00:00 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
On this week's episode of Circles Off, we have a very special guest. His name is Matthew Trinhale. He is the head of growth sports at Pinnacle Sportsbook. I'm going to ask him a bunch of questions about risk management, the recreational book model versus the sharp book model, and some betting advice too. We'll have some fun with it. Let's get started here on Circles Off. Welcome to Circles Off, episode number 81. As part of the Hammer Betting Network, you can check out all our content at thehammerbet. Rob Pizzola here, joined by Johnny from BetStamp. 81, gotta be one of the easiest numbers, I would say. 

00:38 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Maple Leafs legend, I'm not even gonna name anyone else Phil the Thrill, the Iron man, phil Kessel. 

00:43 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I wasn't even thinking that I was going right away. Tarrell owens oh, come on to 81. Famous randy moss, when he was with the patriots as well, wore 81. I think he was 84 for most of his career but 81 with the patriots he did. 

00:57 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
He was 84. That's when he signed back with the vice. 

00:59 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
They get your 84 jersey right, exactly 81 with the patriots, but 81 was an easy one off the top. And then obviously the phil kessel one that was like third in my list. 

01:07 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I won't even list another player other than phil kessel. 

01:10 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yeah, I did, although I do have a terrell owens buffalo bills jersey what phil kessel has accomplished in his nhl career, though, like the iron man streak, is actually hysterical when you consider that he was like essentially, I want to to say paraded out of the city of Toronto for eating hot dogs, and he ends up just consistently playing. 

01:30 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Terrible fitness, poor work ethic, apparently, and then he hasn't missed a game. 

01:35 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Well, I'm pretty sure the last game that he missed was when he had testicular cancer. 

01:40 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Right it was before he even played a game in Toronto. It was the last game he missed Unreal Iron man all right, unreal, we have a, really good guest today. Go ahead rob we do. 

01:49 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
We have a very special guest. He is part of pinnacle and pinnacle is the official sportsbook partner of circles off. They are the world's sharpest sportsbook and they're now available in ontario. Find out what professional bettors have known for decades Pinnacle is where the best bettors play. You must be 19 plus if you're in Ontario. Please play responsibly. We always preach that here on Circles Off Not available to US customers and we're going to welcome in said very special guest. His name is Matthew Trenhale. He is the head of growth sports at Pinnacle Sports, based in the UK right now. We were talking a little bit off air before we started about this World Cup and we'll get into that a little bit more. Matt, thank you for joining Circles Off. 

02:33 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Very kind, Rob, and a very pleasant introduction. Thank you very much. 

02:36 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yeah, no problem at all. We'd like to start Go ahead. Well, it is episode number 81. 

02:40 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I know you had prepped any number 81, special, near and dear to your heart, matthew well, for for your guys. 

02:46 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
I suppose monk wasn't monk um 81 I think what receiver for um yeah, so that was uh. That's a sort of classy old school one, um, but the one because I I suspected that was coming on for 81, so the one I had was uh. One of one of the uh from the old country, rob is Christian Zaccardo. 

03:05 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Wow. 

03:05 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Who played about 17 caps, I think, for Italy, yeah, and played for, I think, palermo, was maybe his real best stint. I want to say but you know, good player, and he chose 81 because of his birth year and 81 is my birth year. So I thought, wow, the synergies are all there. But yeah, that is 81 in soccer not so common, right, there's, uh, there's not many of those. But, um, yeah, no, I was. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was actually someone who was a legitimately very good, very good player so, zacardo not to get into history here, but I I've been watching. 

03:39 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Uh, I grew up with italian heritage. Both my parents were were born in italy and I grew up with Italian heritage. Both my parents were born in Italy and I grew up watching Serie A on Sunday mornings with my grandfather. So I know exactly who Christian Zaccardo is and he was just like a utility defender and midfielder, started with Bologna, went to Parma and then eventually went to Milan and that's when he took the step up in class to a good club and his career just kind of fell off the cliff towards the end there. But I know exactly who Christian Zaccardo is, played for the Italian national team as well interesting stuff. 

04:11 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Yeah, a little bit uh before my time, especially in the soccer range here. But good to know that, matthew, if you played in the NFL, you'd probably be a receiver wearing number 81 for the birth year as well, so we can get into uh, we can get into some World Cup here first. But before we do, what we always like to ask, matthew, is if you can just give us a little bit about your background, what you're doing right now, how you came to grab that position at Pinnacle and the floor is yours. 

04:38 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Sure, yeah, so my betting journey started when I was in university college for the. I mean, my betting journey started when I was in university college for the North American reference, I guess, and I wanted a job, just to you know, help pay for beer money that kind of thing. And I worked taking phone bets for a company in London back when still, you know, almost all the bets were taken on the phone for sort of those kind of off-races and it was spread betting. Now, spread betting is probably too long to explain, necessarily, but if you're familiar with the points betting it's the same thing. But yeah, so it was very much geared towards people who played the financial markets in London. That was the target audience. But yeah, so the first six years was just learning about. They were very mathematically minded about betting very much. Early models, early introduction to live betting. They were very keen on live betting so it's a great place to cut my teeth. Did some financial trading for a few years in foreign exchange betting syndicate specialized in golf here in London, worked at Sport Radar, which is the people who supply a lot of the data for the betting industry and other services, and then eventually found myself at Pinnacle and yeah, I suppose slightly surreal. So I was hired by Marco Blumer, who's the ex-trading director of Pinnacle, and the surreal thing was is that he'd heard a podcast episode that I'd done about the challenges of building a sharp book, where I think I ranted for probably a couple of hours I think it was actually in response to something that Captain Jack had tweeted and I sort of went bananas for like two hours on the podcast and he said to me like yeah, I really like that episode. And I was like, oh God, right, because I swear on virtually everything I do. Unfortunately, I'll try, not today. And I was like, yeah, no, it's really good. I shared it with quite a few of the people at Pinnacle. I was like, oh God, this gets worse. And yeah, but it was just kind of like, yeah, what are you doing now? And I was like for you, nothing. So, yeah, and it was like, okay, we're trying to build out. 

06:51
At the time I initially joined Pinnacle in the B2B solutions, so trying to provide Pinnacle quality risk management to other bookmakers. And then, yeah, just weird, I suppose succession of events. Um, there was an opening in the trading team and it was kind of like, I, I don't, we feel awkward asking, but you know, I don't. I suppose you could maybe like, just look after this for a little bit. Yep, yep, I can do that. I absolutely can do that, you know. And yeah, I'm sort of like a little weird fanboy in the sense that, like, like you know people, you know people, people talk about their dream jobs. I literally I'm living my dream job. So, um, so, yeah, so I ended up doing that and that's where I now am in trading and head of growth sports. 

07:38
And growth sports is sort of a weird pinnacle type thing in the sense that we have what's called north American sports, which were the core sports of the, you know, 1997 or whatever, the original key North American professional and college leagues, and then spin out, we had soccer, which became massive, tennis, which became massive, and, it's right, the original sort of poster boy of growth sports success is. Esports started out as nothing. Now it's enormous for us. And, yeah, I sort of I'm in charge of the incubator of all the other sports that may become big at some point or maybe not. 

08:12
But, um, yeah, everything from darts, snooker, volleyball, rugby, aussie rules, cricket, you know, you name it, including the. I suppose the biggest stuff I do is I do the non-north american basketball, which is a lot of you know know, chinese CBA basketball, euroleague basketball, these kinds of things, and non-MLB baseball. So those of us who are still, you know, ptsd from lockdowns in the pandemic will be familiar with Chinese Taipei baseball, japanese baseball, korean baseball, that kind of stuff. So yeah, so that's, that's sort of how my journey's gone to date. 

08:46 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So those were all yeah, you're trading for all the sports that popped off, I guess. 

08:50 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
KBO during COVID was just like unruly, like huge blew up. 

08:56 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Taipei ball. We had esports a little. That's awesome. So, okay, we'll get into those things in in a second here. But we got to ask you because it just came to a close right now. The world cup pinnacle, we noticed, uh, taking the highest limits anyone on the planet right now that you know accepts all winners. The most you could get down was that pinnacle prior to post. We're looking at around a half a million dollars per click with obviously the opportunity to rebet, meaning you know if you bet that half a million dollars per click, with obviously the opportunity to re-bet, meaning you know if you bet that half a mil may only move a couple pennies, you can always re-bet that again. So we have a couple questions in regards to that. You let us know what you can and can't answer. But first and foremost, how did the world cup turn out for? Pinnacle? Great, medium, not so good. Let's see if you can answer it better than expectation. 

09:42 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
But I will say that we were unsure collectively as a company, as to what the timing you know putting this world cup at this time of year. We were completely unsure, I would say, as to how the volume would fall, uh, particularly from our, you know, non-professional customer base. Um, we really weren't sure as to how it would play out in that regard and you know, volume is dollars and cents to us at the end of the day. So we possibly tempered expectation a little bit going into the World Cup but ultimately the thing that rewarded us was just the exceptional levels of volatility. People were, you know, unsure as to, you know, these top European players coming in at peak fitness rather than at the end of you know a long season, players coming in at peak fitness rather than at the end of you know a long season. There's just so many infinite variables it felt like in terms of, already, international soccer has got a lot of complexity to it in terms of players who don't play together normally, but they just dialed up the variance to it. 

10:38
Variance, we hope, means, you know, price moves, uncertainty, all these things undoubtedly give us a better trading ecosystem to work with and at the same time, despite the volatility, all the serious. You know, top level bettors, it's a once in a lifetime high volume. They can't not flip the coins on something like this, they have to be in it and you know there's no way they can avoid, they can't turn down the ev, you know, especially when some of the you know, essentially they know that, like, if they can predict market, you know if you're trading eight cents, you know, and like you can predict a bit of market movement, you know your, your synthetic hold is the common phrase used now is like you can get low synthetic hold just with pinnacle by just like observing the market and thinking where it's going to move, quickly develop strong opinions. So all of this, uh, you know, all of this combined meant that it was, uh, most definitely a very solid tournament for us. 

