the fact that, well, draftkings, fanduel, underdog, prizepix, mgm these companies have a lot of money behind them. They can market themselves. My belief is that these products are just not good enough. I mean, you can't enter the space with a product that has, like no differentiating factor to these other big books and hope to compete, and I'm curious about your thoughts on that. What do you make of these operators that have quickly pulled out of the space in the last few years? 

01:14:19 - Mark Hill (Guest)
There's no one rule to fit all. I'll say that and quite rightly you've named three that were on Amelco tech stacks that are no longer with us, and Fitstairs in Canada is going to be another very shortly as well, where they're going to withdraw from the market, thriving in the UK and Ireland on the platform there. But, yeah, the Canadian space is just not worked out for them when they're up against 29, 30 other sportsbooks and there is no differentiation in terms of what you're offering. I'll reflect a little bit on the three that I kind of experienced firsthand, if you like PlayUp, case study and poor market fit and naivety, so PlayUp for me. 

01:14:55
A lot of friends were involved on the US side of the operation and still in touch with them, still have a lot of time for them. They entered two very, very competitive marketplacesplaces new jersey and colorado with a generic recreational product and their ambition on the us side was to offer good limits, respectable limits. But there's no way that you can sustain that in those two marketplaces against a very sharp and shrewd user base. When you're running a recreational feed and when I say recreational feed you the commercials are done beforehand you sign up to take what's called a unified odds feed from sports radar. You're then beholden to what sports radar offer as your odds. Now you can, you can do biasing, you can override, you can switch the lines, but your source of truth is a poorly executed odds feed from a third party provider. So the culture was right in terms of what they wanted to achieve. 

01:15:53
On the US operations. They brought in Rex, and Rex is chalk and cheese in terms of some people like him, some people don't, to his credit, I think Rex has so many positive aspects and his passion for the industry cannot be faulted at all. Joe Rogers and Mike Roselli and some other guys that were involved there. They really had a drive to do it correctly, but they were fighting not just the battle of those two states and trying to book there with recreational feeds, but also their overlords, if you like, on the Australian side of the business. There was too many people and some of the other sportsbooks are guilty of this as well. They thought they could make a quick buck by entering, obtaining licenses, licenses that you could potentially piggyback into iGaming down the line and then make a quick buck by selling on, and it speaks volumes for me that you know a few, few weeks before um, play up up, if you like. Sam Bankman Freed was seen as the savior and was going to come in and sort it out and then we all know how that played out. 

01:16:53
So internal dysfunction, poor product and lack of investment in the product side and more obsession with obtaining licenses in states that they had no rights, where they sort of distraction, and obtaining those licenses for more states without getting the bread and butter states. The first two they were in correct and pay, you know, investing in that and investing in upscaling, like. Just to give context on that one, we run in sprint cycles on the development side, on the, the b2b, our version that was in pay up in new jersey and in colorado was about 18 months behind the version that we're rolling out to saracen casino in arkansas, purely because they just weren't paying the bills or they paying bills late and things like that. I don't want to get into too much discussion. It's it's dead and buried now. But the obsession with making the quick buck from entering the market, getting the licenses and then making the quick buck of selling those on, there was no care or duty of care to the actual people working for the company and other things, and I can't blanket all the Australians that were involved in that project the same way, because my trading counterparts over there were lovely and had weekly calls with them. It was great. It's just the exec level, if you like, just not understanding the marketplace, very naive and unfortunately that one fell by the wayside. 

01:18:22
Sorry, rob, I don't know if you want to say something, but I'll just contrast that with the likes of Fubo and Winbet. Fubo really strong vision, too much bureaucracy which is how I'd sum it up and poor guidance. So they had some very talented young people behind the vision for what that sports book could have become. And I think if you look at like Skybet in the UK, and if they had really driven the direction that way and embedded their product into their rights that they had for streaming games and have that dual screen experience, I think they could have done something significant in this space. They may not have made it long term, but they definitely had a vision. But then they brought in consultants and they brought in people who don't understand and they made a few switches and again, when it's a publicly listed company, people will say well, we've bought four licenses for these states. I think they got up to seven licenses they acquired, so they were paying the overheads for that. And then they said well, the regulator says we have to work with Genius. We're going to offer Genius odds and have this conversation all the time with every new operator I work with and every current operator I work with. 

01:19:29
Outside of one or two states, tennessee being one, you can take an official data rights deal with Genius. That does not mean you have to take odds from Genius. Unfortunately, so many of those commercials are signed with the naivety that, oh, this means I must take genius odds or I must take radar odds. No, you negotiate a rights deal for the data collection in stadium. I have a very strong view on it that if you do the deal right, they should not be entitled to a penny of rev share on pre-match markets because we're not using their data for pre-match markets. But unfortunately, on the commercial, commercial landscape, all those deals are signed not by traders, not by people who understand the sports book mechanics. Um, it's to the detriment again and again, tennessee, for example, trying to enforce this ruling that you must use official data and not other providers and things. It's, it's to the detriment. Last one one I'll mention and I know I'm going off on a tangent a little bit Winbet Again, so frustrating because they've had the best trading team that I've worked with hand-in-hand At that stage Allenberg, matt Lindemann, motoy, pearson fantastic trading team. 

01:20:45
They were not engaged as stakeholders when it came to product innovation and development and everything else. They rushed to market. They kept the outdated tech stacks, not just on Amalka. We ran the sports book in Michigan and had some fun with Joey Kanisha's bets and things there. But they had such excellent internal stakeholders there who knew what the betting public would want, would knew what products and feeds and everything else would gravitate with them. 

01:21:15
But the obsession at the executive level was we need market access, we need to go into another state and another state and another state. In that process they're not reinvesting in the states that they're already in, they're more obsessed with getting the next license and the next market entry. When they bit the bullet, if you like, and took on the New York market, everything else kind of died to death because of the costs associated with that. For example, they partnered or they bought Betbull in the UK, that book we had operations, I'd say, for three months and then they shut it down because of the losses they were making in the North American market. That sports book was doing respectable enough sort of tier two, tier three level handle day to day, like they were doing very good horse racing business, very good football business. The Wynn executives, the Betbull executives just didn't understand and they just cut it and reinvested that into the US market. 

