Data Management & Engineering for Sports Betting

Leverage the power of data and code to implement, manage, automate, and execute algorithms for scalable sports betting.

Course 1: Scraping, Parsing and Databases

Data acquisition, extraction and storage, Python, Excel, SQL, CSV, XML, JSON, HTML, case study.

Rolling enrollment. Begin today.

Course 2: Automation, Execution and Bots

Github, Selenium, cron, APIs, authentication, scripts, end-to-end case study.

Rolling enrollment. Begin today.

Course 1 Scraping, Parsing and Databases

Data Acquisition

Methods of data acquisition: manual, scraping, APIs, and historical data. NFL beat-the-spread example. Google Sheets IMPORTHTML and QUERY. Microsoft Excel web imports and XLOOKUP. Data validation.

Scraping

NBA data example, introduction to Python: installation, terminal, Jupyter notebooks, modules, variables, lists, and dictionaries, using requests, Flash Fill in Excel.

Data Extraction

Parsing, CSV / XML / JSON / HTML, BeautifulSoup, regular expressions, data cleansing during ingestion.

File management, cloud vs. local storage, files vs databases, postgres and pgadmin, database types (integers, dates, strings, JSON, binary, etc.), schemas, primary keys and indexes, SQL, queries, joins, views, extracting from database, extract to CSV, connect to Excel, SQL library for Python, building a database of NBA boxscores, reparsing, challenges of building a play-by-play database.

Data Transformation

Populating a database, data visualization, exploratory data analysis, common data cleaning issues, outlier detection, indexing across different data sources.

Case Study

Golf data scraping, parsing, database loading, management, transformation, and analysis.

Course 2 Automation, Execution and Bots

Building a Robust, Reliable, Scalable Operation

Production vs. staging vs. development environment, GitHub, unit tests, docstrings and comments.

Automation and First Steps Toward Scaling

Batch processing, caching, storage considerations, naming conventions, cron.

Data Professionalism

JavaScript and password-protected sites, Selenium, automation.

Data Collection Bots I

Line shopping tool and comparison tool.

Data Collection Bots II

APIs, GET/POST, authentication and permissions, tracking and big red shut down buttons, circuit breakers, relationship to high frequency equity and crypto trading.

Guest lecture by Captain Jack Andrews

End-to-end case study with APIs and exchange trading.

Instructors

Harry Crane is Associate Professor and Chancellor’s Excellence Scholar in Statistics, Co-Director of the Graduate Program in Statistics, and Affiliated Faculty in the Graduate Program in Philosophy at Rutgers University.

He is currently Fellow at the London Mathematical Laboratory, and has previously held positions as a Visiting Scholar in Mathematics at UC Berkeley, Research Associate at the RAND Corporation, and Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is also a co-founder of Researchers.One, a platform for scholarly publication and initiative for intellectual reform.

Harry received his PhD in Statistics from the University of Chicago and BA in Mathematics, Economics and Actuarial Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

He has profitably applied statistical and other techniques to successful sports betting and other advantage gambling opportunities and has discussed these experiences on the Business of Betting podcast, the Pinnacle podcast, the Political Trade Podcast, the Artful Trader, Old Bull TV, and other media outlets.

He is the author of Probabilistic Foundations of Statistical Network Analysis.

Website: harrycrane.com

Twitter: @harrydcrane

Philip Maymin is a professor of analytics and the director of the Master of Science in Business Analytics program at the Fairfield University Dolan School of Business where among other things he teaches both an undergraduate sports analytics course and a graduate sports analytics course. He is the founding managing editor of Algorithmic Finance and the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sports Analytics. He is the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer for Swipe.bet, an Insight Partner with Essentia Analytics, an advisor to Athletes Unlimited, and an affiliate of the Langer Mindfulness Institute, and has been an analytics consultant with several NBA teams.

He holds a PhD in Finance from the University of Chicago, a Master’s in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Harvard University. He also holds a J.D. and is an attorney-at-law admitted to practice in California. He has been a portfolio manager at Long-Term Capital Management, Ellington Management Group, and his own hedge fund.

He was awarded a Wolfram Innovator Award in 2015. He has won numerous coding challenges and hackathons. He was named one of the Top 50 Data and Analytics Professionals in the US and Canada in 2018. He is the only person to have won both the Grand Prize for Best Research Paper (2018) and the Hackathon (2020) at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

He is the author of Financial Hacking.

Website: philipmaymin.com

Twitter: @pmaymin

Testimonials

The course was awesome!! Harry and Philip did a great job of laying the foundations while simultaneously providing value to more experienced bettors with advanced topics and guests. My motivation for taking the course came down to my interest in forecasting and markets in general. I think the lessons here are broadly applicable and will help me in my explorations on where to focus my time and energy on my next big project. I think regardless of whether or not I get into betting more seriously, my investment in your course is worth it...

I have really enjoyed the course. The biggest negative I can think of is that I wish each class was 4 hours, which is definitely a compliment. Overall, great class. I went into the class thinking I needed to refresh / enhance my quant skills to continue to improve. My primary takeaway is that I need to improve my data management and efficiency more than anything.

Enjoyed the course - given me a lot of food for thought and opened my eyes to some different approaches to things too. I like the dynamic between Harry and Philip presenting the course, and if it weren't for the late night start/finish for me in the UK I might contribute more but it's fast-paced enough that there's plenty to digest too.

The class exceeded my expectations! 10/10 would recommend to others. Outside of arbing, my knowledge on sports betting, prior to this class, was minimal. For the novice, this class is exactly what I was looking for. I come from other advantage play worlds so I signed up looking to add more tools to the toolkit. One aspect about the class I really enjoy is the level of detail you guys dive into by taking the time to prove concepts. A lot of “ah ha” moments. Overall the course has been invaluable. Thanks for putting this together!!