11:35 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I think a lot of people would. Would you know, think of what Johnny was saying earlier. With Pinnacle taking, uh, half a million dollars a click, um you know, half half hour before a World Cup match, and they'd be like that's insane. How could anyone take that kind of money on a bet? How do you get to a point where you're confident enough in a number that you're comfortable booking a wager that's as large as that? 

12:04 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
So I mean there's several things at play. When we think of liquidity, I suppose I think a lot of people think of liquidity as the one click amount. But in really high volume events it's actually the number of dollars you can turn over every second or every minute. High volume events it's actually the number of dollars you can turn over every second or every minute. That's the real liquidity. And if you think of like a stock market, you know something like Apple. Maybe you only have one or two shares at the top on the buy sell, but you know it'll exchange hundreds of thousands of times a minute of shares. And for us, like if you think the half a million is big on one click, but if we're able to run through several million in a minute, you know, then suddenly you're like oh okay, so it becomes proportionate of how much money you're going to be able to turn over. And you need to be able to know that you can buy and sell a bet easy. And when you're trading to that narrow spread with that much appetite to bet, you're in a situation where even if you take, you know, even if you think you've hit a little bit of a negative earn on one bet, you know that you have future volume for the next 29 minutes to be able to reshape it, and so you always feel like you can commit to that high size. 

13:15
I want to say it's not even one-sided either. You know people want coming to us. You know the big groups. You know the big professionals. They want that big size and we want to make sure that lands with us. It doesn't land with you know another entity in the global ecosystem, so you know it's part of us. You know having to deliver on what the demand is for the people. 

13:38
You know who are betting in this sort of to my mind it's mind blowing. You know, like, I'm not the kind of person who I don't think I've ever placed a. You know no, certainly, certainly never, never, certainly ever placed a fifty thousand dollar wage. I may have placed a five thousand dollar wage at some point, but you know like, generally, you know five hundred thousand in one bet and and the thing is, is that the mentality of the people betting into that market is different, in the sense that you're thinking five thousand. You know $500,000 at one click. They may be looking to build a $5 million position across the market and so they're going to not only click the 500K but they may do some other things elsewhere around the world. And then suddenly they're like oh look, you know, pinnacles drift back a couple of cents, like I'm going to get my, you know, so that there's more rebetting'm going to get my. So there's more re-betting, there's more scope, and also I think I actually think that people are a bit freer in this environment to take skinnier edges just to get the volume. I agree, which I think is interesting in the sense that Costa Rica has just lost 7-0 to a tournament. And you're thinking, okay, I don't feel rock solid about this now, but at the same time, I've got a global synthetic hold of like zero or less than 0% and there's no other way to bet. 20 million of my 200 million bankroll of my group's got. So just get it in there. You know, you just got to. 

15:06
And so when you're faced with that sort of almost spiral, it's like a positive spiral. Basically, you know, a lot of games or sports can get trapped in this kind of like there's not many people betting it, try and raise limits and the only guy bets it like maybe pretty sharp, and then you kind of like in this little sort of uh, just never really goes anywhere. And then suddenly you get something like a world cup game or you know big nfl games, these kind of things, and it's like everyone wants in. And then the movement also. Like the moment people see movement, they'll be like I wasn't gonna bet this game, I had no opinion, but now it's move date, sense, you bet your ass, I've got an opinion, you know like, so it's just one of these things where, yeah, it just sort of. It really is this positive volume spiral that just beats. 

15:47
And then so suddenly you're like, okay, people want to bet half a million dollars, um, and we now can envisage that there is that much money flowing around to allow us to move that money around. Yeah, you know it. Just it just ends. And you know I ought to. You know, can't turn away the fact like this was hyper-focused, trading Multiple people on one game at a time. This is no joke. At this point we're trying to get into that almost matrix predictive the line will move. Here we're so confident it's going to move. Here we can know in advance. That's the kind of level you want to get to for these kind of high profile stuff. So in that situation, yeah, why not hang a big number on the max bet? 

16:30 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Well, the interesting thing that I've always noticed is you'll see some, maybe even some of the sports that you trade where the limit is a little bit lower right, meaning the limit's only $250 or $500. Then as soon as one person clicks that max bet, it should, in theory, move a lot more right. So every time I've seen you know limits of like even 50,000 or 100,000, let's say, for NFL one click typically doesn't move that that much. So it's crazy for us to see when a line near post for the World Cup might move even like 18, 20 cents with that limit. Like how much was truly bet on that? 

17:06
So I think that's an interesting context you provided, in that multiple people are trading that line per game and they know they're going up against pro bettors and they're just trying to turn over as much volume as possible. And you guys are playing with a little bit of an extra hold right, because the book, the bookmaker, is actually taking the VIG on their end. So you know, you obviously just hope it's enough. And what I love, what you said was like if you take that a couple of big bets, even if you think there might be negative EV at the time they come in, still have like 28 minutes to shape, the line and figure it out, so that's cool. 

17:42
What do you think, rob? 

17:50 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I think on my end it sounds a lot like you know, from a risk management perspective. The World Cup was successful for Pinnacle and we hear a lot of the success stories in the space from different sports books when things go really well on their end. I'm very curious if you have any examples of potentially like a risk management failure from Pinnacle in the past, an event that didn't go your way, and specifically if you could point to any reasons why that was the case. 

18:13 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Well now, you did say to me that you're going to ask for examples of this. I have to admit that the boring examples are things where things just break right, something goes wrong, and that's not necessarily a conscious risk management failure. But I have to give you some really obtuse examples, I'm afraid, from growth sports, but they do highlight, I suppose, how you just can't sleep on anything. So I'll give you an example. Are you familiar with how the chess world championship works? 

18:47 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Oh, yeah, Johnny would be for sure. During COVID he was probably the number one chess better in the entire world, I would say. 

18:55 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Chess is a good betting sport. But yes we are familiar. Continue. 

19:00 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
So, yeah, so there's the candidates tournament tournament see who plays against magnus carlson, right, and chess falls under growth sports. So, uh, someone said, oh, you gotta you know, you gotta put up the multi-way for this, you know, gotta put up the contest, um. And so I'm thinking to myself, okay, fine, like you know, I did like a not a huge amount of research, but you know, I looked at like the chesscom and chess24 and you know people had done some sort of basic simulation. Chess naturally has Elo and Glitco working for it. There's enough rating systems out there. 

19:37
And I was thinking to myself, okay, and then the other thing about chess is that it's actually quite liquid in Russia. So the big Russian books actually take some quite serious money on chess. So I was like, got a market reference, got some models, ah, you know, just jam this together up, it goes whatever. And, um, you know, first, first bet like max bet, max bet, max. I'm like, oh my God, what's happened here? Um, and then what transpired was is, of course, that the favorite for the candidates tournament was, uh, butch, this dingler in, or lindering the chinese player yeah, and it transpires. 

20:18
I always counted dinglier and I think, but I don't know yeah, so so it transpires that of course he has this literally ridiculous elo rating and it's massively inflated because he only plays in china, he hasn't been allowed to play out of china, so he's just had loads of pats. He's just put it's like, it's like, you know, just horrendous, like heavyweight boxer padded record, so all the rating systems like so everyone just had him as like quite a short price favorite and um, and I looking at it and then, sure enough, the second I think it was, I want to say, was it Ian Neponchi? They just call him Nepo. Yeah, I think so. Nepo was the guy I think he won. Anyway, then she got pounded and I was looking around afterwards and you're like you know, you're always trying to find how I had my ass handed to me so badly here, and you look around it's like, oh yeah, so this one rating system I found had him like second best and I was like, ah, okay, so that's sort of, and after the fact you kind of think you know how's it going to help, I suppose. But yeah, absolutely that was a classic case of and you know, I was probably only google page two away from reading about all the chinese conspiracy, about the inflated rating. But I didn't get to Google page two and uh, and you know, and someone made, uh, you know it's low limits, but the thing is just, this guy was like I want to say it was like started at like 18 to one or something like that, you know. And this guy was just like, yeah, this is three to one, mate. Just I'm going to keep on hitting this, hitting this. And I was like it's one of those awful things where, like you suspend, you're like no, I mean, you know, look around, you know, russian books are still out there, whatever. Okay, put it back up. Bang, bang, right. Okay, what's going on here? You know, yeah, and the the other. This is. This is a classic mistake, I suppose, coupled with um, you know, I suppose this bad risk management is. 

22:04
Again, it's athletics. Now, I cannot remember it was a diamond league event, I cannot remember specifically. It was a women's, might have been like 800 meters, something like that, and it's something with rounds. I know that for sure, because I put it up between rounds compounded my error. This is how brutal it was. So I put it up and you've got several heats. So, rather than just price everyone, we put up the field. This is great. This is very classic for sort of um. 

22:32
I suppose classic north american style booking is to have the field price and I've always liked the field. I've never like in the uk we just quote a billion people, right but I've always liked the field principle because you know it's kind of like, you know, give people a nice sort of basket full of randomness and it's like, oh, here's a price for it. You know, I've always kind of liked that. So I sort of dumped them all in the field and uh, and I thought that's fine. Um, and little did I know that I'd created my own like big short style basically you know, cdo bomb in my book, without realizing it, because people just came on betting the field and I was like my God, what's going on in the field? And I just thought to yourself well, you know, the favorite wasn't super, it wasn't like one of these minus 300 favorites in athletics or whatever. So it's kind of like, oh, maybe it's like whatever, not too bad. And then we actually took some money on the favorite as they got pushed out, you know. So the automation like pushes the favorite out. 

23:24
A bit I'm thinking to myself, oh, this isn't, this isn't too bad, um, anyway. So that goes down the next heat. So I put it up after the first heat. The field now is getting absolutely pounded and I'm like, oh my god, you know, I took it off. I thought to myself and I made the. 

23:41
This is like the cardinal sin in my like. If you're trading nfl, it's different, right, but in, and I made the, this is like the cardinal sin in my like. If you're trading NFL, it's different, right, but in my zone I made the cardinal sin of going. How much shorter can it be? Back it goes. And then I let myself get beat smashed three times and then finally it dawns on me, oh God, the second favorite's in the field, and I haven't realized, and I just hadn't typed, I hadn't typed the second favorite, and so everyone knew that the second favorite therefore had to fall in the field, price Right. And the second favorite was like plus 350 or whatever, and like this thing had been, I think, literally the first bet. The first bet was at 50 to 1 or something like that. 