01:22:10
So a lot of stuff behind the scenes that most of your listeners would never be aware of. There's no one size fits all into why an operator falls away or disappears from the marketplace, and I don't think it's down to just marketing. I don't think it's down to any one thing and I don't think it's down to just marketing. I don't think it's down to any one thing. But the underlying theme of all three of those is too much were operating in and not try to chase this mass expansion into new states. Lock down your potentially 30%, 40% market share in one state. Build the organic reputation off that and unfortunately that's just not the culture. That has been post-pass, but it's been a race to the next state, the next state, the next state. 

01:23:01 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
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01:24:24 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I think, just following up on my last point about potentially smaller sportsbook entities dropping out of the space, I think consolidation is inevitable unless there is a change of trajectory on the regulatory side, the data collection side and so on. The rising cost, the increased tax, the over-regulation current trajectory favors monopolies and it's just. We're at the point where, unfortunately, we're at a crossroads. We can get it right, or its history repeats itself. You look at the sweepstake models, you look at the crypto sportsbooks, you look at the offshores, sort of not necessarily reestablished themselves, but having trust and stability in that space. The regulated space is going to become more and more constricted and we're not going to have the product innovation that we're desiring, we're not going to have stuff really come to the fore and make us a better product and as such, it's going to really drop away. Inevitably, at some point, california and texas will regulate and everything will be fine again. Everyone will go. This is the next boom, yeah, and it will paper over the cracks for a little bit longer and you know, maybe we'll, we'll have the provinces emerge, in canada even, and have all them on their own. You know, regulated space instead of it being ont, ontario and then everybody else. So I think there will still be enough narratives to just say oh, we're fine, there's another new market opening up, there's more new sports books emerging, but they'll not last very long and they'll be left by the wayside very quickly. And we'll be left with not just the sports book operations having limited scope, but sports bettors forced into taking money elsewhere and playing elsewhere. Or you know, if we're talking about just general share of wallet, that share of wallet is going to go into fantasy leagues, it's going to go into other vices rather than staying in the affordable, regulated sports betting space sports betting space. 

01:26:28 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Right, there are still books that are making pushes into sports betting in markets that have been established, like like ontario. Now we still see new books that are coming into market uh, every now and then, other us states as well. Do you hold out any hope that any of these books will be able to compete compete with the likes of fanduel and draft kings, or do you think that it's just like it's too far gone at this point? They're too late to the party. What do you see as the future of these books that are now trying to make a push into sports betting? 

01:26:54 - Mark Hill (Guest)
probably going to sound pretty biased in that I do think Fanatics and Hard Rock yep, I've got the foundations in place now to really become more competitive than they are and that you know. Slow incremental market growth has been encouraging. Now, yes, there's been substantial overheads to achieve that initial launch and that initial growth. However, draftkings and FanDuel have also, in tow, had significant overheads on marketing and acquisitions and everything else associated with that. So I'm not totally glass half empty, that it's only going to be FanDuel and DraftKings of this world. I think the best position to challenge is Fanatics and HardRock for me. But it has to be a long game for them. Fanatics, obviously, diversification. There they can cross, sell across different verticals and have a sustainable customer base and a potential customer base that DraftKings and FanDuel might not have exploited yet or utilized yet. And again, if Texas, california et cetera comes along, there's really an in there for them to be potentially in the door quickly and potentially lead that space. Hard rock for all the flaws and I've been quite derogatory around monopolies in the betting industry I know that everyone will look on at Florida and the Seminole tribe and think that that is restrictive for the business. I think you'll find people at Hard Rock, probably nodding their head and saying, yeah, but in credit to Hard Rock behind the scenes, since they've got off the ground in Florida and they obviously have the cash flow associated with that, they are reinvesting that heavily in personnel and heavily in product and a lot of the other ones that you might class in that top five, top six. You know what are pen and espn doing? What are mgm doing? They're chaotic behind the scenes. Fanatics to the credit, hard rock to their credit. I'm seeing a lot their credit. I'm seeing a lot of stability and I'm seeing a lot of reinvestment in the product, reinvestment in the direction they want to go and they're not obsessed with chasing license after license. Yes, they're getting into these states and yes, they're getting licenses, but they're reinvesting the money to ensure the long-term stability of the companies, in contrast to an mgm or a pen or an espn like I. 

01:29:09
I've listened to a lot of podcasts in this space and I I listened to to joe brennan and adam bjorn on the prime sports podcast regularly. They they often mention espn. It's like they dropped the ball, massively dropped the ball whenever pen, barstool, whatever, got that brand of ESPN and they've done jack shit excuse my French with it. It's like how can you monumentally F up something so potentially perfect like the misguidance, the misdirection of that is crazy. Instead of trying to compete with FanDuel's and DraftKings of this world world, they're just sleepwalking into irrelevance and they'll they'll be gone sooner or later. They might have the piggy back of the the I game inside and maybe that will give them a sustainable base, but I, at the minute, unless they change trajectory, they're, they're gone, so that those are the big four, if you like. 

01:30:00
And then like, I'm naturally going to give credit to the Circa, the Prime Sports and, dare I say, even Caesars on this one where you've got them targeting or having the perception that they're willing to take a bet. Obviously, circa and Prime speaks for themselves. Caesars, reputationally, are better than most of those vanilla tier two, tier three operators. They're willing to take a bet. For the most part, they're fighting the good fight, if you on the pricing side, and that allows them differentiation. And I still think we're going to get to the point where, yeah, in another two, three years they will still be competitive, they will still be in the space because they're offering what the offshores can offer. They're willing to take a bet and they're willing to move a line and move a number and be dynamic and and I think, given that two, three-year lead-in time, I do expect Circa to, you know, really re-enhance some of the product and add some of those bells and whistles that other sportsbooks have Prime. You hear Planet Tech and Adam Bjorn talking about what their vision is, that they will add incrementally the bells and the whistles. They've got the foundation, they've got the customer base now, yes, very small market share in the grand scheme of things, but they're trending in the right direction, whereas a lot of these others in the tier two, tier three space are just copying the DraftKings and the Fando. What I'll add on that is DraftKings and Fando, for all their sins, they're not resting too much on their laurels. You look at what F fan do. We mentioned earlier um around the, you know, trying to carve out a niche on the, the player prop front. I think it's 95 percent of sgps that we have like placed on our sports books contain a player prop. If they are really carving out the niches, being competitive in that space and their sgp pricing is also starting to garner, you know, the eyelash and pride chick reputation of being better on the SGP front. They will do just fine. They're going to do just fine. 

