How a 29-year-old Aussie and his team set the odds for the Super Bowl

FrontPageBets spent some time this week with PointsBet head oddsmaker Jay Croucher to discuss preparations for Super Bowl 56. Croucher, a 29-year-old Australia native, discussed a variety of topics with FPB as he and his staff of traders prepare for the biggest betting event of the year.

Question: Walk me through your last two weeks. How intense are your preparations for Super Bowl compared to the rest of the year?

Answer: Super Bowl is definitely the biggest singular betting event of the year. Nothing else is really even close. March Madness is the only thing that really compares in terms of intensity. The reason it is so intense is not so much the main markets in terms of the line, the totals, the money line. There’s a lot of liquidity in those markets, obviously. In terms of trading them, they’re not particularly difficult. It’s more about the risk management aspect. We offer so many markets, so many props, so many player markets that are naturally not as solid as the main line. So building out, pricing all those markets, managing them as betting prices is extremely labor intensive. There’s a lot of demand. That’s what makes it the biggest betting event of the year.

Q: The line has been moving since the open at Rams by 3.5 to Rams by 4.5. What are the key factors you are considering as we move closer to kickoff?

A: It’s been bouncing around. I think the main thing here is the difference between 3.5 and 5.5 is not that significant. Rams -3.5 is -120, Rams -5.5 in an alternate line would be +100. It’s not crossing key numbers of 3 or 7 or even a less key number like 6. It’s just moving around, finding its way. But in that zone it has settled. Most of our early money was actually on the Bengals particularly when it got to 4.5. But now we are seeing a pretty consistent flow of Rams money where people are just a little bit more comfortable betting on the more loaded team.

Q: How long have you been an oddsmaker and how different is it sport to sport?

A: I’ve been in the industry for five years. I started in Australia then moved over with PointsBet to the U.S. two-and-a-half years ago. I think that in terms of booking different sports, every sport presents its own challenges. The NBA, night-to-night with all the injury news is difficult in that sense. College basketball and college football, the lines are going to move around a lot more because there’s not as much information that’s readily available as there is about pro sports. I think, with the NFL we’ve got great confidence in the main markets in the lines and totals because there is so much liquidity that’s been poured into those markets through the regular season and particularly the playoffs and the Super Bowl. The challenges for us are more on the props side and the player side. We’re starting to see so much thirst from the betting public for those markets. And that’s why we’ve invested a lot of resources into things like this new product called live, same game parlay, where you can combine correlated outcomes in play. So you can be betting on Matthew Stafford to throw for more than 300 yards and the Rams to win by 10 plus halfway through the second quarter if you think it’s trending that way. That’s because there’s such an appetite with the betting public for those type of markets. We’re taking about as many bets for Cooper Kupp to score a touchdown as we are on Rams -4.5.

Q: You’re a young guy from Australia. How did you get into this game?

A: I turn 30 in a few months. I got into it because my background in Australia was as a lawyer. Being a lawyer just wasn’t that interesting. The opportunity to get into this space and have my job revolve around talking about Steph Curry and Matthew Stafford and Mike Trout as opposed to drafting contracts and sub licenses … It was a no-brainer decision for me. I grew up not necessarily gambling but approaching sports through the lens of probability. When my Australian football team was down two goals late in the fourth quarter, I’m thinking are they like 20 percent chance to win this, 15 percent chance to win this?  When you look at sports through that lens it really lends itself to gambling. I’ve always been passionate about sports from that angle. An opportunity arose at PointsBet and I kind of leapt at it. American sports are huge in Australia. If you walk around the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, you’ll see Kevin Durant jerseys, Tom Brady jerseys. These are global sports now. It wasn’t the biggest learning curve coming over here. But college football and basketball have been a pretty steep learning curve because we don’t care about those sports in Australia.

Q; How much does homefield matter this week at the Super Bowl?