24:25 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So yeah, bet was at 50 to one or something like that. 

24:27 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
So, yeah, that was a painful lesson. Did you get burned? Did the second favor win? Yeah, oh, oh, 100. 

24:30
And you know what the funny thing is about these bets, right, is that as a book, they've never lost, ever. And yet, as a better, you're sitting there thinking like sometimes you get like, oh my god, I knew the injury before everyone, I had everything here, I knew the matchup between this, whatever. And it's like you know, like some like maybe some obscure, like anytime touchdown, like play or something like that, just like this thing is like plus 200 and I got plus 1800 and you absolutely know that that person is just dropping in the end zone. You know like fingertips out of it, like you never win. These, the ones where you get the insane value, I mean like the hundreds of percent worth of value that never wins as a better and as a bookmaker, they never lose. So you're like how does this work? These bets must just like negate themselves in the, in the world, somewhere. You know yeah, so yeah, when you're sat on that, it's like you just know like oh, this, this is already one. No doubt about that. 

25:28 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I caught a Rams bet last season where one book forgot to list the first, the top, like six touchdown scores and then had a field price of like plus 700. So it was like, uh, in the for the rams was like cup was enlisted um, there's like literally none of those guys was. It was beginning of the season last year, I think, like woods was enlisted, henderson, whatever, and it didn't win this is one of the most common edges. 

25:52 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I think that certain people look for this specific one right here. We have another content creator here at the hammer. He goes by joey knish and he's maybe sent me a dozen bets that he's really liked in his life. Probably 10 of those 12 have been. Hey, they didn't list this person and he's going to be in the field. Go and bet the field. It's sometimes like some NASCAR grouping or some golf grouping. It's just like random stuff of you know which golfer from this country is going to perform best. 

26:24 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
They don't have top South African with this guy Exactly. 

26:27 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Exactly Right. They just missed someone. So that's a common one that I think people look for. I it's funny that you mentioned that one and also I think a lot of people would completely resonate with exactly what you said there at the end about like I'm. I'm very consumed in the Twitter space, but a common theme every week is somebody complaining about how they got upwards of 10% CLV on a specific game, and they're like I always lose the game where I get the most CLV. I can't explain why, but I think a lot of people will resonate with your answer there, matt. 

27:01
I do want to talk a little bit about the profiling of accounts Specifically. We know that this happens with more recreational books, but for different reasons. A lot of times it's just so that they can, let's say, reduce the player's limits very quickly. With sharp books, you might use the flagging of accounts or profiling accounts in different ways. I think we've gotten a lot of questions in the history of Circles Off about this which myself and Johnny haven't been able to answer, but maybe you can speak a little bit more to this, specifically how Pinnacle would tend to profile accounts, how quickly that would happen. Does the amount that someone is betting actually matter and how you guys would utilize that to your advantage from a trading perspective so obviously I would have to. 

27:52 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
You know, I think everyone would appreciate I'd have to pick my words carefully here, um, but I don't think I'd be saying anything untoward by saying that every single bet is a potential piece of information and every bet has potential to carry signal or noise, essentially, and there are several layers to any bet. What sport is it placed on? What market is it placed on? Was it a mainline or an alternate line? Was it placed at the open? Was it placed just before close? Was it placed mainline or an alternate line? Was it placed at the open? Was it placed just before close? Was it placed in running? Was it placed just after a red card in soccer? There's all these layers and the player is only one part of that. So, to use the word profile, pinnacle is profiling the markets, it's profiling the people, it's profiling the time, it's it's a huge amount of elements that go into it. 

28:50
Um, and these problems are why, you know, we still believe firmly in the power of the human trader, along with, you know, automation, because quite often humans are capable of observing these patterns and actually picking them up faster than you know. Some sort of machine learning exercise can sometimes pick up the pattern. So, in terms of you know, we always are looking for. You know who the sharp customers are, undoubtedly, and we're also very cautious. So, as a bookmaker, we must constantly create resilience, and our robustness of how we trade comes from. You know we tend to err on the side of caution rather than jump the gun. You know, just like a better. You know, if you win 10 bets in a row, you think you're a hero. Just inverse it, you know, you just flip it. You know, as a, as a, as a bookmaker, you've got to constantly think just positive variance for the better, you know, could just be right. So we're often waiting for, you know, good statistical, statistically significant records to develop, right, and we're patient, we're in this for the long game. You know we can afford to do that now if you're doing the exact same thing as someone else, well, that's a piece of information, right? You know, if you bet exactly at the same time as other people or if you bet in a notoriously, I suppose, volatile spot, these kind of things, there are certain things that we can, you know, deduct, deduce, you know, behavior from in advance. But I would say it's very much in our interest generally to allow records to reach into the thousands before we take any aggressive viewpoint on these things. That's sort of just what's the prudent way, I guess, to go about it. But all these things can vary. 

30:51
You know, if Rob bets the NHL openers, his ROI is different than if he bets the closes, you know. And so sometimes you know you may get an account. Let's say, rob did both. What are you going to do now? How do we profile Rob's account? Well, when Rob does this at the opener, it means one thing. When he does this near the close, it means another. When he hears that the goalie's out, that means another thing. 

31:25
You know, there's this idea that you know, well, we've got just nothing but billy walters and you know, you know these kind of people here and we've got everything else there and you know, just make these guys move the line massively and make these guys, you know, do nothing, and then that's, you know, that's all she wrote um. And the reality is is that there's just sort of you can get caught down, bogged down into it, but there's a lot, of, a lot of complexity in it. But sometimes you get these situations where it's just like you know the whole classification of people who bet very close to the open. You know a lot of people are doing that. Then you can sort of create a general impression of okay, people that do this kind of stuff. We can expect to hold X against them. You know you can build up like a group profile if you like of people who do this kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, it's 100% not a solved game for us. 

32:11
It sounds weird to enjoy your life being hard, but I do quite like customer profiling how people create their edge, how they improve. You know spotting when that edge disappears. You know that's super challenging, right? But the very nature is that we're desperately trying to create, you know, the most horrendous shark tank possible. We're desperate to get the absolutely most unpleasant, ruthless, you know, winning bettors ever because they're the ones that chew out the not quite so ruthless ones, right? So you know, the guy who was, you know, destroying us in 2014 may not be the guy who's destroying us now, and you know, if you're super lucky, they don't realize that they've lost it, right? That's, I don't think I'm saying anything here that I don't think I've given away the seat, anything that you couldn't extrapolate yourself very obviously. 

33:12 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Well, I appreciate that it's a tough question and we put people on the spot with those types of questions and there's a balancing point, obviously, with what you can say and what is useful. But I think you said a lot of things that are useful For me. I've always been curious and you touched on it a little bit but, like we know, about the profiling of accounts, but I call it the unprofiling of accounts and I was curious if that was something that actually happened. Like how often does a bookmaker profile someone as sharp and then like revisit that and say, hey, maybe this person has lost their edge and we shouldn't be moving based off of their action anymore? 

33:50
I'll give a personal experience of mine, but in my heyday I was a very, very good NHL, better betting, you know a lot of money into the NHL market and it would move the market whenever I placed the bet and then that edge slowly started to erode over time and I, you know I'd click and I'd be like I'm surprised that they're, like they're really still moving off my action, considering like I've just lost a bunch over the course of the last year on this sport. So I was very curious about the um, like the unprofiling, and how, how often the bookmaker keeps up with people that, um, they've already deemed to be this type of better, and whether they're, like, rebucketed over time. Essentially, well. 

34:27 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
So one thing you again, we're constantly being cautious. One thing you do have to be cautious about is we have very loyal customers. People have been with us for over a decade and you know more, and so we have some, and we have some groups who bet like an insane amount of times. So we get some pretty enormous betting records, like staggering. One of the first things I looked at when I was in Pinnacle was looking for the people who've just bet a lot of times, not people who win or lose or whatever. I just wanted to look at their within growth. I had some guys who bet into my kind of sports like with 10,000, 000 plus bet records. You're like you know that's uh, it's a lot of bets. And within those records because they're betting into people who, in my case I hope we're doing a reasonable job at it they can go 500, a thousand bets losing. So at what point would I know to un unsharp that guy? That's very difficult because I look back 30,000 bets holding 4% or whatever. It's like guy's sharp, no doubt about it. No statistical test you can do here that doesn't say the guy's smart. And yet 1,000 bets I could have just been going. This guy's lost it now. So you have to put two and two together, you have to basically create a good reason why they've lost it. 

35:46
So let's say, you know I'm sure, rob, you were really into like the XG involvement in hockey you know when that number started to really come out and be formulated. Now there's the guys who first were collecting the data. You know the data became sort of semi-public-ish and then there's people building numbers off of that and that guy may have, like that iteration. One guy spreadsheet mouse just clicking, like makes bets. This line is not going to move for the next six hours. It doesn't really matter how fast I'm doing it, dirt click. That guy pretty soon were like this guy is literally beating us for 15% on hockey, nhl. What's going on? You know sharp, yeah, this guy's. You know he's just continually beating us. The line's always moving. You know ultimately in the end, to where he bets, all good. 

36:41
And then suddenly you notice there's another guy who's betting bigger and earlier than him. Because that guy, he was the guy just like oh, it's a little fun system. I love hockey, I love numbers. I'm just there playing with the stats, betting $50. 

37:00
And you're like sometimes it's hard to even uncover these people, these people can just be. You talked about how important is size. We take a ton of bets, a ton of volume, and it's like sometimes these bets are just it's hard to sort of, but we're constantly analyzing and looking for I call them micro jobs. But there's plenty of people out there that just they're not looking to be professional bettors, but they're just super smart. It's like some of the smartest bettors I've ever met have been academics who don't even like placing a bet. 

