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In the sports betting game, there’s one surefire way to find out what other people know that you don’t know. That strategy simply involves making them part of you or trading them your money for their knowledge. BetMGM co-owner Entain has just employed that strategy.
Entain has acquired Angstrom Sports and with it all the company’s expertise about sports betting related to the United States. For bettors who use BetMGM’s online sports betting app, it means the in-play product could be about to improve in terms of performance and variety.
Entain announces Angstrom acquisition
According to a Monday news release from United Kingdom-based Entain, it will pay up to $203 million pounds (about $265.5 million USD currently) for Angstrom Sports. The release does not specific what up to 122 million pounds of contingent payments are based upon but does say it expects to complete the transaction in the current quarter.
Entain says it is now “the only global operator with a full in-house suite of end-to-end analytics, risk and pricing capabilities for US Sports betting products.” While Entain offers multiple sports betting products in Europe, BetMGM is the sole online gambling offering in the US that Entain has an interest in right now. MGM Resorts own the other half of BetMGM.
The release confirms that Entain made the acquisition with BetMGM as the target benefactor. Angstrom is a young company with early stage venture capital raises spanning back to just September 2020 according to PitchBook.
Regardless, Angstrom’s website says that the company’s staff has more than 50 years of expertise in the sports betting field. For BetMGM users, the noticeable effect of the acquisition could be a revamped live betting experience.
How Angstrom could change BetMGM’s in-play betting experience
The news release focuses on parlay wagers and live betting capabilities as the main thrusts of the deal for BetMGM. Angstrom’s suite of products includes a bet-building interface. Whether that will be more robust in terms of options for bettors as compared to what BetMGM currently offers will remain to be seen.
The more tangible benefits for bettors could be in live betting on BetMGM’s app. Angstrom says its technology offers “zero latency in-play pricing.” Latency, in this context, refers to the time between when athletes in events actually take actions and when the sportsbook app reflects those actions.
For example, the time it takes BetMGM to show that a pitch has been thrown during a baseball game would be the latency that Angstrom is referring to. If that’s truly down to zero, dependent on users’ devices’ data speeds of course, it would be something that could set BetMGM apart.
Another improvement that could be coming to BetMGM’s in-play betting product is an expansion of the options for such wagering. Angstrom says it features a “full suite of innovative derivative markets” and player markets that BetMGM could leverage to its desire.
However, that may be an area where the technology allows for more than BetMGM can actually offer. Jurisdictions have legal standards about what sports betting licensees can and cannot offer in terms of betting markets. For example, some jurisdictions ban wagers on coin tosses at the beginning of American football games.
If BetMGM can truly offer a differentiated live betting product which is really superior to the competition, its share of the US online sports betting market could increase. At the very least, BetMGM now knows what Angstrom knows.