01:31:52
Draftkings for me, the history of DraftKings is interesting, and certainly on the Sportsbook state, if you think about where they both came from and how they became disruptors in the space and everything else and you mentioned before about sweepstakes and and crypto casinos they're the disruptors now, if you like, and to an extent, circa and prime sports are somewhat of disruptors, like draft kings and fandu are still going to dominate because fandu are getting it right and draft kings are just acquiring everyone else who's getting it right. So simple bet, for example, on the micro betting front. You know that acquisition. If you know caesesars, ourselves, multiple other sportsbooks, hard Rock Fanatics we're all using SimpleBet for their micros. Draftkings come along and purchase that. They can then shut off the other operators. Now don't get me wrong. That leads to innovation and more micro providers emerging. Right, but it's not isolated to just that micros. You know they purchase Mustard Systems, which is a London-based company, or, again, almost like the syndicate side, they do sensitive pricing, particularly around golf, and have really innovated their golf pricing product. 

01:32:56
Another niche and another sport that I think is ripe for sports betting and nobody's really tapping into that If DraftKings get that right in the near future again, they're built on like a their background, if you like, on the tech stack is is sb tech. 

01:33:12
So they've they've gone to market similar to hard rock and fanatics in its infancy, where they've they've kind of taken a source code. In fact, they just purchased sb tech and built upon that. But they're not at the point where they've reached their confines in the back office. They're not now going right, we'll just buy this one, we'll buy that one, and whether it's Jason Robbins or the executive, somebody who's sharp enough to identify where the trends are going and they're consuming the M&A space, they're consuming the right people to take on. So, in short, I think that domination will continue. But I've respect for the two that we have worked with and Fanatics and Hard Rock. I think they're trying to achieve it right. I think MGM and Penn are disastrous, and then Circa Prime and Caesars are the other three that I kind of have my eye on and going yeah, I like what you're doing. 

01:34:02 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
You're trying to disrupt and you're trying to do it the right way and I think that's the foundation of a sports book I'd want to run if I was running one from scratch. All right, let's say you are starting a new sports book from scratch today. What would be your number one priority if you were doing that? 

01:34:19 - Mark Hill (Guest)
there's the cliched answer and there's and there's the genuine answer on the actual sports book side. The cliched answer is your first five hires are everything. The right people make or break a sportsbook. We've talked about the failures already. We've talked about why those companies have failed and it's been an underlying misdirection from the top. I've said a name drop some people that I think are fantastic in this industry. They are usually behind the scenes. They know where a sports book should go and anyone that's starting up or anyone that is acquiring a sports book let's say, penn or Acquire or ESPN or whatever and they want to just rip it up and redo it. You've got to build it with the right stakeholders and that's across the various departments or iterations. So there's definitely, if you're launching a sports book and your first five hires aren't absolutely nailed, you're already dead in the water. Don't be another copy-paste recreational sports book. Be a disruptor. I've mentioned a few already. It's like most new sports books are just variations of the same old safe model, low risk, plug and play, zero differentiation. So you can't do that if you want to start a sportsbook in 2025. 

01:35:33
Price and competitiveness I'm trying to change it at Amalco and I've been very open and transparent about that, that we have an over-reliance and a burden, if you like, on the risk management side, or that we you know we're having to firefight a lot of mistakes made by the feed providers. If I was starting a new sports booth from scratch, I would want to do the data collection myself, if it's achievable, or work with partners who are competent or open to competition in that space to allow us the ability to price in-house, run their data through the model and have faith in what's being offered, because then we can offer better limits. We don't have to be perceived as another vanilla sports book and, yeah, being just competitive on those pricing. I deviate away from this mentality that you must hang 20 cent and 30 cent lines. You know we need. Unfortunately it's a hangover from the, the old school industry in in north america. I want to be more competitive on margin. I don't want to just offer 10 cent, 20 cent, 30 cent lines or, in some instances, people offering 40 50. You know it's. Yeah, we shouldn't be as restrictive on on margination. Um, and then price competitiveness. 

01:36:44
The underlying theme for me, though, if I was starting it is you have to become an originator, and that origination might not be market beating but you need to have an underlying confidence in the ability to originate a number and understand where that market's going. At the moment, if I'm a sportsbook operator and I limit every customer under the sun that has a pulse, I don't get to see their business going forward. Circa can, prime can Offshores can. They can tag those customers. They understand those customers. On the recreational sportsbook side they just open up another account and another account and another account. If we have that open and transparent relationship from day one and we originate our own pricing which we're doing at amelco now on um a couple of sports in particular we now can dictate and understand where that market is going to go. 

01:37:37
You can see the manipulation of the market, making books we talked about circa. It doesn't take much to manipulate circus nba lines, for example. You know that. It doesn't take much to manipulate Circa's NBA lines, for example. It doesn't take much to influence Prime Sports number or BetChris number. It certainly doesn't take much to influence Pinnacle's number. These days If you are originating your price behind the scenes, you can just ignore that market move because you have faith in whether it is directionally correct or not correct that all of a sudden opens up a whole plethora of new business because you're welcoming the arbs, you're welcoming the um, the bets, that most sportsbooks will just shy away from and say, okay, we're profiling this customer, he's uh got a plus ev bet against the competitors at that time and, and yeah, so for me, originating the pricing it's not an overnight thing either. You've got to reinvest in the personnel again, not to go off on a tangent too much like at Amelco. 

01:38:34
One of my biggest headaches, if you like, as a trading director when I joined the company was that we had a quant division or an algo team, but they didn't have the domain knowledge behind the sports and that's that's across sports, not just even the European side. They were mathematicians, they were very competent developers, they were what you'd call quant developers. They weren't quant analysts, right. So last year, or sort of started this year, we spun up a quant division. I brought in guys from Star Lizard, I brought in guys from Smart Odds and we're building something on the pricing side that, if it ever did come to the point where we were going B2C and maybe wanted to open our own sports book, we are very well positioned now from a pricing side of things to do that the difficulty I have and I'm sure people at Amelco and other companies have this headache all the time and we've seen Fitstairs, for example, withdraw from the or about to withdraw from that regulated market in Ontario or against 29 books. 