37:33
So you're like you find this guy and this guy won't know that his lunch is going to be eaten Because at some point, some group or some just sophisticated guy, he's built the automation to calculate the ratings, bet, the price automatically, blah, blah, blah. He doesn't realize that his lunch is slowly being stolen and maybe he realizes that. Hang on, I used to get eight value bets a week and now I'm only getting two. But there's still two big value bets. And what he doesn't realize he's now an adverse selection. The two bets he's not getting is the guys you know, the smarter guys now not betting those. So he's leaving them to you and then, slowly but surely, now in that situation, if a human, again, again, huge amount of data science at pinnacle, huge amount of machine learning exercises, huge, you know, you know just just huge data dumps. These kind of things have every bet since pinnacle's inception, every single one, all recorded. So you know, the data analytics is off the scale, you know. 

38:23
But you know, if ever just a trader says, oh, I used to love this guy, I used to know, whenever this guy bet, I just, you know, move the line like an extra 20 cents because he's just ridiculous, and then that trade is watching and like just sees the bets come in, it's like, oh, my friend, you know, you kind of, you almost you know, love these guys right, because they're just, you know, just brilliant for you, you know, not betting huge and just sharpening the line beautifully, all the rest of it. And then suddenly you realize oh, ah, well, this guy, he, he's sort of betting the same time as my friend and he's hitting the max bet and he's rebetting and all the rest of it. You're like, ah, yeah, game got professional suddenly. So, whatever that guy and sometimes these, it's always these like it's. 

39:01
It's kind of like, if you invent it, like I don't know who invented the first, was there a search engine before yahoo? I don't know who the very first search engine was. You know, google gets to have the job, the glory, but you know, like there's always an all sports betting. There's the guy who first discovered the pitch, fx data. Or the guy who discovered the barometers of the games with the humidity, the guy who discovered xg, the guy, all these people. 

39:23
It's so rare for that person to get like proper rich because it's some person you know, because often these people are just really curious. They just love ideas, they love playing with things, but that doesn't necessarily have the ruthlessness you know. And then suddenly knish comes and talks to them and it's like. It's like I don't know what you do, but I promise you I'm gonna absolutely hammer this. You know, just give me the, give me the chance and I will do it. 

39:50
And you know, it's like I think, guys, I want to say that I've heard on a podcast before people like reached out to you on twitter, didn't they? When they look at your hockey numbers, they were just like I don't know what you do, but it looks good to me. So let's, let's get it, let's, let's ramp this up. And there's always someone looking to ramp it up at the end of the day. So those guys you can sort of unprofile because it's like I'm sorry, my friend, you're no longer at the cutting edge but yeah, very careful about. You know we're very careful at making someone move the line a lot. We're very careful at making them move it not so much. You know, you just got to be careful and you know that's the truth of it. 

40:26 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
It that was my journey into being a pro. Better was just posting baseball numbers to twitter every day and then somebody reaching out to me saying, hey, the market is steaming as soon as you post your numbers to twitter. And I was like I don't even know what that means, like someone's got to explain that to me. They're like you have something of significant value and you're posting it for free and everybody's using it. Um, so that was, that was the light bulb moment for me, uh, where I got pretty lucky. 

40:49
A lot of what you said there resonated with me. I've lived through a lot of those um experiences that you just talked about. I want to talk about some betting concepts. This is like come some, some things that have are really growing in the space right now and we had the head of risk from Circa, who is another sharp sports book based in Nevada. Come on and like speak to this a little bit. But the big thing that's happening in the space right now as content starts to take off and we're part of the content space now as well Public bet percentages are huge. People, the fade, the public strategy and the whole notion of reverse line movement is huge bet percentages. To place a bet, or looking at some sort of reverse line movement strategy, where they essentially weigh where the dollars are in market and where the line currently is, before they go and place a bet. 

41:59 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
I think the first thing I should say on this subject was that the Pinnacle tweeted bet shares that come on the Twitter account. Tweeted bet shares that come on the Twitter account. There were incredibly smart people before my time within Pinnacle that did not want those shared. So that sort of is, I suppose, a bit of a hint as to my viewpoint on that. As it is, I think it is interesting content. I actually think it's interesting content. I actually think it's interesting content. Whether you can utilize it for your embedding or not, I think it's. You know, if you're into the betting space generally, I think it's quite a nice curiosity. But, um, but I would say that you know you're not far from observing, like you know, let's, let's plug, let's plug bet stamp, right, you know, right now. You know let's plug Betstamp right, you know right now. You know, if you're staring at an odd screen and you're watching the odds move, now, if you are aware that you've got reasonably accurate information from a book that moves off money, moves off information moves off money, you know they're not a feed consumer. You know they're actually moving their own lines and there's an intelligence behind the moves, the way they move. If you have access to that. You know bet share, bet counts, basically Not the volume, but you get to know the bet counts and you get to know what the odds are now and you can look through your odds. Do you guys have odds history within the bet stamp? We do yes, yeah, and you can look through your odds. Do you guys have odds history within the bet stamp? We do yes, yeah, and you can see the way the odds move and the size of the moves. You're not far away from extrapolating what goes on. Now, once you've extrapolated what's going on, the question is has the steam run out the move or is the price now at equilibrium? Right, I would say that the price is not always at equilibrium and sometimes what you can do is you can actually look very specifically at the game, like, so I would say that, um, the race to equilibrium is is sort of faster in, like sort of low, low liquidity, um, you know low. 

44:07
Almost a lot of these games just have no real systematic bias in them. They're just literally the money drives it towards its sort of relative efficiency. I mean, it'll be very efficient, but it's efficient relative to the other people trying to bet into it. But you know, you get these big games. You know things like Monday Night Football or you know world cup games or whatever. Well, you can get these situations where you're like, yeah, I can, I can see why there might be still room in that. You know you. I suppose you have to put it in our minds as to right. 

44:38
So you know, pinnacle's job is to make as much money as possible from every, from the next, from the next bet. You know well, not just the next bet, but for the remaining bets they envisage and they have put themselves in this situation now is it advantageous for them at this point to hold the line, um, if they're predicating where the next bets are coming? So you know, like public I think people always think about, like, you know, wall of public money. You know bet count 10 million versus bet count two. But the two is, you know, you know two of the sharpest. You know syndicates in the world, kind of thing on the other side. But I think you know, let's say you've established the quote unquote. You know sharp side as in whether the higher. You know you talked again about bet size. You know smarter people tend towards bigger bankrolls, tend towards betting bigger. You know there is undoubtedly a correlation with that. I don't want to say people will always like to say like, oh, I know this guy who just donks off a million here and there in Vegas, of course, of course. But you know, very generally in our ecosystem, you know people who bet max, who you know are betting big. You know they tend to be the people with you know with an objective and they know how to get there. So you know you definitely can get to the point where, like, this price is definitely lopsided in terms of you know there appears to be more signal on this side, more noise on this side. Now, should it go further, should it not? Well, a, you can look to see where the next move is and make a deduction from that. You know, is it still going that direction or is it still going this direction? You can also look at the narratives behind the two things. You know comeback game, for you know tom brady, after injury, whatever. You know these kind of you can look at what sort of narrative is building around it. So I think it's like to. 

46:22
I think a lot of people want to say it's pure garbage. You know there's no value in it or the rest of it, if you like anything, if you make it your sort of life's it, if you like anything, if you make it your sort of life's work, if you dedicate yourself to just purely looking at odds moves, and then somehow you've got an access into that real-time information. I don't know how. I've never really known how these people who like claim to have like I don't know x bookmakers, like numbers, I don't, I don't know how real time it is and I don't know how necessarily to get access to it. But I do know that, you know, I think people are saying it's not worth anything without all the extras, and I do kind of agree with that. 

46:55
But I do definitely think sometimes you can find yourself in these huge you know huge games, um, where it just it just makes sense for us to, you know, not let the sharp side completely dictate the game. 

47:08
Huge amounts of public money Makes sense to earn off the public money. So bet share is going to give you a little window into that. I think I'd be interested to know some of the ticket counts in regulated US when the mattress bet were coming in towards the end. I think at that point you can start to think those bet shares would be interesting, right, because one side is that a square who's advising, who's advising mac to place that bet is the only place in the bet when it's quote positive ev. Because you know, people like that attract a lot of people who want to give them the good advice, right, you know. So you know, I think that's one of the areas where you can start to sort of. If you dedicate yourself to it, you can probably start to get information out of, out of that stuff. But yeah, I would say it's not easy though. 

47:54 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Well, one thing I will say is a pinnacle doesn't limit winners, right, so you accept action from anyone. Therefore, the actual bet shares are a little bit more valuable at pinnacle versus a recreational book. So the reason why in the past we've said that it's not really valuable is because, um, most people are looking at, you know, competing platforms to us or apps or websites that show like, okay, here's draft kings fan, dual points bet, mgm, whatever down the line, and I know how they get that data and, like you know, we we're an affiliate and we love the those sports books as well and we we advise still, you know, playing everywhere, you can open up as many outs as you can, um, but we might get an email from one of those sports books to our affiliate team in the morning saying, hey, here today's bet percentages if you wanted to use these for promotion, and they come in the morning. So that means they probably pulled it either the night before or right in the morning. And then there's people looking at that at 7 pm before the game and making a decision off of the bet percentages that were sent to an affiliate in the morning, like not updating in real time, not including anything to do with what line that was bet at, the profile of the player, that bet, that, which is obviously massive. And then on top of that, that was just like the profile of the player, that was that, that, that bet, that, which is obviously massive. And then on top of that, that was just like the opening number, the, the line, like you mentioned. 

49:15
It's like, once you've even determined because it's definitely possible to determine, okay, which line is, which way is this line going to move. It's like, once you've determined that, it's like okay, I could have determined from these bets that this line would have moved from three up to five, but it's already at five, so there's no value. Then after, I think, if you had, if you had given me hey, this is every bet that was placed at pinnacle, all, you don't have to give me the percentage, just give me, like, here's all the bets I replaced on this game throughout the day. If I got that in real time, then, yes, I'd be able to make a ton of money because I'd reference that with the line history and see where you guys moved. But just giving me a summation saying like, hey, this is how many percentage of people bet this at any given snapshot. 

49:57 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I don't think I could earn off that, but maybe again, like you said, if you make it your life's work, maybe, but I don't think I can earn off that, maybe if you were looking at real-time data for a sharp book and then using that to formulate bets at more recreational books. I think there's a possibility of that as well. You know what I'm getting at For sure. But then you don't even really need that, it's true. 

50:18 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
You don't need- you just need the line history. 

