At Decimal Data, cricket is our specialty. We collect very low latency ball-by-ball data, create pre-game and live odds, manage risk and analyse more than 10,000 professional men's and women's matches a year for licensed sports betting operators, teams and media.
Because we're specialists, we also work with our partners and seek to optimise every possible aspect of the process to make our content easy, reliable and effective to use for our customers and their users, despite the complex nature of cricket.
If you're a licensed sportsbook, here's what we'd tell you to check before buying live cricket data, odds or managed trading services, from Decimal Data or anyone else.
Request a live demo and watch every datapoint arrive on a real game yourself.
Ensure you look for ball-in-progress (BIP) alerts and a live latency update, as well as scoring information and betting datapoints like possible wicket and possible boundary.
Suppliers like Decimal optimise their process to send BIP as late as safely possible.
This means markets stay open longer while still shutting out late bets, creating a superior customer experience.
Others may BIP send too early, too late, or not at all, and only testing will tell you which you're getting.
Check too that the live scoring and live odds feed publishes live latency rather than assuming it persists through a long day's play, every match.
If the unexpected happens, you want to know so you can adjust your processes accordingly.
Official data is collected in the venue under board rights, from the scorers' box, with dedicated internet connection to avoid disruption.
Unofficial data is collected from TV pictures and will be slower than official data because TV pictures add latency.
Suppliers like Decimal Data are laser-focused on reducing latency while maintaining accuracy and optimise every part of the chain to find marginal improvements that add up to better customer experiences. This includes how we build our live data collection technology, how our people are trained and monitored, how data is validated and corrected if necessary, and how it is accessible and delivered to clients, via APIs and WebSockets.
Currently our official data arrives in under 1 second (often under 0.5 seconds) and 98% of our remaining coverage is sub-5 seconds. You can see for yourself by arranging a live demo with our team.
When reviewing a cricket odds supplier's market depth, check four times: an hour before the game, immediately after the toss, five minutes after the start, and when an innings is down to its last two overs or two wickets.
Market availability can collapse when a match starts and can disappear completely towards the end of a match if a provider lacks traders, lacks experienced traders, lacks access to fast data, or uses models not built for modern cricket.
A good tip is to watch session run lines during a game. They're very popular but difficult to price and trade well, especially towards the end of a session. If a supplier lacks focused trading resources, they may pull the line markets down early, and they often aren't available at exactly the moment bettors want them.
Live cricket suits same-game multis, because matches last a while and have lots of natural breaks.
Check your supplier's bet builder works in-play, because many are only available pre-game.
Check also that it works across every format and competition, men's and women's, not just the major T20 leagues.
If yours doesn't, that's a good reason for your customers to visit a sportsbook whose does.
A good cricket odds feed tells your front end which markets matter to bettors right now, so they don't have to scroll past irrelevant options such as second-innings markets during the first innings, and lose their way.
Ask your supplier what metadata is carried in their feeds to help with market ordering, relevance by match phase, and what to surface at the key moments.
Markets that are perceived as suspending too often, for too long, are a top source of bettor and trader frustration.
A good way to check is to review a live demo during death overs in a T20 match.
Under-resourced suppliers may manage volatility in these key moments by closing the book early, for key markets or for everything.
This has an adverse impact on your users' experience as well as on ROI.
Bet delays don't only arise due to data-latency or advanced client profiling processes.
They may get imposed for avoidable reasons, including one trader managing too many games on a model that wasn't designed for cricket's many nuances.
This causes unnecessary friction for users. If prices change beyond a certain range during a bet delay, bets (or cash-out requests) get rejected, which can see the bettor discard their bet altogether.
The supplier's job is to be laser focused on identifying every cause and stripping out unnecessary delay without adding risk.
That’s how Decimal Data is able to drop its bet delay to 2 seconds.
Because different operators have different protocols for delays and bet acceptance, suppliers like Decimal Data also include dynamic recommended bet delays in their feeds to allow additional automation of operator processes should they wish.
The best way to understand the different supplier approaches to bet delays is to ask them directly. Decimal Data also has test accounts to show how we treat delays.
Markets that take tens of seconds to be repriced and reopen after a wicket mean your book is closed at a peak moment of bettor demand.
During a live demo with a supplier, check how quickly key markets like session lines are available again after a wicket falls.
Fast, accurate settlement returns winnings while the match is live, money that's frequently re-bet, and keeps you out of dispute queues.
Ask what data sources are used to settle and why the supplier trusts them. At Decimal Data, we collect our own data, while others are understood to settle off data scraped from somewhere else. Ask too how corrections flow through to bets, and whether auditable logs are available to support end-user or regulator queries.
Outsourcing what your bettors see and use is outsourcing a large part of your business. It's important to check how you'll actually communicate with the people running this service for you.
As well as thorough integration support, that means live two-way contact during and after games for settlement questions or other live queries. Ideally your supplier offers 24/7/365 support to mirror your own trading hours.
You should also expect transparent and understandable billing, a high grade of operational support, and real conversations about improvements and roadmaps that suit your customers and your market, and can be provided soon.
At a multi-sport supplier where cricket isn't a priority, those conversations may have to pass through layers and it can be hard to reach a cricket specialist, or anyone who can deal with queries effectively.
At Decimal Data the people who collect the data, build the models and trade the markets are the people you talk to, and they care about your cricket business the way you do. They're also passionate about cricket! If you would like to see whether Decimal Data can help you, or just ask whether it's really true that spinners have more luck on English county grounds in September, please email sales.team@decimaldatagroup.com.
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