A: That’s definitely been the most interesting and nuanced aspect of pricing the spread this week. Home-field advantage is lessening, full stop. Traditionally, home-field advantage was a field goal. When the Eagles would play the Cowboys in Week 17 for the NFC East, it would be the home team favored by 3. Now we think homefield is worth 1.5 to 2 points. In the Super Bowl, we’re trading homefield as between one half to one full point for the Rams. The reason it’s less is because so many of the aspects of homefield have to do with the fans and the impact they can have on referees. The Rams don’t really have that many fans anyway. That’s going to be lessened this week with more of a neutral crowd. There will probably be more neutrals cheering for the Bengals because they are the better story. Then there’s things like rest and travel. Those are mitigated because the Bengals will be rested for two weeks. The travel schedule is easier. But certainly the familiarity of the stadium for the Rams, the fact that they will have played two games in a row there, that kind of stuff matters. The familiarity, the routine. Knowing how the light reflects off a certain part of the field, all of that stuff helps you.

Q: What do you think would most surprise bettors/fans about how odds are generated?

A: I think maybe the most surprising thing is just how violently they can change. Particularly since we are seeing so much activity shift in play. It’s all about in play and that’s what we want to focus on and be best on. That’s why we’ve invested so much time and resources into products like live same game parlay. I’ve spent the past week in L.A. talking about the line and how it’s Rams -4.5, Rams -4. We focus on it so much. But if Matthew Stafford throws on pick in the first quarter, and a pick is generally worth 5 points in the spread, just one moment of madness from Stafford, which he has been prone to this season and all of the sudden the Bengals are favorites. Particularly with the NFL, given it is just 60 minutes and these teams have so few drives in a one-game sample, the odds change so significantly, so quickly off individual events. I think most people would think if Stafford throws a pick-6 on the first play of the game, that the Rams have been favored for two weeks, they’ll be favored to win this. They won’t. The Bengals will flip to favorite immediately.

Q: The American Gaming Association released a survey this week that said they expect $7.6 billion to be bet on Super Bowl 56. As more U.S. states go legal, what event becomes the second-most bet?

A: March Madness. It’s not a singular event but particularly the first two days of the tournament. When you have 13 seeds upsetting four seeds. You have all of those games happening, that is definitely from our side the really big event to prepare for. The World Series, the NBA Finals, they just don’t quite stack up in terms of individual events. Obviously there’s a heap of interest in them. But there not one-off games. You can’t treat them as a singular event in terms of all the activity traded on one or two days. It’s definitely the Super Bowl, a big drop, then March Madness.

Q: How will your day go Sunday? When do you start, when do you finish and when do you go enjoy a beer and be thankful it’s over?

A: The issue now is with all this in-play betting being almost as much of a lift as the premier stuff. You can’t really relax until the final whistle. We have a global team now, we’ve got traders in Australia, in Europe in addition to our offices in Denver and Jersey City. Our American team will get in at 5:30 a.m. Eastern. They’ll have their shift and then work all the way through midnight. Certainly the trading room will be filled all day up until the final whistle. Even then as we’re settling markets … a lot of these markets are not automatically settling. We don’t have a computer model that automatically resolves bets from the color of the Gatorade that gets dumped on the winning coach so … we work with our customer service and resulting teams on those so. It’s definitely the longest day of the year.

Q: How does the proliferation of in-game betting change your job?

A: The way our in-play product works is we’re running off a model that we built ourselves that has pricing based on every event that happens in the game. But we’ve still got traders overlooking that model and those prices and making sure everything is as it should be. We’re just kind of praying there aren’t too many outlier events that really mess with the model. For instance if Matthew Stafford gets knocked out halfway through the first quarter then all of a sudden the in-play becomes absolute chaos. There’s no model that tell us what to do necessarily. We have to make an assessment on what’s the likelihood on when he comes back, the most likely point at which he comes back, what’s the dropoff from him to the backup. All of that stuff. That’s when in-play trading becomes really complicated. Outside of that, it’s really just kind of checking to make sure the model is working as it should and that the prices are coherent.

Q: Any advice for prospective bettors on the game?

A: I’d just encourage bettors to look beyond the spread and the total. This is the Super Bowl. We’re offering hundreds, up to a thousand markets on this game. We’re offering a lot of really weird and unique markets we wouldn’t offer for most games. And try betting in play. That’s where this is headed. We think that within a couple years, 70 to 80 percent of bets will be in play. Previously your in-play betting options were pretty sparse. Now, with the stuff we are offering you can bet on Cam Akers’ rushing yards halfway through the second quarter and parlay that into the Rams to cover the spread if you think that they’re going to dominate and there’s going to be a lot of running the ball in the second half. There are just so many ways to get involved in the game.       

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