50:20 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
You really just need the line Exactly. It's all you really need. 

50:25 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
An interesting story from. So when I traded in finance, we were generally dealing to the retail market. So people who wanted to just trade, you know, foreign exchange or the price of gold or whatever you know, open up a private account. So like Robin Hood, but sort of before Robin Hood, and often there was good leverage. Before the US in particular clamped down on this, you could get like 100 to 1 times your money to trade on foreign exchange and things like that, and they actually built in-house back then trading algorithms. So a prop trading algorithm for us where basically whenever 70% of our because if you think like sports bettors lose, it's nothing compared to people who try their hands at financial trading. It's just unreal. 

51:12
Over 10 years I think we had less than five over a 10-year period who sort of sustainably made money. And we had this thing where it was an absolutely perfect inflection point. The moment it went 70-30 long to short on a a market, you knew that that was the time to fade it. It was absolutely ridiculous, like the sheer power of every greedy cognitive bias of everyone who wanted to get rich all at once and when the market hit that apex of like everyone's got to be in this. This is the trade to be in, this is the tesla, this is the, whatever it is. Literally you hit that point and it's like that is the point to reverse the move and and it was incredible like that this thing just made. I think at the time people kind of were unsure of like is it this easy? Like just, you know, it was betting, it was sort of trading for us, but not in like monster, monster size, but it was just. It was just ridiculous to the, to the extent that I actually had people like say to me like you know, I might actually have to like shift some money like into my pension or whatever. And it's like what do you mean? It's like I mean the market's going to go up, and he said why? Because literally 80 of our customers are short, so it's just going to go to the moon right at this point. And we're, like it actually became people that actually considered like making you know life, financial decisions based on this indicator. It became so um, so ridiculous. 

52:36
So in that, in that sense of like knowing when the public is super, just, absolutely juiced to the max on the side, you know whether there's value in the price or not. It definitely, definitely, if I ever see that skew that large in a bet share on Pinnacle before I worked here, I would always be like, oh, let's just see what the price action is. I definitely would always have a look just to see, because you're kind of intrigued to see how that sort of plays out. And the funny thing is that the most intriguing thing is when the price has not moved at all, like last six hours it's done nothing, and yet the 70, 30% bet share it's like not moved at all. 

53:18
Right, yeah, who's in the 30%? You know? So, yeah, I mean it's like I say I think it's. You know, there's the odd screen obsessives, right, who are watching, who look for the patterns, and I'm sure if you sort of gave them the information even slightly off real time, I reckon they'd be able to definitely work with it. But, as you say, quote sharp book. Definitely that data is, you know, much more valuable than for sure, though. 

53:52 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
The thing I've always noticed is, though, when you look at it like a bookmaker, versus better the better builds a position, and typically that position, at the end you know you'll be like, hey, I built up this position, I have rams minus three, minus 105 and it's closing, rams minus four, minus 110. I have a good position, if you know, you value that as a good position. But what would then happen is when, when you look at the bookmaker side, you guys are taking, you know, call it negative vig, right, so you're actually collecting vig. So you're always betting at, you know, usually in theory, obviously, like you know, plus, oh, plus, oh, five, plus, oh, five, call it with pinnacle, or you know shifting, depending on the hold you're taking on that market. But when you guys build a position, since you have so many like people, like, let's say, you take a million on one side, million on the other side. That cancels out you've made your position there. That now heads in like you already got that 40 grand off the top. 

54:43
And then now, so when Pinnacle ends up with a position, they'll be like, okay, we have the rams minus three, but we have it at plus one plus 117. Yeah, because of you know all of the money that came in and the way it works. So I always look at when I'm looking at, hey, like we need to be on the same side of the book as the bookmaker, like we're laying minus 110, minus 101. If you shop around and you know, go no hold for sure, but we're laying minus 10. You guys are, are usually collecting. At the end of the day, your position will likely be a good position and we'll likely have collected a bunch of VIG to make that like a plus 12, plus 17. And in that scenario, sure, we can get the same number as you, but we might not get the same price we need to win at a different threshold than the book, like usually, like between four and 5%, you know, because of the hold. 

55:28 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
So that's my issue with the fade the public stuff, right, is it's not apples to apples, matt? 

55:33 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Metcalf tweeted out the other day saying that Circa Nevada was holding 3%. Right, I think that's high, that's a good for his model and they don't have that many recreational bettors. He's doing a great job. I would assume Pinnacle is holding in and around the same range. You know, it might be a little less, might be a little more, but it's definitely not. You know, 25% or 20% or 10%, even like the more recreational books. So if you guys are building those positions up and only holding 3%, then how good do you have to be as a sports bettor to hold 3%? That's the key, right. 

56:13 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
You're not going to do it by just looking at the bet percentage and then going and picking up a number. I don't. I don't think so. But to each their own. 

56:17
Like, anytime I post something in a public forum, social media, related to, um, that not using bet percentages or things of that nature, I met with a lot of people who claim that they exclusively bet like that and they win money. Now, who knows if that's true or not right, like everybody thinks they win money in sports betting. We know from industry studies that, like 1% of people actually do. I find it very difficult to believe 75% of the people following me are all long-term winners when we know what the industry numbers are. 

56:44
But yeah, I think, matt, just to like bring it back to what what Johnny said, you know I consulted for sportsbooks for years, so I've kind of been on the on the book side of things and you know you take in a bunch of bets you're basically you're, yet you get plus 110 on the side that you like. For a lot of these books that are out there now, the better wants to be on the exact same side as the book, but they're not getting plus 110. They got to go out and lay minus 110. So now you have it's not apples to apples, right? You have to win five more bets out of 100 than the book actually has to do in order to win Looking at 9%. 

57:21
It's a big difference. 

57:25 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
I'd be remiss if I didn't defend the apparent easiness of booking by saying that, if you think the minus 110 is powerful, adverse selection is five times more powerful Having to book every line versus you being able to pick and choose, versus you being able to pick and choose. For me, from my perspective, it is that whenever a bettor is placing a bet in their mind, they're not paying the VIG because their fair price that they're taking is bigger than the bet it definitely happens. 

57:59
So, from their perspective, if they make something like minus 130, minus 110, you can say that they're paying. You know they're paying the VIG. They're paying the VIG relative to a fair price of 50%, but you haven't made it 50%. You know you've not made it plus 100. You made it minus 130. And you get to choose when to bet and when not to bet. So you know, like I say it's, I like to think that, whether it was, you know, cow from benson or or you know guys from our side or whatever, you know, there's plenty of sweat that goes into, uh, you know, keeping as much of that big as we can we're not suggesting otherwise, by the way. 

58:40 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I want to be. 

58:41 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Yeah, I want to be clear here, matthew, I was more referencing. I'm not saying how easy it is and you guys don't even book minus 110, minus 110, you're, you know, even, even, even lighter than that, which is crazy. But what I was more saying is if you think that you can make money just by following these bet percentages, then that was more. Given an example there, like on that specific bet, the bookmaker is building a way better position than you, so you're not getting that same position, even if you follow the the bet percentages. However, obviously, if I had the bet log from pinnacle I'm not I'm not saying that that's not valuable, that's some of the most valuable that would be worth millions, obviously, um, in the right hands uh, one thing I wanted to ask no free lunches, right? 

59:20 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
no, no, no, no free lunches. 

59:23 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So so, matthew, uh, this wasn't on the sheet, um, and if you don't, you don't want answers. We can cut this out for sure. But what percentage of your Pinnacle's business do you think is you know, in terms of dollars made, what percentage would come from more of what you call a recreational base versus a sharper base, because we referenced it before, there are a ton of sharp bettors, potentially including Rob and I, who might win at other books but then also give a percentage of the profits back to Pinnacle. Despite the fact that we're going to win at sports spending, potentially in the long run, over our whole portfolio, we may still lose at Pinnacle, may still lose at Circa. 

01:00:03 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
So first of all, I should say I don't know the answer. Actually, I genuinely it's not something that I've ever had to like particularly think hard about. The longer the time span of the betting record, the more it trends to. You know, the longer you give us to beat you, the more it's likely to trend towards. You know zero people who can beat us, but the reality is that there's people who've beaten us consistently for many, many years as well. 

01:00:37 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
The more you play, the more you lose. That's what I'm hearing here. 

01:00:40 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Well, I mean, you know if we're doing our job right, sure, you know if we can't get better off people, you know, at the end of the day you know we don't. You know we have to pay you for the information. But you know, if we pay you for it long enough, hopefully eventually we learn a lesson. Otherwise it's pretty expensive tuition for us. It'd be hard for me to know. One thing I do know, and the average Pinnacle customer average is better than a coin flipper. 

01:01:19 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Okay, so it doesn't beat the VIG, but it's better than a coin flipper. Is the average Barstool customer worse than a coin flipper? 

01:01:39 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
That I have a belief that they are so. From when I was at sport radar and we were doing the this is back. You know, when I was working with the managed trading services department, you know we would look at books which had a customer base that we genuinely believed would still make money VIG-free. Wow, because the cognitive biases. Think of the guy who literally saw Spain win 7-0 against Costa Rica. Right, and he is like there's only one outcome in the next game Spain might win by 10. 

01:02:07
Now, and I always said spain were great. Look, you know they won these big events before. You know, literally like every single newspaper. You know barstool article. You know espn headline. He's just aggregating it like this incredible neural network just processing all the biases. He's spoken to the guy in the bar. Do you like spain? The guy's, like I love spain, knew it. Like he is just spoken to the guy in the bar. Do you like Spain? The guy's, like I love Spain, knew it. Like he is just pulling all that in. 

01:02:32
In the same way, the sharpest models like you know, algorithmic models are trying to completely remove all bias. Yeah, 100% from it. You know, like I don't. Even if, ideally, the machine places the bets for me. I don't ever have a subjective opinion. 

01:02:45
This guy is only, he's pure subjective Nothing. He's distilled it down into its purest form and he's like do you know what? I'm not even going to take Spain at like the minus two and a half, I'm going to take the minus four and a half plus money, because it's impossible they don't win by a billion. You know, like he is just literally just, and these people 100%, and like I would encourage people to in no way, ever, ever, judge these people, because someday you'll need them to plan your stack too. So you know, at the end of the day, like you know, ultimately, these people, like just, they live life intensely and full, and you know, yeah, so 100%, but yeah, so going back to. They live life intensely and full and you know, yeah, so 100%, but yeah, so going back to. Anyway I digress, by the way, I'm getting a lot of deja vu of myself in my 20s. 

