Tennis Aces

For all global sportsbooks, tennis is a key revenue driver. Whilst it is presented to the customer as a single sport, the data that drives it behind the scenes is fragmented, with official data rights being spread across various providers for Slams, ATP, WTA and, from 2025, ITF.

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For all operators, this dispersal of rights across various distributors is problematic. On a technical level it means multiple feed integrations which over recent years has been exacerbated by the various rights moving between different suppliers as distribution contracts expire. Commercially, each of these new renewal cycles is characterised by spiralling data rights’ costs being passed on to the sportsbooks themselves – not just for tennis but seemingly every sport.

For operators, the prospect of diminishing returns in a major sport such as tennis caused by cost hikes in data is a worrying one. For those that choose to maintain the use of official data it is going to be vital that the in-play prices they generate from it can maximise their hold on turnover. Unfortunately, for many, their existing pricing solutions are not capable of this. Often, the 3rd party distributors of the official data also bundle odds alongside with the intention that operators then use these prices for their customers to bet against. As these major suppliers in the market have no experience of offering sports betting to their own customer base it can mean these odds are usually of a low quality and are often scraped and copied from elsewhere – especially for the lower ranking tennis such as ITF which is much harder to generate positive revenue from.

In contrast, 10star are the world leaders in tennis pricing, trading and risk management. Formed in 2020 following the acquisition of specialist tennis market maker Jasis. 10star is the primary liquidity provider for betting exchanges and has been supplying the world-renowned Pinnacle sportsbook with tennis pricing, trading and risk management services since 2016. Given the tendency of the B2B supply chain to scrape and copy its prices from both Pinnacle and Betfair it could be argued that 10star is already driving the world market when it comes to tennis trading.

However, there is a huge difference between taking a service supplied directly by the experts and paying fees to a supplier for an offering that is based on copying those prices. While Pinnacle’s tennis prices are visible to the industry, the underlying 10star probabilities that power these odds and the liquidity they generate are not. The outcome is that the industry is blindly following a “black box” with no understanding of how the odds are generated and, crucially, no capability to risk manage in-play. Given that approximately 90% of most sportsbook action on tennis occurs after the game has started, handing over responsibility for this revenue to a supplier that doesn’t have the capability to manage it won’t do anything to reverse revenue decline being driven by higher data costs. 10star offers sportsbooks a powerful alternative and an antidote to the damage to revenue caused by the current expensive and pricing-deficient supply chain.

Continuing with tennis as an example, not only have we developed best-of-breed models, we also use the liabilities that are generated by the wagers placed by customers as inputs into the prices we produce, rather than risk manage as an after-thought or ignore the liability altogether. Any information from “sharp bettors” is automatically accounted for by the price changes the model makes, driven by our proprietary data analytics software and overseen by a team of expert traders. Existing suppliers’ models and practices are not capable of this. Moreover, our tennis model – and all our models – are fully correlated, meaning that if there is a change in the any price of a main or derivative market caused by liabilities that have been generated on that market, the change flows down through all related markets automatically.

Using automated risk correlation as the framework makes 10star models unique in their capability to manage liabilities that are generated in play, ensuring that our partners are optimally positioned in the market to maximise their revenue, right until the last point is played.

Furthermore, a decade of managing liquidity generated from the betting exchanges (where the counterparts are anonymous) means we can manage all types of betting turnover from all types of customers, giving our partners the confidence to stand larger positions and lay bets to more skilled or retail customers that are otherwise turned away.

Lastly, our market-leading multiples/combination risk management algorithms mean that we deliver market-leading returns on turnover across tennis and all other sports – pre-match as well as in-play.

‍10star’s expertise in tennis and our ability to provide expert pricing alongside efficiently correlated risk management provides a solution for operators that are trying to pull their businesses out from the industry black hole they have been sucked into by expensive data that the existing supply chain doesn’t allow them to monetise.