01:39:28
They will go off and apply for other licenses in other jurisdictions, not necessarily in North America, but that license will allow them to move into potentially gray space or potentially other B2C areas. If I really got the sports book off the ground and was building it from scratch and I had the right personnel and I had the right price and dynamics, am I going to open that sportsbook in the North American landscape right now? Or am I going to open that sportsbook in the grey space and unfortunately, with everything that we've talked about, I'm going to open that sportsbook in the crypto space or I'm going to open that sportsbook in the offshore space because the regulated space is making it too restrictive, too costly to actually innovate and launch a new sportsbook. So long-winded answer, but hopefully you get kind of the direction I'm going on. 

01:40:14 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
No, I get it. And even if we look at exchanges nowadays, a lot have pivoted to the sweepstakes model to avoid a lot of the regulation that's happening in the space, and you brought up the sweepstakes model a couple of questions ago. How do you see the exchanges within the current ecosystem? Like, do you consider exchange? Some people consider exchanges to be the way of the future. At some point everyone's gonna be on exchanges. It's great pricing peer to peer. I personally I love the idea of an exchange. I don't see it as the way of the future, but I love it. Where do you see them within the ecosystem? 

01:40:49 - Mark Hill (Guest)
It won't happen in the North American market, not in that regulated space, until there is some sort of boundary broke down. Maybe Trump and Elon will do it. The Wire. 

01:41:00
Act alone is a major, major roadblock. Without some federal reform you're never going to get exchanges off the ground. If we got to a world where all 50 states you could have an open and transparent exchange and you could have peer-to-peer betting across the whole jurisdiction, or let's say 30 of the states Maybe we'll add in the 51st state of Canada again, if you were able to do peer-to-peer exchanges on that kind of scale. Yes, the discussion is there. We can say exchanges could be the future and lessening of the wire act. It's simply just not going to take off. And I look at the. We work with a lot of partners who seed exchanges at the minute. You know I don't mind mentioning like DL Trading and people like that who are assisting us on player props at the minute. At the minute I sit with David and we talk about product innovation on the sportsbook side. They are also seeding the exchanges and sport trade and some of the others that are out there. 

01:42:13
You've seen ProfitX have to sort of move away from that model because they're restricted to one state, one jurisdiction and you're competing against the sportsbooks, yes, but you're not able to actively encourage the peer-to-peer element unless you are Rufus and DL, for example, going head-to-head on a golf market. You know it's. What kind of encouragement is that to the recreational? Better to go and enter that market and play on an exchange? I think there's like I've seen it in the uk firsthand there is definitely merit in exchange betting but again, it cannot be as restrictive as it is currently to really grow organically and allow a recreational punter to understand what they're actually betting or why price sensitivity matters or the ability to lay a bet. You know it's totally different dynamic. It requires a lot of education. It did pick off in the uk. Um, betfair has a very strong reputation but it's not. It's not the betfair of old anymore, as you're probably aware. Like, yeah, we're up against affordability checks in the uk. It has killed the industry over there. 

01:43:18
On the exchange side you've got matchbook, you've got betdac, you've got others in that space, but the liquidity is just not there. If I want to go bet the NBA in the UK, I physically can't at a regulated book. I'm limited at every recreational sports book and the exchange has zero liquidity. So where am I going to place my NBA bets? If I want to make them, I have to go for an agent or I have to go and do them in the traditional offshore sense, because the UK market is not conducive to be able to take those bets, because the liquidity is not there anymore. At some point in the future, if DL or if Cescana or whoever else is sort of seeding exchanges on the syndicate side realize, yeah, we're just up against our peers and we have an edge here and there, but it's just not, you know, is that half a percent we're holding worth it? Or will we go chase some recreational elsewhere or go back to our traditional model? They'll just go back to the traditional model. Liquidity won't be there and they'll just die a death again. 

01:44:15 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I want to. I want to kind of pick up on that but rather than talk about the future of sports books and exchanges, more about the future of sports book tech, which we very rarely talk about here on circles off. So I've. Obviously it's seven episodes and it's going to shit. I have consulted for sportsbooks in the past before. I know a little bit about the trading room. Um damn, it hurts me to see that seven on the board. You're going to be reset to a zero at some point, as it was a source of pride for me. But I've talked, you know, remain in contact with many traders who I used to work with. Automation has become a much bigger part of sportsbook operations, especially over the last few years, at least from the people that I talked to, how much trading is still manual versus algorithm driven nowadays? 

01:45:10 - Mark Hill (Guest)
it's difficult for my perch, given that most of the odds that an amalco sportsbook will turn out do not originate from amalco, so to speak. So there's absolutely algo driven models out there and the shift from manual trading has been dramatic over the last five, six, seven years. We've got to a point now where again, the innovators in this space like what Deck Prism have done in Las Vegas, for example, and then the purchase from Huddle and everything associated there they are starting to really drive the marrying better pricing and better algorithms, with better products and more liquidity and, and you know, higher limits and everything else. Unfortunately, those that have most of the control of the industry do not. Most of the control of the industry are people who their tech and their algos are about copying the market right and then returning that out, and unfortunately, most of the players copy it slowly and copy it badly. So, whilst there has been a shift from human oversight to automation, it's poor automation, it's poor latency and there are guys that are doing it very well. But there is so much more edge on the better side because you can access multiple tools and you can access multiple odd screens, like not just bet stamp. But obviously it's such competitive space. Now the edge is absolutely with you guys. I've don't hope you don't mind me saying it I I have been hit from pillar to post by some bet stamp employees with the in-play uh sports betting that the guys were doing in ontario. It's like the edge is very obvious. It's not hard to play that edge when you have an odd screen that can compare one tech provider who does it very well and is not copying versus everybody else. So we're getting to a more algo driven line generally with the pricing. 