01:03:36 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
As you're telling me this, this is just me sitting around with my friends of like watching an NFL game. Team wins by 42. They're like I can't. They're going to crush. They're playing a worse team next week. They're going to kill them and losing those bets. So this, this is like. It's given me a throwback to my youth. 

01:03:53 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
I appreciate that so what we can deduce is the average pinnacle customer, um, you know, is going to lose, but they're going to lose slower and part of this is the power of line shopping which you guys always preach. A lot of people who, when they come to pinnacle and place bet, they're coming to us to place a bet because we are competitively positioned within the marketplace or, alternatively, just in general, we are happy to sacrifice some VIG in the price discovery process slightly more aggressively maybe than other people to get to the good number quicker. All these things mean that you have a fighting chance and I think this is undersold generally that if you are losing less than the vig, you've achieved something. You should absolutely recognize that at this point you have, you've made your first step and to break even, I think is really undersold as like an achievement, bearing in mind. There are people over there like, as I say, you know, you know parlays can get you into the sort of you know sort of if you're living the the pull full, parlay, yolo life, you know you can be winning. You can be losing far more than the, even the expected vig in these things. 

01:05:02
So to bring yourself back down to like coldly considering, you know line shopping, getting the best number, all the rest of it to get to that point where you even get to your breaking even. You should, you know, you should feel you should congratulate yourself on the discipline you know and the work you've put in there. You know, like winning is just not easy. It's not easy like whether you bet into a shot. It's not even easy betting into anyone, like other books, know it's like it's betting requires you to, like deposit your emotions at the door and you know, coldly think about, you know what's the what's the best thing to bet. Or you know, work on something to. You know, write a program. Whatever you're going to do, how are you going to do it? It's not, you know, no one's giving it away. So, um, so, yeah. 

01:05:43
So I don't know whether the race, how the ratios, I think. I think where we think, where we have a much larger segmentation of people who are losing very slowly, in very small amounts, but they are losing, maybe hypothetically. I guess the number of the percentage of people winning with us isn't actually that different, except they bet a lot, volume terms, completely different kettle of fish, let's say we had only 2% customers, or 1% of customers who win with us. You know they're not. They're not just tippy, tapping around with the $10 bets. You know those guys will obviously be getting as much on us at all times as we go. 

01:06:21
But yeah, I mean it could. It could well be that a huge percentage, you know. I mean you know enough people lose to keep us in business for 20, over 20 years. So, um, but yeah, I kind of feel like where there's this big this, you know, you know big break between us and you know a fan duel of draft kings is probably there is this large chunk of people who are losing like half the vig and we're okay with that, you know well, you heard it here winning is not easy, and that is spoken from a man who has been behind the screen booking what, what I want to say is millions of bets. 

01:06:55 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So uh, definitely would trust this, uh, this opinion here. We wanted to get on to a few more uh concepts, matthew, if you still have some time here. So the one that you know I know rob wanted to talk about was the, the sharp model versus the recreational model and how we've seen it before Circa. They don't limit Pinnacle. They don't limit, they let everyone play and they book to that information. You've heard Matthew talk on this podcast so many times and so many good little nuggets here about why the information is so important, why those bet logs are so important. Yet you see multiple other sports books. In fact, let's call it every single yeah in the regulated space. That will cut off winners and will not actually go with this strategy. So curious to get your thoughts on this um here matthew can't understate the importance of ownership and heritage. 

01:07:48 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Um, I feel terrible about not knowing the name of Circa's owner. Is it Darren? I can't remember Circa's owner. Of the owner, derek Stevens Derek, not Darren. Derek Stevens, right? Derek Stevens, from what I understand from the limited discussions I hear on the internet, is someone that wants to make this sportsbook and he wants to make the sportsbook that way and he has empowered a group of people to make that sportsbook that way. 

01:08:20
Now, pinnacle's original founders all games, players, big stakes, bridge, big stakes, badgammon you know absolutely a lot of gamble in them, super smart, you know, and they wanted to play a game and they didn't want to play like an easy game. You know, don't get me wrong you know if you manage to get a lot of, you know, casual bettors with you, obviously the game feels easy at times, but they weren't bothered about whether the game was hard or not. They wanted to play the game and the game of booking was just like intoxicating to them. So you know you. Then you know our current CEO, paris. You know she has a wealth of experience in the booking world, right from the. You know working. You know all the way up through. You know all the levels to where she's got to now. You know she believes in us, she believes in the traders doing the jobs, all the rest of it. The ownership structure within Pinnacle is behind us. 

01:09:17
Chris I've got a bit about Chris, but they're another person who's sort of talked about in the triangle, if you like. 

01:09:26
I'm pretty sure that they also have a structure that is supportive of them and in the case of someone like Chris as well, with them, um, and in the case of someone you know, like I, like a chris as well, um, you know, if you're taking um a wide, you know you, I picture now I've been to costa rica, but I've never actually I've never worked for any book over there. But I picture that, um, you know, you're gonna have to write a lot of bets from a lot of bets that make you uncomfortable, just to build your business up to the point where you can generate. You know you've got to reach critical mass and so I think if you're someone like a chris or you know, going back old school, like the greek people, like that, they probably had to write a lot of bets. That may put them in a cold sweat, but you know, you didn't know early on like this guy could be the guy who loses a million dollars or takes a million dollars off me. 

01:10:12
And you know, when you build a sort of heritage within your company that is about booking bets and booking bets in that way that's all you know it becomes sort of you know, to use a cliche, it's in your DNA. You know, if you look at a lot of the, you know I suppose the UK, the UK books, I mean quite a lot of the heritage of the original UK books is sort of taking bets on taking bets, you know, into the races as a day out. 

01:10:42
You know there were lots of. There were some hardened guys who come and pro bet racing and the rest of it. But you know there's generally these people. The phrase you, the phrase you never see a poor bookie, was like like just common place in the UK. You know the 70s or whatever. These were the guys, it's always kind of stuff you know. It's sort of they created this kind of perception of like bookmaking was just printing money. And so these people then opened, you know, bedding shops, like kiosks, whatever you know, within all, all the towns in Britain. And then they went online all the rest of it. And you know this is a product designed for casual five pound, $5 bettors and that's the product we want to build. And then you had online casino come and it's like, well, this is, you know, a great add on. And then that add on, you know iGaming. 

01:11:31
You know we talk about all these pivots coming out from the regulated market in the US, people pivoting to iGaming. Like you know they weren't intending to always be all about iGaming anyway, you know, and it's like so I guess there's certainly that element in that. You've got to want to do it, because there'll always be that, I suppose, internal debate of dollar investment, like if you're the owner of. You know, let's say you want to create a company and like let's say, oh, you want to open a sports book, and the guy says like here's model A, here's model B, and it's like okay, well, I've got, you know, a hundred million dollars. What's the return over the next two years, three years, five years, 10 years, whatever, for each of the different models. And you know, there's undoubtedly some big appeal to, you know, the most common model at the moment and our model probably looks like hard work, right, and it probably looks like hard work, even harder work, when you look at the global taxation frameworks and the regulated frameworks. You know there is, you know, licensing restrictions. 

01:12:44
You know they're currently everyone's seen bookmaking as this infinite money pit that we can take money out of. And you know, sometimes, when you see some of the maybe not the US numbers, but numbers, but you know, sometimes you see some of the numbers that come out of the europe over the years, you're like gosh, it does seem to be just limitless money. But you know people want the sports, want the data fees. You know um the local areas, you know states or countries. They want the tax and they sometimes want the tax on. Do they want the tax on turnover? Do they want to tax on ggr? Do they want? 

01:13:14
There's a myriad of things that suddenly mean that you, what does it? What does each dollar that someone bets with you cost you to facilitate, and what is the cost of getting the customer in? Now I consider us fortunate in that we've built a brand with good integrity that's trustworthy and you know, fortunately, quite a lot of people end up betting with us because they don't have many other options to bet elsewhere. There's no point, you know, beating about the bush there. So you know, and we don't funny enough, we don't have to pay any marketing dollars to get the person who's been closed elsewhere to bet with us. So you know that that that's undoubtedly a benefit to us and we welcome, like I say, we welcome those people with open arms. Don't promise them an easy game, but you know, absolutely you know it's going to be, should be an enjoyable one, should be a really stimulating one, that's for sure, if nothing else. 

01:14:09 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
What are your thoughts on esports moving forward? Obviously, you're managing that team at Pinnacle now, so what do you think on the prospects for actually esports betting, and where would it eventually hopefully rank? 

01:14:23 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
I'm not managing esports. Esports has flown from growth. Esports is its own big. 

01:14:26 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
It's above growth now. 

01:14:28 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Yeah, it's grown, it's full grown and it's massive. It really is absolutely huge for us and it's full, it's full grown. So, um, and it's, it's massive. You know it really is, um, absolutely huge for us and it's growing. You know it's. It's one of those things where we're growing generally, you know, across the board. 

01:14:42
You know, but in terms of, you know it's more hockey stick growth with esports than is, and you know there's a whole new generation of people, you know being born all the time now, who are sort of coming to the age where they're really becoming either new people becoming engaged with esports, or, alternatively, there are people who got into esports early who are now coming to the stages in their careers where they have more disposable income. Right, these guys who you know grew up playing a lot of these games as teenagers, but now they're. You know there's completely stereotype. You know silicon valley, software developers or whatever, not that they would be betting in cal, of course, but these people would suddenly have disposable income and want to bet, and maybe they want to bet on the things that they've actually become more familiar with than Monday Night Football, whatever it may be. 

01:15:26
So, yeah, so we're definitely seeing growing people who only bet on esports. We're seeing people who open accounts because they want to bet on esports with us, people you know who, just like, like I said, the volume is growing there. The product's growing, you know. It's an unbelievable amount of like content, right Fixtures, leagues, et cetera and, yeah, it's something that we take very seriously. And, you know, we're also fortunate enough to be at the sort of the vanguard of integrity within as well, you know. 

