BettorTakes Tries To Appeal To New York Gamblers

Posted on: January 27, 2023, 01:53h. 

Last updated on: January 27, 2023, 01:53h.

Chris Sheridan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Live Casinos, Sports Betting.

New Yorkers are gearing up for the NFL’s championship weekend by studying up on the four remaining teams: San Francisco, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Cincinnati. And that is good.

But New Yorkers also need to know their relative strengths and weaknesses when it comes to their own personal sports gambling history. Finding the proper tool is not all that easy because of the voluminous number of betting apps being put to the market. A company run by a guy in Mexico who spent one year as a New Yorker before fleeing the Upper West Side because of the weather may have an app that can help.

BettorTakes has come out of the developmental stage and is being marketed as a sports gambling app unlike any other. That’s because it tracks a gambler’s proficiency in numerous categories and sub-categories. It is a study tool that forces a sports gambler to reckon with his/her losses and learn from those mistakes, but also highlights what types of successes each individual has produced.

“I started betting a lot on college basketball when it became legal, and I follow the sport closely and thought that I might have an edge,” said Steve Rubenfaer, CEO of the company. “I am a spreadsheet guy, and I wanted to know details on how I was doing. But there was nothing out there, aside from bet-trackers that don’t look at the nuts and bolts. How did I do with Big Ten? How did I do with underdogs, both at home and on the road?

“There wasn’t anything that told me any detail, so I decided to build it.”

The company has been in development for two years trying to get its algorithm right, and it has been live in the Apple Store for three weeks. An android version is coming shortly.

Sports gambling is now legal in 36 states and Washington, D.C., up from 32 in 2021. There are 33 states that are operational, and three others have yet to launch their programs. Mobile sports betting is now legal in 26 states, up from 18 in January 2022.

This Weekend’s NFL Games

There are a lot of people gambling with legalized sports betting companies, and many of them are paying handicappers for their picks rather than doing their own homework. But homework does not just involve studying trends and injury reports. Sharp gamblers study their own strengths and weaknesses and put in long hours trying to figure out where the best bets are.

What has been missing is a tool to trade each player’s relative strengths and weaknesses.

And as that pertains to this weekend’s NFC and AFC championship games, bettors who use BettorTakes would be able to see how they have done on every wager involving the Chiefs, Bengals, 49ers, and Eagles. Same for NBA, NHL, and college basketball wagers, which Rubenfaer demonstrated by showing how he has done in games involving Middle Tennessee State, where he had an “edge score” above 60.

The edge score gives a weighted value to past wagers involving that team, that conference, and wager records at home and on the road, with favorites and underdogs. Anyone downloading the app (it can be seen on an Android at m.bettortakes.com) will be starting new and beginning their own personal database. But tracking one’s own bets and learning what has worked and what has not worked is paramount, unless bettors want to purchase picks from handicappers.

Here is a demonstration of what the app does.

The Eagles are favored by 2 1/2 at home against the San Francisco 49ers, and the Chiefs are favored by 1 against the Cincinnati Bengals. Anyone who downloads BettorTakes and starts logging their wagers can build a success/failure database unique to each user. And with sports gambling here to stay, the net effect will be starting to build a wagering history that can make a gambler a better bettor.

Will it help this weekend? No. Will it help a year from now when a year’s worth of bets have been logged. Conceptually, yes.

“The sportsbooks do not mind having intelligent gamblers, because they just want to have people gambling. The more wagers that are made, the more money they make, and they do not mind making payouts to smart gamblers because that ensures that those people will be gambling even more,” said Gil Varon, a publicist for BettorTakes who arranged the phone interview between Casino.org in New York and Rubenfaer from his home in Valladolid, Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Their business is a gamble unto itself, because of the number of wagering assistance apps out there, and the sports gambling landscape is littered with aps that have failed and sportsbooks that have failed. But it is a growth industry, and you never know if you do not try.

Smart Bettors Desired,Then Become Sharp Bettors

BettorTakes includes a chat function so that friends can discuss the games while they are being played, social groups that encourage like-minded gamblers to compare notes, and contests designed to drum up business.

For Rubenfaer, a UCLA economics grad whose grew up in Detroit, this is a worthy business gamble because the product is unique and is geared toward intelligent people.

“I have been an entrepreneur all my life, and there is no one out there doing this,” he said. “Sports gambling is huge and is growing rapidly, and the number of gamblers who need this tool will increase as well.”

Will it be a success? Hey, that is a gamble these folks at BettorTakes are taking, and we will not handicap their fortunes. But having seen a demonstration of the app, there is no denying the fact that it crunches data and makes it bettor-specific better than anything else in this space that we have seen since Christie v. NCAA changed the sports gambling industry nationwide.