01:47:02
But 70 to 80% of the industry is more concerned with how are we copying the market makers or the innovators? Most of them don't know who to copy for a start and copy badly. So a lot of the european uh startups are not startups. A lot of the established european operators that moved into the north american space copied bet. 365365's pricing on North American sports is horrendous. They continue, five years, six years later, to still copy Bet365. They copy Bet365 slowly. Bet365 and Denise Coates has an absolute monopoly in the grey space. Everyone thinks of their reputation in the UK and Ireland and, yeah, they've got a brilliant product product. They don't need to be price sensitive because they are doing hundreds of millions and billions in the grey space. A regulated sports book who wants to start up in Ontario and copying a sports book that does it badly? What, what like what is that right? Yeah, it's, it's crazy. And unfortunately, even six, seven years later. 

01:48:04
If you're going to copy the market, copy the right market makers. Don't copy, uh, the bet365, the sky bets, the william hills. Yes, there's, you know, there's certain elements that are good there. But even if I look at the, I think you'll be aware but certainly some of your, your listeners, won't be there are a lot of companies in this space that aggregate odds. So you've got l sports, tx odds, companies like that that their bread and butter has been that aggregator where even the big books that some of the ones we've talked about, the draft kings, the fan duels, the hard rocks, the fanatics, the mg there are component parts of their tech stack that just copy the market and copy the market badly, using those aggregator services, and it might be for player props or it might be for main lines. 

01:48:56
There's no one size fits all. If I was personally to set an aggregator, I'd want to, you know, say, for hockey, for example. That might be off the top of my head like Jeff Davis or someone like that. I might want a little bit of his influence in. Wouldn't want the full picture from Jeff, but I want a little bit of that in there. I want a little bit of Penny's number. I want a little bit of bookmakers. I want to pick and choose my blends. None of that happens, because they're picking and choosing their blends based on early copied recreational numbers, to begin with, because Pinnacle have moved off screen or you know others have moved off screen. 

01:49:26
It's just, it's a ludicrous world and you've seen it now, I guess, with the whole optic gods and switch analytics and it's like all the innovation is happening to the betterment of the customers, of the the betters, and then they, those innovators, are moving in a little bit into the B2B world and helping operators, which which is great, but it's still so poorly done, but they can get away with it. It's frustrating. I've gone off on a complete trajectory here, but it's like yeah, automation is here, but the algos need to be driven off the right metrics and at the moment, this industry, for the most part, does not put the right metrics into the algos to begin with. 

01:50:05 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
But we're going to keep going on this topic in one second. But what I love what you did, mark, is you basically did my BetStamp Pro ad. Read for me in talking about how the live betting BetStamp users were destroying you. I might be putting words in your mouth, but the live betting is in beta right now. It's being tested around the office. You heard it from Mark himself Product's pretty good at winning money. 

01:50:27
Betstampcom slash circles off. If you want to check it out, we'll put the link in the description down below. There are limited licenses on this product because we don't want to oversaturate the market. We don't want this to turn into odds jam where edges are completely getting blown up. So if you want to check it out, apply now. Betstampcom slash circles off. Once the spots are gone, they're gone. Make sure that you check it out. On the automation side, mark, there's a lot of advancements recently in AI, artificial intelligence. I use AI a lot in my day-to-day life Makes things pretty easy for me in many aspects which I don't want to get into, but there's a lot of discussion about AI and machine learning in sports betting in particular. Do you think that there is a point where artificial intelligence will replace human traders? 

01:51:20 - Mark Hill (Guest)
No, no, I don't Not. In the next 10 to 15, 20 years, we will get to the point where, if there is innovation in the match tracking side of things and everything is tagged on a pitch and you've got this plethora of data points and information. I do see a world where AI will replace elements of trading. That can become driven by 100 automation and machine learning and everything associated with that. However, at the moment, in the current landscape, we are light years away from that and on the I have this issue or topic come up. We I do an internal monthly trading forum with my, my entire team, where they can go on Slido, ask anonymous questions, and it comes up time after time. There is this concern that they are going to be replaced by AI or they're going to be replaced by automation, because I'm a massive advocate for it. Right, but I've tried to instill some confidence in them that all that means is that I can reuse their energy resource in a different area. So I don't want to. If I have a team of 59, I want that team to be 100 once I've fully developed AI, because I want them to be working on product innovation. I want them to be working with the quant team. I want them to be working on other aspects within this space rather than feeling their jobs are at risk to be replaced by automation. 

01:52:46
Automation for a moment or for the last few years we've had so much manual lifting to do in our company and, as a whole, automation is paving the way that these talented guys that are brought in and talented guys that have lost as well because they've had to do so much manual lifting and so much firefighting, both on the the product side and the feed side. They get tired, they get bored, they just get fed up and they move on. For us, automation is not about replacing personnel, it's about enhancing personnel. And with automation, with ai, with machine learning, I know firsthand that certain companies, certain big companies, are trying to do a black box approach to sg, for example, and try to really innovate that product. And I would, you know, on the product side, I want to get to the point where the user journey is frictionless. You can combine anything that is on a betting menu and it will churn out a price, but that comes at a, at a cost, both. You know, labor wise, personnel wise, et cetera. There's so much potential for innovation hand in hand with ai. 

01:53:52
I love it, like I. There's obviously different degrees of ai, but I, you know, like yourself, I use it every day for a lot of remits in my life. I've introduced my partner to recently as well and she's like, got a new best friend for her interests and stuff. It's like, but that's you know, that's just the, the general of ai. It's not, you know, the the bigger picture of what ai can deliver in the next. But that's just the generative AI. It's not the bigger picture of what AI can deliver in the next 5, 10 years. 

01:54:16
So long and short. It's like we should all be embracing it. We should all be engaging with it. It's here to stay. It's here to grow. You're only as good as the inputters and feeding that model. And please, anybody in this industry, if your company is saying to you that you're going to be replaced by automation and ai, it's not the right company to be in. That company should be saying now I can have abc redirected to focus on enhancing our sgp with, you know, additional testing. Or you know, enhancing the front end um working on cms working on you know, sitting in operator meetings deciding what next product innovation we're going to do. That's what the company should be directing you to Not saying oh, we want to cut the trading team in half, it's not the way we're going All right. 