01:16:07
So where would you say accusations, you know COVID et cetera. Where would you say it could? 

01:16:12 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
eventually rank one day in terms of the the major sports like? Do you ever see it surpassing any of the the bigger sports? If so, which one? 

01:16:23 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
um, I genuinely think it can. Um, I genuinely think so. If we, if we think of global sports, like, is it going to be bigger than soccer? No, is it going to be bigger than basketball? I don't think so. At the end of the day, you know, those are sports that can be played in the poorest countries, in the poorest areas in the world with no, you know, no effort. 

01:16:46
Maybe if android handheld devices, you know, come down to five dollars or whatever and you can play the game, play the games on them, who knows? But you know, generally, you know, um, and in terms of like, if you're talking specific, uh, north american market will be bigger than the nfl. No, um, although, you know, I don't know, I suppose give it 50 years and enough kids, enough parents don't want their kids playing football anymore, they want to play soccer. Who knows, maybe that does change, maybe nfl does lose its crown, but generally no, but I I think it can beat out of tennis. Maybe, maybe, maybe this is something that's exclusively to um, to us, because we seem to have done a very good job of acquiring the fans, um, who want to bet esports. 

01:17:28
Um, you know, maybe that's not the case for another book. You know, european books will see a lot of tennis volume. It's very important to them. But you know, when I look at the trajectory of something like tennis, where you've got guys who are barely able to pay for a living, you know, and they're still they're not even on the worst level tour, you know the guys are playing Challenger Tour even you know it's just scratching a living and then I look at, like you know, 10 million plus dollar esports tournament prize pools. It's not just about, you know, the betting trajectory of it also there's a little bit. I always used to hate people who said that sport popularity and betting volume correlate perfectly, because they very obviously don't. But, um, definitely I would say that there's going to be a point where esports I consider to be going on a very, you know, upwards trajectory and just it will drag, by definition, up. People want to bet on it because people love to speculate on sports. That's the truth. 

01:18:20 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I think, just offering my perspective here I think Marco Bloom had a huge impact on Pinnacle and esports in particular. So I got to meet Marco at several conferences and speak to him and he was super sharp and passionate about this. As someone who's all you know, I'm not a video gamer myself I've always been fascinated by esports and esports betting. I've ran esports focus groups before with gamers and bettors and so on and so forth, and I think traditional bookmakers, a lot of the ones that are offering esports out there, just treat the esports better, like they're the exact same as a sports better, and I think that they're way more nuanced and it's completely different to the point where an esports better, depending on the way you actually spell esports on your website, whether you capitalize the S or you put a hyphen they're going to say no, no, no. These guys don't know what they're doing. This is a disgrace. There's no way I'm going to bet there. And I think where Pinnacle has separated itself in market is I mean, I'm not in the inner workings of Pinnacle or whatever but I think Marco's passion with esports and just him being involved in that in a daily really grew up the market offering to the point where pinnacle has just like. 

01:19:36
I wonder if esports is growing um, industry wide or like market wide as much as you think it is, or if it's just that you're seeing that within pinnacle, who is an industry leader in esports? 

01:19:50
Because when covid happened, for example, right, this would have been, I think, the prime opportunity for esports betting to take off. You got nothing else going on but lots of video games that we can bet on and there were some offshore sports books running, like Madden simulations and FIFA simulations, and those were were doing well. But from the bookmakers we talked to um across North America, they're like, yeah, we didn't really see a huge uptick in in esports during the pandemic and I'm I find that like I'm floored by that really, because it's like one of the only things that people could bet on. So that's just my perspective. I want I wonder if you want to comment on that at all. I I feel like pinnacle is an industry leader in esports, but maybe market wide it's not having the same, uh, it's not growing to the level that potentially you believe, matthew yeah, I, I would say that, um, I would say that the broader bookmaking space will. 

01:20:45 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
So I I think that the big pivot point is esports is massive in lat America and while Latin America has been growing as a region for bookmakers to enter into, it has been probably slower. You know, brazil is on the brink of sort of regulated now. I think the rules, I think the laws were passed. Brazil is massive for esports. You know, india is not a regulated betting market yet, but people want to get in there and everyone focuses on cricket and yet mobile esports is absolutely massive in India. Will China ever officially regulate its betting space? But Tencent and the likes esports is absolutely enormous there. 

01:21:33
Korea, not regulated. Japan not regulated regular well, japan's got its own sort of regulations. There's huge areas where, you know, I think if all these places uh, changed their regulatory structures and every book was just allowed to enter with an online service, you know, I I'm maybe I'm overshooting this, but I think it would literally flip the switch overnight. So right now, when people are talking, if we're talking to books in Nevada, or books in the UK, or books in Ontario even and it's like how's esports been for you? It's like your journey of technology and experience of team sports in schools and things like that. It's sort of a different journey you've been through um, whereas, like my, my mother's family is actually from peru. I know I don't look it um, but like you know, in the late 90s, like going to like internet cabins at like two in the morning in like south america and like playing like quake and things like that, you know, it's just, you know the, the intense passion they have for the games as well is just like off the scale. So you know, I think right now there's no one. You know people can't operate in these jurisdictions and there will be a time when they, I believe, sort of kind of naively this is probably the most naive thing is I kind of believe that ultimately everything will become, you know, open to everyone. But you know no guarantee of that. 

01:23:01
But yeah, I do think, like, let's say, china decides to just have a national bookmaker. Just, you know, like there's going to be one bookmaker and it's going to be the Chinese national bookmaker. I imagine that the Chinese national bookmaker would have King of Glory or whatever one of the most popular esports. I picture it would actually have that to bet on and I picture it would be massively popular. So, yeah, I guess you know, like so much in the world, it hinges on governments rather than on popularity. But in terms of terms of people out there wanting to speculate on it, it's like the skins market's been massive for esports. People kind of sort of under, under report and undersell the size of that market and a lot of those people, if given the right product, would translate in the same way that you know, dfs bettors have in many ways translated to being bettors. 

01:23:45
Um, you know, yeah, so I think I think you know it. Definitely there's no reason why I couldn't do that. But yes, I absolutely am skewed by the fact that within Pinnacle, you know, I've worked, seen other bookmakers. You know, like I said, at Sport Radar we were looking at the books of like 100 or bookmakers and you know esports was insignificant as a piece of the pie. And then, you know, within Pinnacle World it's enormous. But I do think in the right areas, in the right areas, in the right jurisdictions. 

01:24:16 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
It's like it's going to be a behemoth really. I'm interested in getting into a betting advice question here. So the last episode of circles off we did was a Q&A. Johnny was tending to business matters and we had plus EV analytics here in studio and we took a bunch of listener questions and we were able to get around to some of them. But there was one that I'd specifically like to ask you here which I think would be interesting and some people might be able to take away something. 

01:24:39
So we do have a lot of people who are new bettors that watch circles off. They're not seasoned, sharp bettors that have been betting for 15, 20 years. One of the questions we got was where should an aspiring quant or data scientist or even a new, better focus on in markets right now? Essentially, if you could start from scratch, what do you think would be worth the effort? I'm interested in your take. You've been in the industry for a long time. For someone that's new to the space, maybe has some sort of math background programming skills, what do you think is a good starting point for them? 

01:25:16 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
programming skills. What do you think is a good starting point for them? Um, ultimate ambition is to become a professional better, or just to get involved with betting and see how far you can take it, kind of I, I think it's. 

01:25:22 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I don't think people are starting to bet to lose in the long run, so let's make the assumption that they're trying to bet to win, but maybe not at a professional level um, I, I firmly believe that. 

01:25:34 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
So I think there's a lot of people that feel that you need to be so dispassionate that actually not knowing anything about the sport isn't somehow, um a benefit. And, weirdly enough, there are plenty of pinnacle traders whose understanding is they understand the numbers and the movement of money and money flows exceptionally and they don't um have like a deeper understanding of the sport and they don't have like a deeper understanding of the sport and they don't need it to. But from the better's perspective, um, you know you're not being paid a salary like a pinnacle trader is and you know you've not, you've not fallen in love with the game yet. So to get that engine started, to get that fire in you, I think it helps to pick a sport that you're engaged in, which has its risks, because you're obviously going to be emotionally attached more to a sport that you're already engaged in. But I think, in order to understand the domain nuances like if you build a model, it's really nice to be able to put your finger on what the model might be getting wrong. With a bit of domain knowledge, you know if it's like you know if you didn't know anything about. You know football and the quarterbacks out. You know, if you didn't know anything about, you know football and the quarterbacks out, you know, and you didn't know what that meant, you know you'd be to use a grotesque example, but you know like that would be a big disadvantage kind of thing. So I think you want to make, you want to put as much little resistance you want to, you want to make the betting of things the enjoyable. You know you want to get to that point as fast as possible. So minimizing the obstacles in terms of your understanding of you know how the rules of the sport work, how the sport works, and getting involved with that. 

01:27:01
And then I would say, once you've, you know, chosen your area, you want to specialize. You know, even if it is, you know, let's say you know you want to do football, you, you know it's, it's, it's it's always scaling up the liquidity scale. It doesn't necessarily have to be in terms of you know you can bet nfl size, but you're betting at the open. You know um, you know people talk about, you know player props and these kind of things. You know, I, I would, I would, I would say just generally, you know the, the, the, the lower, the, the lower, the limit, and the bigger people should never be put off by big vig either. Big vig is just fear at the end of the day. You know, just take it on. You know it's absolutely no, don't be worried about that, because one thing that is uniform throughout 20 years of like me and bookmaking is that the places where there's the biggest vig are the places where there's actually still too little Vig. 

01:27:56 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
In a weird way we constantly underestimate. 

01:27:58 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Like you look at the Vigs that some of the player props have on them, right, and you think to yourself that's a lot of Vig, it is a lot of Vig, but if you know we're completely wrong, it doesn't matter, right? So you know. Again, I would say just pick something that you can really get, you know, engagement and enjoyment out of, and then, you know, work up the volume scale and go from there. You know, because you know and you want to, you know you want to be able to get anything in life, you want to get some early wins. I mean, the world is lifted with people who like stop betting just because you know people who are trying to do betting seriously. I mean, obviously, if you've got a lot of gambling, you carry on betting regardless, but the world's going to be full of people who built the first spreadsheet, gave it a go and because the first hundred bets were terrible, that's it. The spreadsheet just lives in the C drive forevermore. 

