From Chalkboards to Apps: How Sports Betting Went Digital

Sports betting has changed beyond recognition since the days of betting slips and racecourse boards. The interesting part is what made that possible. Behind every tap on a phone sits more than a century of new technology, faster data and clever engineering built to keep up with the sport you are watching.

Put a bet on during a match today and you barely think about what is happening behind the screen. The odds are there, the game is live and your phone is already in your hand. Go back far enough, though, and somebody at the racecourse was doing the sums and writing the latest totals on a chalkboard. Sports betting has come a hell of a long way to get into your pocket.

That change did not happen in one jump. Betting had to become faster to calculate, easier to update and practical to use away from a physical counter. Each new piece of technology solved part of the problem, eventually turning something tied to a place into something that follows the game.

The Sportsbook Moved Into Your Pocket

The biggest change is easy to miss because using a phone has become such a normal part of watching sport. A match can be on the television while the sportsbook sits on the screen in your hand, ready whenever you want to check what is happening.

That entire process now sits behind online sports betting. SpinBet has a dedicated Sports Home and live section available through the web, iOS and Android, with its sportsbook rules and sports promotions sitting inside the same digital service.

The phone changed more than where you place the bet. Digital sportsbooks can offer products that depend on events happening during the game. SpinBet’s Multi Boost, for instance, applies a cash boost to the payout when every selection wins on a multi containing three or more selections. Its NRL early-payout feature works during the match, paying a pre-game bet once the backed side reaches a 15-point lead.

Neither feature makes much sense in the old world of filling in a slip and waiting for the final whistle. The sportsbook now reacts to what is happening in the sport while you are watching it.

Getting there took more than shrinking a betting counter until it fitted onto a phone. The harder job came much earlier: finding a way to keep track of thousands of bets quickly enough for people to know what was happening.

Before the App, Somebody Had to Do the Maths

Racecourse betting created a fairly basic problem. Every new bet changed the totals, so somebody had to keep counting them and tell the crowd what the latest figures were.

The early solution was as simple as it sounds. Pari-mutuel totals were calculated manually and written in chalk on slate. That worked until the volume of betting made the job too big for people armed with chalk and arithmetic.

Computer scientist Bob Doran, writing for the University of Auckland’s Rutherford Journal, records the breakthrough that came at Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland in 1913. George Julius’s automatic totalisator was a mechanical calculator that could accept bets from 30 ticket windows at the same time while keeping totals for as many as 30 horses.

Around 83,000 bets went through the machine on its first major day of operation.

That is the bit worth remembering when you pull out a phone during a match. More than a century before the app arrived, engineers were already trying to solve the same basic problem: process a lot of betting information and get the latest position in front of the bettor.

The machinery kept improving until computers replaced the old electromechanical totalisators during the 1970s. Once betting information became digital, the next problem was getting it to the bettor fast enough to keep pace with live sport.

Live Betting Turned Speed Into Part of the Product

A footballer scores, a rugby side crosses the try line or a tennis player breaks serve. Anyone watching understands the result immediately; a live sportsbook has to catch up almost as fast.

There is a lot going on during those few moments:

1. The event happens during the match.
2. Live data records the change.
3. The sportsbook processes the new information.
4. The market on the screen updates.
5. The bettor sees the new position.

Speed becomes especially important when the pictures and betting information share a screen. Amazon Web Services’ technical guidance for betting and gaming livestreams describes systems capable of delivering video and associated data with less than 300 milliseconds of latency. Other configurations operate below two seconds or between two and five seconds, depending on the technology being used.

Three-tenths of a second is a long way from somebody rubbing a figure off a chalkboard.

The live section at SpinBet is the customer-facing end of that technology. Information has to arrive quickly enough for the sportsbook to respond to the match, update what is available and put the new position onto the screen. The bettor sees the finished product rather than the data feeds and processing doing the work underneath it.

That has changed the relationship between sport and betting as well. You no longer have to make a separate trip before the game and then wait to see whether the bet wins. The sportsbook can stay with the match from kick-off onwards.

Watching and Betting Became the Same-Screen Activity

Professor Mark D. Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University summed up the change in a November 2020 interview with the New Statesman. Smartphones, he said, mean “people can effectively walk around with a bookie in their pocket”.

That pocket is the final step in a long piece of engineering history.

The old racecourse totalisator solved the problem of counting bets faster. Computers took over the calculations, while the internet removed the need for the bettor and bookmaker to be in the same place. Smartphones then put that connection beside the sport itself.

Digital payments had to follow. SpinBet accepts deposits through cards and Apple Pay, while cryptocurrency is also supported. Withdrawals include bank transfers and cryptocurrency. The account also includes The Vault, which lets a customer lock money away so it is no longer sitting in the available balance ready to be used for another bet.

The result is a sportsbook built around an account rather than a physical counter. You can watch the match, follow what is happening and deal with your betting from the device already in your hand.

There is still a nice connection to that chalkboard at the racecourse. The technology has changed completely, but the basic job has survived: take what is happening in sport, process the betting information and get the latest position in front of the person watching.

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