01:55:03 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
So AI not going to replace human traders in the next 10 to 15 years, according to Mark. But, Mark, I do want to ask what's one tech advancement that might happen in the next five or 10 years that you think could change the industry? 

01:55:22 - Mark Hill (Guest)
It's a really, really hard one to pinpoint because I think most of the initial innovation is already happening, like in that micro betting space, and that we have a set of culture in this industry where most, unfortunately, most of the players when I say players, the the people who run sportsbooks, the execs, the shareholders they are obsessed with getting the eye game in the casino. We talked about the contrast earlier between the European market and the sportsbooks and the North American market. Everyone in the UK and Europe has an iGaming arm. In the US they don't. But if we are still five, 10 years away from the innovation on that side, then micro betting and really engaging with micro betting and making that experience frictionless and flawless and no latency and no lag, you can replicate a lot of the dopamine inducing hits that a casino type customer could generate. Am I an advocate for it? Do I think it's sustainable and good? Not necessarily, but I would much rather advocate for a product like that that keeps it within the sports betting world than, you know, throwing it at a casino with a really crap RTP. You know it's like yeah, I that. That for me, I hope, picks off. There are competitors emerging now to simple bet that I think, will innovate more, um, but we're at a point where micro betting is here to stay and micro betting, and in-play betting in particular, is going to be more and more the predominant feature. 

01:57:09
The the big thing in the industry, if you like, on the SGP side is SGP Plus or Enhanced SGP, where you can combine SGPs from everywhere. That side of it is riddled with long-term holds, long-term holds or holds, whatever way you want to look at it. Because unfortunately, whenever the public numbers say FanDuel or DraftKings are saying we're holding 35%, 40%, that is not long-term disposable income that is sustainable. Micro betting and other types of betting allows for the churn, yes, but also the player experience that they're having wins. They might win one in every three times or they might, you know, hit lucky streaks. Having wins, they might win one and every three times or they might hit lucky streaks. You're not going to hit that on 30-1, 40-1, 50-1 parlays or, dare I say, 1,000-1, 10,000-1 parlays. It's just not sustainable and you will get to a point where they'll only hang around and they'll deposit on payday and they will play for a few nights and then they're done until the next payday or they just don't return at all. 

01:58:12
You need to have a culture where you're getting back to the customer as much as you're getting from the customer. And unfortunately again, we live in a incestuous world where people pry on the, the customers. And it's not my mentality, a lot of the folks on this side of the industry. It's not their mentality. We wanted the fair and honest competition, a game. Um, so it's. I say micro betting for me. It doesn't sound like I'm being unique in that, but it's like it's so much potential if it's done sustainably and right and just gives that player engagement enjoyment. Are we going to stop people throwing in 10 leg sgp parlays? No, but if they want the sustained sportsbook experience and share of wallet and player retention, you've got to give them products that allow them to win as close to as often as they lose. 

01:59:03 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Mark, you've been very generous with your time. I've enjoyed having this conversation. I do want to just chat quickly about March Madness, since it's right around the corner and you offer a unique experience and perspective from the sportsbook operation side. So, since we're about to start March Madness here, the main tournament tomorrow how does a major event like this impact trading operations? 

01:59:30 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Excitement for a start. So you have the cadence of the year where you go through right August time NFL season you know NFL pre-season, sorry and then NFL season starting in September. You go right through the Super Bowl where every day is busy. You've got all the major leagues sort of operating to an extent. You get the super bowl and then it's like brief yeah exactly you've got that window out of the way. 

01:59:57
You do have a little bit of a fluctuation and a little bit of a down period, but for most trading floors and, to be honest, on the sports betting side, it's very, very similar. On the the better side, you'll take a couple of days to breathe and then you'll be like okay, let's start's start prepping for the majors in golf, let's start prepping for March Madness, let's start looking at the NFL draft or whatever. For us it's very, very similar in nature. We know we get over that hurdle of getting the Super Bowl out of the way. Nobody wants to release new tech as well during that Super Bowl window, if you like. So once the Super Bowl window, if you like so, once the Super Bowl is out of the way, you'll find a lot of operators will start to release new features in the build up to March Madness. 

02:00:34
Once you hit week of March Madness or obviously for us this week, selection Sunday and then into the play-in games and by the time this goes out we'll be heading towards the tournament starting for proper. It's so exciting because we're seeing constant bet flow. We're seeing days where we traditionally be quiet is just bang, bang, bang, bang bang. It's exciting for the punters. It's exciting for us on the sportsbook side and, yeah, it makes the day go quicker and it makes the day go more fun on both sides of the counter, on the sort of yeah, what is the major impact, if you like, on trade and operations. You have to be open to unpredictability. You have to be open to high variance. It is, yes, there's quite a few games, but we've got a relative sample size over the course of the season. It could be all blown out the window on day one and it's like trying to explain that again to the sports folks and just let them ride the waves of the variance that is associated with the March Madness tournament is part and parcel of it. 

02:01:36 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
From a trading perspective, what's the hardest part of managing liability during a tournament like this? Because you have so many futures that are offered and I assume that there is way more volume on these futures leading up to a tournament because you have so many recreationals who are looking to bet tournament winner, region winner, things of that nature. Then you have the individual games themselves. Is there overlap between those two? Will you sometimes potentially shade opposite of a team where you have a huge liability on futures? From a trading perspective, how encamp encapsulate all of that? 

02:02:13 - Mark Hill (Guest)
it sounds obnoxious but four years in I haven't had a losing march madness and it's that's with all the poor recreational feeds and and everything else. There's just so much volume comes in recreationally during the march madness period that you can write out any you know, long-term futures and anything that's sort of sitting there. Of course the big schools, the big colleges are going to dominate the market for the most part and in our sportsbooks, if you operate in just one state, that is no pro team like Arkansas, if the Hogs go far, if Calipari and everything else, they beat Kansas and I think it's 10 v 7. If that happens we we know and the sportsbook partner knows we're in for uh yeah, a significant loss. 

02:02:56
But at the same time they again varies operation to operation. They play into that. They will be like, ah, you got us and they'll put new promos out and they'll boost it and and everything else. They we've been very fortunate, since we've gone live with them, that the hogs on every sport have not performed very well. It's inevitable. At some point they will go on a run. Is it going to be this tournament? Are they going to get far hit and form at the right time type of thing. It's like could they be the cinderella run this time around? That will kill us, arkansas, that will blow out. 

