Supporting Fanatics Betting & Gaming Customers with a Machine Learning Solution on AWS

As sports gambling evolves in itself, there's new ways to bet, there's new things to bet on. Think of a baseball game where you can bet on every pitch. We wanna make sure that, you know, they're having a very engaging experience, that they're having fun. Lots of people find a lot of joy and entertainment in, you know, the different types of games and, uh, betting experiences. However, at the same time, it's the responsibility across the industry to help keep players safe from harm. That's really

the heart of what we developed, uh, working with AWS and Fanatics. Fanatics Betting and Gaming is a brand new sports betting, and iCasino operator. Fanatics is an established business in the sports merchandising industry in the US and we're opening up a sports betting business now. Fanatics Betting and Gaming is a standard digital native company, and they're doing things with their data that most companies aren't, and they're using their data to democratize insights and actually change what mos

t companies, you know, in their industry aren't doing. The Responsible Gaming Solution Accelerator on AWS uses techniques that are backed by research. The goal of it is to help customers enjoy gaming without developing problem gaming behavior. And problematic gaming behavior has been present and has been seen in customers in brick and mortar gaming since brick and mortar gaming has existed. And those problems have transferred online. And in some ways, betting and gaming online opens up new forms

of that risk to customers. The solution we developed is basically one, to help, uh, gaming companies identify people who are at risk with their behavior, with respect to gaming. We can take a look at their behavioral markers and use that to identify if they're showing behaviors that could indicate them doing harm to themselves in some way. This is a problem the entire industry shares. It's not just a Fanatics problem. To attempt to solve it at the industry level we need an operator who's deep i

n the subject matter all day, every day. And that's fanatics. We need experts in machine learning and data science, and that's where our friends at Databricks come in. And in addition, we need the ability and the platform to promote this to a global industry solution. And that's where AWS comes in. So this collaborative approach allows us to move very quickly towards developing the solution that we need, but also to make sure that it's going to be replicable and available to anybody in the indus

try. All of the data that Fanatics has, for example, lives on S3, all of the compute that's taking place that you are kind of orchestrating through Databricks using the compute that's offered, uh, by AWS. What the research kind of pointed to is if people have a loss and then they have this feeling of, oh, I have to go place a bigger bet to win back my money, or if they're doing deposits from a large number of different accounts, or if they're making a lot of deposits that, uh, end up failing, uh

, or being canceled, that can also be a strong indicator of maybe some problematic behavior. Databricks and AWS bringing the power of machine learning to this problem to help us identify other traits which predict problem gaming so that those customers can be proactively reached out to and helped and managed before they go too far, before they've done something that they regret. To be able to handle the hundreds of thousands of accounts that we have in our system becomes quite a burden. So, one,

you need the ability to process a really large amount of data in real time. Second, you need the ability to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually determine when those actions are being taken. And lastly, you need an intuitive user experience for your responsible gaming team to be able to quickly understand the different behaviors that players are exhibiting and understanding if any sort of intervention is needed. Working with AWS allows us to scale this to the vast number

of users that we're gonna see. Being able to use their technology and their platform to be able to execute on all this data that we have. Everything begins and ends with the customer. That's what we're about. Responsible gaming is not something that only Fanatics Betting and Gaming cares about. It's something that any operator cares about, and that's where, especially AWS, helps us boost this to an industry level solution and not just a Fanatics solution.