01:28:48
I think if you've got the passion for the sport, you've got something to drive you on because you're going to be watching it anyway. So you know, kind of I believe in that. I generally believe that helps. 

01:29:00 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I think the next round of BetStamp swag that we put together needs to be a shirt that says Big Vig is just fear. I love that. I've never heard that before, but it's. It's actually a great, a great saying. I think we might actually throw those together. We'll give you some sort of royalty on it, Of course, Matt. We'll give you some the name Adam Chernoff. Does that mean anything to you? Are you familiar with Adam Chernoff? 

01:29:23 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
Yeah, I am familiar with Adam Chernoff, matthew. 

01:29:26 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Wins listens to all these podcasts of ours, which is kind of something that I'm not. I'm not too thrilled with, to be honest. Like that, you listen to all the podcasts because then it's like, well, if there's something, we now we're gonna be careful what we say, you know, because I'm I bet into pinnacle stuff like that. You know what I mean. Yeah, but no, we do appreciate your support. We're just joking around. So with that, yeah with the name. 

01:29:45 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I bring up adam turnoff because, um, there's like this debate that goes on behind the scenes now in like discords and stuff like that. 

01:29:54
So adam has a telegram channel that has like 8 000 subscribers and what's happening now is it's not just adam, there's more and more people with large followings that are giving like these, these public releases of plays in telegram channels to large followings that seem to be impacting the market, because there's so many people that are just going out and betting this all at once. And there's a lot of debate now on whether or not does the closing line even matter anymore in a lot of sports, because there are these public figures, who may or may not be long-term winning bettors, that are actually just influencing the market. And I'm very curious if you're aware for one that there are these like public releases to these large followings nowadays and if you are aware, you know kind of how you process that in real time. Are you just forced to move a number because so many people are betting something at once, or is there something that actually goes into moving the number because you, you know you're falling back on your profiling as well? 

01:30:59 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
so you can't ever give um these sort of external shocks, um undue influence, right. You can't be. If there would be zero point in us ever signing up to a raz or to, you know, listening to adam shernoff when he posts his picks. You know we work very hard to get to the point where money moves lines. Some money moves it slightly more, some moves it slightly less, but money moves lines. You know we don't want to move before, we don't want to move on air. 

01:31:32
In these situations we want to know exactly how smart the money is over the long term. You don't find out how smart the money is unless you take the bet. So you know it doesn't. It's not that it's irrelevant, it's, of course it's not irrelevant. You know, if people bet adam's views with us, it's it's. You know, we see the bet, you know, and we work with it. And who knows, maybe there's some guy who's built some sort of you know Alexa bot that listens to Adams and bets it instantly with us, for all I know. But that guy will crop up as the first guy who always bets at this time and, like you know, we trace it back. 

01:32:06
You know it's kind of these things that people think that it's like I love the idea of, like the subversive bookmaker, like, you know, hiding in the discords or whatever like that. Like when I'm ever in these places, like I'm just trying to find out if there's ways to do the business better. Right, you know, if people have a criticism, I try to, you know, you know, consider that if possible. Um, but yeah, this idea that we sort of somehow are like slaves, to sort of you know these guys are really good or whatever, no, you just let the chips fall where they fall, right, you see how the money goes and you, just over time, you know, like, if we built a really super specific strategy to handle like Adam Chernoff's releases, how long before someone games that, how long before someone flips it on us know how long someone goes to adam and say, hey, adam, literally it's worth 10k to you. You know, if you say this side when we mean the other side, you know it's like like I went back to that phrase I used resilient. 

01:33:03
You know, robust bookmakers have to make themselves as bulletproof as possible to misdirection and to these kind of things. So, yeah, I'm, we're aware of them. You know certain sources very popular, you know definitely generate volume, but yeah, we just take each bet on its merits and you know, like I say, slowly but surely we build up a record of how. But you know, for us, inevitably, if someone gives out a number and people just want to bet it into the ground, you know minus 110 is gone. I'll take the 12, the 14, 16, 20, 25, whatever. You know, the EV runs out on these picks eventually. So that's obviously you know, and we won't really know on average what the EV is. You know. The weird thing is is that we are our own bet stamp. 

01:33:52
You know we're profile, you know, know the betting records build up with us yep so, um, and yeah, we won't know um, you know we won't know adam's record until till we take the bets. So, yeah, it's um. I don't want to sound like dismissive of it, like people you know it. Just we let it happen and and we go from there. 

01:34:10 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Well, that that's what I would do too, because, like you know, obviously you can move on air, but then it's just a matter of time that you said before it's like, okay, well, they're moving on air, like, well, they move it when we load it up like this, okay, perfect, let's do the reverse. Then, bang, bang, it's just gonna, and it might not, you, might, you guys might not catch it until it's too late as well. And then, next thing, you know, okay, bam, there's the Might as well. Just take the hits once and call it a day. Yep, move on the action. We have one final question for you, matthew, which is the same question that we ask all of our guests. If you could go back five years, just a simple five years to the previous version of yourself and you know you can talk to him what's the one piece of advice that you would offer? 

01:34:58 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
can talk to him. What's the one piece of advice that you would offer? Um? So I'll sort of I suppose I'll split it into betting advice and sort of general life. So, like professionally and like life, advice for me is reduce friction, reduce. Learn how to reduce friction in your life. 

01:35:14
So I'm someone who has chosen at least 10,000 hills to die on vocally and angrily, and it has never, you know, put it this way, it took me 20 years to get to pinnacle and I don't know whether I could have got to where I wanted to be faster if I just acknowledged, like, probably just being a better human, you know. But like, the reality is that within work, I always came in hard, strong opinion, you know, and was always, like, always wanted to win in style, you know, with like everyone, you know, it's like why I struggled with Twitter and why I'm not on Twitter now is, know, going in and saying, right, I'm going to tell these people how it works, and then everyone's going to stand up. They'll just start slow clapping and then it'll build to a crescendo and they'll be cheering my name and telling me how right I was. You know what's never happened in my entire life, ever. So I would say like, um, I don't know where the phrase reduce friction, but like, reduce the sort of antagonization with people. I would say that that is like, or become a professional better and live in a hut, you know one or the other, but you know, generally is like, for me, that's definitely something that I would advise people, you know, and I would definitely tell myself because, you know, even five years ago I was still a bit too, uh, you know, spiky about all these things. 

01:36:30
Um, and in terms of betting, it sounds weird but like, I would definitely if I was advising myself, for my own betting would always be, you know, what do you actually expect to get out of this? Because I literally talk for the last 20 years, I've just ended up speaking to people like, literally I meet people who've won eight figures plus. You know, occasionally you get very lucky and you have a few brief words with someone who owns, you know, bought a football team, you know a Premier League football team or something like that, and you meet these people and it just completely skews your expectations. Going back to the, you know, breaking even is good. You know, I would definitely say to myself, matthew, like, be honest with yourself, you love your job, you love booking. There's no shame in you know, enjoying that. So sometimes I, sometimes I would actually sort of say to myself you know all these people, you know all this information and yet you know you break out in a sweat, you know, just clicking the button to place a bet sometimes, because you know you just sort of get that anxiety. The idea is, I should just you know, I wish I could have. Just you know, right now I feel pretty at peace with you know, I love my work and I I do that pretty much. That's my focus. 

01:37:45
But there's been times over the years where I'd be like I could be a professional gambler. Yeah, I reckon I could do that. It's like ice in the veins, my friend. You do not have it. You know you could not, you could not do this and you're not, you know you're not the kind of person who's ever going to sort of learn to be able to do it. So so, yeah, so I would have just said you know, what do you expect? 

01:38:03
And the reality is is that I was wish. I just wish, you know, I wish I could go full and just be pure subjectivity guy. I wish I could just walk into the bar on a Friday and be like now I just can't bet because obviously I don't want to have a bet. So if I have a negative EV bet and it's like, oh my God, like someone might be watching, like me having a bad bet, you know, like, so I've taken away the fun betting for myself and I've also acknowledged that, like, I'm not going to be a professional gambler. So now what I'm left with 400 spreadsheets on the C drive, all you know, gathering dust basically, of failed experiments, et cetera. 

01:38:36
So yeah, it's about, you know, for anyone's out there. You know, it's like, you know there's lots of people, professional bedders in this, but whether it's your podcast or you know the risk of ruin or spank all these other podcasts that are basically interviewing wildly successful people. And they did it. You know, like, like, literally, we're trapped in survivorship bias world at this point, and so you can be like you just step back. How realistic is that? You're what that person Now what would be good, define what good for you is. 

01:39:08
And if you know, getting to the end of the season, you know, and your $1,000 bankroll is $1,200. Does that feel good? You're damn right, we should, we should feel fantastic, you know? So you know, that's uh, that's definitely um, you know, I'm sure a lot of people would be like going so what you're saying is just lower the bar until you can get over it? Right, is that what you're saying? But yeah, you know, like I would say, um, you know, I haven't lowered the bar in my work. I still want to be the best bookmaker in the world. So, yeah, pick and choose your battles. Have a clear idea of what you want to get out of betting before you go full bore and just firing off like a lunatic. I would suggest that caution. 

01:39:50 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Thank you. Thank you very much for the response. I think that's uh very helpful. Um, I could definitely take that first piece of advice to heart. Just not create less friction. Yeah, probably myself as well. Um, any any questions you had for us, matthew? 

01:40:03 - Matthew Trenhaile (Guest)
if not, we'll close off um, well, one day I may resurrect my own podcast and I'll have you both on an interview, but until then, until then, I've probably spoken too long already. Absolutely. 

01:40:14 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So when you're going up against those growth markets on Pinnacle, when you are betting KBO, not only are you up against that VIG, but you're also up against this man right here, Matthew Trenhale, the head trader for growth markets at Pinnacle, one of the sharpest in the game. We appreciate you taking your time to come on. You've been very generous with it and we will talk to you soon and see everybody else next week.