02:03:28
You know huge profit that we've had over the course of a full you know football season, full basketball season, et cetera. It's been very solid outside of the December window where I think everybody lost on this side of the counter. But the operators ourselves are very open to that variance. We're very open to the Cinderella stories et cetera. It's like it benefits both parties. We hope that they have enjoyed that experience and we retain their wallet share going forward off the back of that win and they pump that money back into the sportsbook or at least, if they don't, if they want to make their withdrawals, that they're coming back in football season or they're coming back at times where you know we want to see the recreational business again. So from my side it's I'm maybe unique in that yeah, you have those peaks and troughs when it comes to super bowl, when it comes to march madness, when it comes to bulls um, when it comes to the nba playoffs. You know you're going to have a lot of variance at hand, but it's the long game and I'd much rather have them win. Enjoy the tournament, maybe win a few brackets, have that experience. Enjoy the product, be paid out quickly, be able to withdraw quickly, retain the, the customer going forward, then get stuck into the balancing of liabilities between futures and otherwise. 

02:04:47
Other books will be very, very, very different. A Circa Prime, their MO, will mean that they will have to maybe shade a few prices and do stuff differently. We're quite open. That I don't want to be perceived as okay. We're one of three sports books in Arkansas. Are we going to shave the hogs price? No, we want to be top price on the hogs. We want to take the business away from Playtech and can be. Or um, oaklawn and betley that are the other two operators there. 

02:05:12 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
It's like no, that's, that's embrace, that take it on and hope that their experience this time will retain that wallet long term interesting um I always like to ask, uh, guests that are on the trading side of things about misconceptions in the space, because I hear a lot of them. You get casual bettors all the time that believe they understand how trading works. You hear stuff all the time about how sports books are trying to balance the action 50-50, but then I always have people on from sports books who are like no, that's not the case, we've never thought about doing that. What's a common misconception that you think casual bettors have about how sports operate? 

02:05:54 - Mark Hill (Guest)
um, let's say, during a major event like this, like march madness I'm probably regurgitating what others have said already on on previous iterations of the podcast. But we don't look at stuff like betting splits like it's. It's a totally irrelevant metric to us. Um, I guess you can share prices if you want to, off the back of that. But we're more concerned in the here and now and the market efficiency. And you know, if the price is right and I'm seeing market making books offer 100k limits on sides and totals and things like that that's the predominant feature. Um, do we have to shade a few lines because an operator requests or a sportsbook requests that they want to be top price or they want to be, you know, bias price, 2% off market and stick that hard bias in? Of course it does happen from time to time. But for the most part we don't care about stuff like betting splits. We don't care if there's a lot of liability on one side. If we have confidence in the market efficiency and the market price, we're willing to ride that variance out and hope that again it plays out long term in our favor. We we have the advantage in theory if we have that um kind of sent hold or, you know, we have the the margin in our favor if we have the price efficiency right and we have the the risk management right, we can leverage that and be prepared to hold long term on it and just write out the way. So it's a bit of a long-winded answer again, but, um, it's, yeah, it's tricky, it's like yeah, sorry, there is other one. 

02:07:28
The other one that strikes out in my head at the minute is just the total lack of understanding on the recreational side around what goes into the mechanics of pricing an SGP. We have tried for years to get the pricing mechanics right. The recreational punter will not see just how much effort it is to price all iterations on SGP and some of the companies are doing very well in this space at the minute. On that front, others have a lot left to be desired and just overcome it by whacking on extra margin and, you know, hide the flaws. But yeah, if anybody thinks an SGP is the same as a parlay and it's, you know, it's all one fluid thing and amount of customer service questions that, um, our operators have to deal with on that side in terms of, well, that's not the right payout for combining assists and props and the team and the team total and everything else, yeah, that that's another misconception. I'd say just the mechanics behind an sgp and how much it differentiates from a standard parlay I can only under. 

02:08:40 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I. I can only imagine the frustration I would have if I had to answer those questions daily. Godspeed to those who are having to deal with that in customer service. Uh, mark, really appreciate you spending the time here. Uh, as is tradition here, on circles off we end with something a little bit different plus ev, minus ev. So the floor is yours. One thing that you think is plus ev in life, one thing that you think is minus ev in life could be sports betting related, could be anything, completely up to you I've kind of touched on that. 

02:09:13 - Mark Hill (Guest)
That period I was out of work, that 10 months, I consumed content day in, day out. Off the back of that, I'm a massive advocate for podcasts and a massive, massive advocate for audiobooks and everything associated with that. The EV move is to know the circumstances that you should listen to a certain type of content or a certain type of product. So for me, I consume during the day. If I'm going for a walk, for example, I'm happy to listen to the betting content, betting podcasts. My head is I can. I can think about the triggers that are there. Ask me to listen to a betting podcast while trying to fall asleep. I'd be wired. It's the same as looking at you know scoring apps, you know you've got a bet, that you're sweating and stuff. 

02:10:03
For me, my plus ev move is find a genre of podcast. If you need to be someone that needs to listen to something falling asleep, be it music, be a podcast. For me it. If you need to be someone that needs to listen to something falling asleep, be it music, be it podcast. For me it's podcasts. Listen to something that, when that 15 minute sleep timer goes off, you're snoozing, you're out cold. 

02:10:19
For me, it's never going to be betting content in that space. It's going to be history podcasts randomly. I'm out like a light in that 15 minute window. So knowing when to to well, one being an advocate for listening to podcasts to begin with, but then knowing when to listen to the podcast, depending on the circumstance. The other little thing I'd say on the plus EV side, on the podcast side, is we live in a world now where loads of people are telling you how to live your life, how to be productive, how to do things I do actually want to shout out. You did that very heartfelt podcast recently and you mentioned a book that deviated for me away from what I would typically listen to. What was the name of the book you can remind me? 

02:11:06 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Rob, it was Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. 

