Gambly launches AI betting copilot

Cal Spears and Jonathan Bales were in between projects and non-compete clauses in February of 2023, fishing in Key West and trying to devise a way to collaborate.

The idea for what would become Gambly hit like a mangrove snapper.

“We had a few different ideas, but one that we really liked was building an AI chat bot to address the various pain points that sports bettors have,” Spears said, “particularly that I was having as a sports bettor.”

Spears, the co-founder of RotoGrinders, had brought a pain point to the boat. A few years earlier during the NFL Draft, he’d received a text suggesting a certain bet on when a player would come off the board.

But comparing odds at various online sportsbooks was a time-consuming and frustrating process.

“You receive that message and you spend 10 minutes looking around on DraftKings to find the bet,” Spears explained. “It’s too obscure of a bet for any of the existing odds-comparison sites to have. 

“We wanted something where you could just search with natural language, quickly find the bet and either from there deep-link to the actual website or share that bet with your friend.”

Bettors can, as of today.

Gambly, which has been operating as a closed beta product since September, is now live and free for everybody to use on the Gambly website, or in their iOS app (with Android coming soon).

Users interact with Gambly through dialogue prompts as with other language models. 

“Lakers odds tonight?” or “Ovechkin props” work just fine.

Using odds-ingestion technology from partner Unabated Sports, Gambly scrapes 11 US sportsbooks for comparable lines and displays them for comparison. Bettors can click through directly to their preferred online sportsbook if they have an account and if it’s available in their jurisdiction.

Good grammar is not a requirement of extracting actionable information. But good questions are, Bales said.

“I think that arguably our biggest hurdle with new users is getting them into good prompts right away, making sure that they're querying the right types of things, understanding what Gambly can do,” he explained. “We have suggested queries there. We'll have a new version of that out that I think should help, where ideally a user is coming on and their first handful of interactions with Gambly, they don't really need to type anything. They can just click around.”

A notification system allows users to snap up odds on a bright-idea market if and when they become available. And to exploit them.

“A lot of it is wanting to shop the line first, having a strong take on a player and thinking that initial line - when it comes out - is going to be off … hoping that it's going to be,” Spears explained. “And then you become the person that gets to fire on it first before it moves into whatever its final range will be. You can get enormous closing line value if you think that there's going to be a bad price coming.”

Enter the Drake Maye case study.

“I remember one of our users was excited for Drake Maye's first start to take the over on his rushing. He set an alert to alert [him] when Drake Maye's rushing line was posted on any site, and DraftKings posted it at midnight, like a really random time to post it,” Spears recalled. “He got a push alert to his phone, popped in the market, saw a line at like, I think, 12 ½ and took it right away. And the next morning it had already boosted up to, I think, 22 ½. So he got massive value just by being one of the first people to shop it.”

Spears and Bales, the co-founder of Fantasy Labs, which was purchased by Action Network’s parent company in 2017, had previously worked together on smaller projects, mostly involving DFS. The chance to build something together came after Better Collective bought both RotoGrinders (2019) and Action Network (2021).

Spears and Bales have equity partners in Unabated but are currently self-funding Gambly. As the site expands, ostensibly to include more research capability - “Falcons ATS on the road?” - and like live-betting, they’ll eventually decide how to make a living on this thing.

That would presumably mean a subscription service or an affiliate model.

“I think both of them are on the table,” Bales said. “But I think just seeing how people use it and where the use cases are will determine if we put it behind a paywall or keep it free. Ideally, I think the way it grows really big is, the majority of it, or all of it is free to the user. 

“So that's really the goal, if we can do it.”

Gambly is now live and free at www.gambly.com, or download the iOS app in the app store.