Castaway Cove

What is Castaway Cove?

Despite taking the top spot on the charts on Bodog this past weekend, NCAA games didn’t prove overly enticing to gamblers. The NBA captured almost all of the top-ten most-wagered events, with only one NCAA game making it to the list. Sports gamblers liked betting on the LA Clippers a lot, as the team’s games against the Utah Jazz and the Brooklyn Nets picked up 13.85% and 11.51%, respectively. In a surprise victory, the Clippers beat the Jazz on Friday, but couldn’t keep the run going and lost to the Nets on Sunday.

The Genesis Invitational, which Max Homa took down after a shoot-off with Tony Finau, attracted 10.79% of the wagers on Bodog this past weekend. Homa is intimately familiar with the course where the tournament is played, the Riviera Country Club, and has been a regular on the greens since he was two years old. With his Genesis win, Homa joins Bubba Watson as the only two players to take a Riviera victory with a bogey-free final round since 1990.

The NBA action returned to Bodog’s list next, with three games getting more than 10% of the wagers. Next, the NCAA’s Michigan vs. Ohio State game was popular with gamblers, as 9.07% of the bets on Bodog were placed on this game. Third-place Michigan handed fourth-place Ohio State a loss, walking away with a 92-87 win to improve to 16-1. Novak Djokovic vs. Daniil Medvedev in the Australian Open attracted 8.58% of the bets as Djokovic swept three sets. The last of the top-ten events on Bodog flipped back to the NBA, with the Sacramento Kings/Milwaukee Bucks and the Golden State Warriors/Charlotte Hornets games getting 7.63% and 7.5%, respectively.

About Castaway Cove

Across 104 matches and more than 100 million bets, AI handled every stage of the pricing lifecycle – from ingesting data and creating the offering to managing liabilities and settling bets. The platform recorded zero downtime, delivered an operator trading margin of 18% and, during the final alone, processed more than one million unique bet combinations.

Kambi had set itself the ambitious target of delivering the entire tournament through AI. By the time Spain lifted the trophy, it had provided compelling evidence that automated trading could withstand the scale and intensity of sport’s biggest betting event while improving the experience offered to operators and their customers.

“The Fifa World Cup draws global attention in a way that no other sporting event can, and it was the best stress test of the technology we could have asked for,” says Oliver Lamb, SVP of trading at Kambi.

What is Castaway Cove?

In the six months to June, Entain’s online net gaming revenue rose 7% in constant currency. Revenue in Britain and Ireland increased 13%, while the company maintained its full-year guidance for online net gaming revenue growth of 5% to 7%. So why is its stock price still so under pressure?

One answer is that the industry is no longer being valued primarily on the promise of endless growth. The market instead wants to see profit, cash generation and manageable regulation maintained across all facets of a listed business. Ed Birkin, managing director of H2 Gambling Capital, says the longer-term decline in gambling stocks runs much deeper than just changes to earnings forecasts.

“The industry share price declines have been much more severe than the cut to earnings projections which means that, while there may be some weakening in some companies’ fundamental growth drivers, the valuations that investors are putting on them have been the main driver of share price declines – although weaker fundamentals lead to lower valuations, so the reality is that they’re completely intertwined.”