02:11:09 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Yeah, no, rightly or wrongly, I am old school and from the school of thought, where you should be saving, you should be building for the future. You know, suffer now to enjoy later and stuff, and that did shift my mindset a little bit off the back of that. But one of the big things I like in the podcast space is productivity related podcasts. So it's I'm going to shout out to um, beyond the to-do list and the productivity show, like no, no competition of you guys. So I'm not going to say that. But they're two podcasts that, the latter of which is ironically run by the Asian Efficiency Network. I did say to the guys on BetStamp Discord that I would shout them out. But I'm going to shout out one individual who sums up Asian efficiency to an absolute T. It's a guy called ABCDE. He's an Ontario better. Whether he is who I think he is in that space, I don't know. He has a very Asian sounding name. He is the top winner on Fitzgerald's NBA, very, very shrewd, totally efficient. And if a podcast ever summed up Asian efficiency or a person ever summed up Asian efficiency, it's him, not the Romars of these worlds, it's the ABCDEs that have that efficiency down to T. So again a few different pieces. Pieces there is plus ev love podcasts, love audiobooks. 

02:12:35
Um, I think you've maybe said it before. Certainly some people have said it on circles back or circles off, like there's. There's definitely a world where there's a lot of crap out there in the content space. Yeah, and you need to. I think you need to weed through the crap and listen to the crap to understand what's good in the space, and I've over the last year, two years there hasn't been a podcast in this space that I've listened to where I haven't picked up some sort of nugget or something that has made the cogs go, like it did when I was out of work for 10 months. That's made the cogs go. 

02:13:09
I want to learn more. Was out of work for 10 months. Let's make the cogs go. I want to learn more about that. I need to just find out. You know he said something or she said something there. Do I want to follow up on that? I'm not entering the cesspit, that is, the twitter spaces at the minute. Okay, I've avoided that. Yeah, I tuned in the other day for 10 minutes at 6.30 in the morning my time because I was just out of bed and I listened for 10 minutes. It was absolutely atrocious. I don't know how you weed through that. You've got a very good producer there. Everything is stamped with what will be on and which part of the show and you can weed through that and really, oh, I want to hear from this person, I want to hear this piece of content. Just blindly listening to that type of stuff for that amount of time, I'll help you. 

02:13:59 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I know you've dipped in and out of it. I go through cycles on it, so there are some weeks I'm really into it, some weeks I'm not. I don't know. I think it's a lot about who you are as a person. I like to mix it up. I like controversy, I like to argue. I've always been argumentative in a way, so it kind of just fits my personality. 

02:14:23
People are always like you're wasting time, probably. But like you know, the alternative for some other people is they're going to sit at home and watch something on Netflix, right, and I would argue that that's a waste of time. I do the same thing every now and then. But, however, people want to use their own you know their own personal time for entertainment. I say, go for it. And you mentioned history podcasts will put you to sleep in 15 minutes. I have one podcast that always puts me to sleep. It's called be better betters. If you want to check that out, you'll be asleep within the first three minutes every single time, before the host even gets through the intro of the show. But, uh, worth listening. To be better betters as well. 

02:15:01 - Mark Hill (Guest)
I'll give them a plug well, the only thing is that you have to listen on two and a half times speed, like Spotify needs to add more levels. 

02:15:10 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
4x speed, 5x speed. They got to do something. They got to do something. But uh, no, I'm just kidding. That's spanky's podcast. For those that don't know, it's very entertaining, I would. I would put it on. If you enjoy this podcast, check out. Be better betters as well. 

02:15:23 - Mark Hill (Guest)
Uh, minus ev mark this is going to sound like a dig at some of my colleagues adam alko oh Ooh, love that. 

02:15:31 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Stir the pot at work. 

02:15:32 - Mark Hill (Guest)
It's not intentional. Literally, my head of sportsbook is one of the worst people in the world for this. It's very work. Post-covid centric. We do a lot of online meetings. 

02:15:43 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Turn your camera on, it's like we, but then you have to put on pants, Mark if you turn, or you got to put on clothes. 

02:15:50 - Mark Hill (Guest)
But then you have to put on pants, mark, or you got to put on clothes. I'm not saying verbatim, you have to have it on every single time, but when it's an operator or a customer call or an internal stakeholder meeting, I really would advocate for having cameras switched on in Zoom. Google Meets no longer have Skype but Microsoft Teams, something like that. It's like the rapport that I've built with my colleagues on the other side of the pond predominantly has come around from me never having my camera off and you feed off their energy. I've still not met so many of the customers I've talked about today on this show. I've not met in person the Saracen crew that I work with. I've not met in person the likes of Allenberg and the guys at Wynn. I've not met a lot of the 99 guys in person, it's like. But I feel like I have friends, colleagues, counterparts that know me, I know them and you build the rapport and the relationship with them. 

02:16:51
If you're just looking at an egghead the whole time or you know a black screen, yeah, it's very difficult to build the foundation and the trust and yes, of course there will be circumstances where you want to have camera off. Fine, but just know when it's suitable to have cameras off and know when it's not. You're probably very similar on these types of shows. You feed off the cues, you feed off the energy and you can build off that. If you have a camera off and you can hear tones, yes, but you can't really truly read what the other person is thinking and it's to your detriment. Again, it's not a go at my head of sportsbook or most of the trading team who say we have forums, we have trading meetings, cameras off, cameras off, cameras off. And unfortunately I'll say it here but it's like it just doesn't reflect well long term. We need to build relationships and and yeah, we'd love everybody in the same room 24, 7, you know run a proper trading floor with a proper trading vibe. But yeah, camera on camera on, cameras off is negative I? 

02:18:05 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I know I was joking at the beginning, but I I couldn't agree with you more. Um, for me there's nothing more frustrating than doing a group call and like one person's camera is off and you don't never know if they're paying attention or not, or anything like that. Totally agree on that front. His name is Mark Hill. You can follow him on Twitter and I suggest you do at Mark Hill Sports. Check him out. This has been really fascinating for me. Mark, appreciate you joining and maybe we'll do another one down the road, because there's actually I could probably go another five hours with you, honestly, at some point or another. For those of you who enjoyed the interview, make sure you smash that like button down below. Next week monday new edition of circle. Back next thursday mr peanut better making his debut. If you got some questions for mr peanut, better leave them in the comments down below. Make sure you're subbed here on Circles Off. We'll catch you back here next week. Peace out everyone.