How Rithmm is looking to help sports bettors win with modeling
Like all great start-up ideas, Rithmm started with a chance meeting at a mutual friend’s birthday party.
Brian Beachkofski, a mechanical engineer by training, had done probabilistic analysis of jet engine reliability for the Air Force, worked at the Pentagon and dabbled in the private sector doing data analysis for human service delivery. Put another way, he’s a very smart guy who is interested in using data to help people make better decisions and programs more effective.
Megan Lanham, a former D-I basketball coach, was a CEO at a pharmaceutical staffing company and had gone back to MIT to get her MBA in business. While taking a class called “Data Models and Decisions,” she began thinking about how it could be applied to betting and who was doing modeling in the sports betting world.
This mutual friend introduced them at a party in late 2019, they got to talking about the inaccessibility of modeling for the average person (and more notably, sports bettors) and Rithmm was born.
After about two years of testing an early version, primarily to collect data, track their bets and see if the models indeed had an edge, they got to the point of having a “couple thousand games that showed a positive correlation with predictions and outcome of the games,” Beachkofski told me over the phone.
Last week, Rithmm launched its sports betting platform, offering both a Core product ($29.99/month) and Premium product ($99.99/month) for users. The platform allows users to easily build personalized analytical models from a library of statistics. Users can choose the factors they value most in building a model, and decide the relative importance of those factors.
“Sometimes people will ask me, ‘If your models work, why don’t you just bet [them]?’ Beachkofski said over the phone this week. “That’s not interesting to me. I’m way more interested in getting tools out there for people to have better decision-making than I am trying to find accounts, shake down pay-per heads and things like that.”
Along with the launch of products for the NFL and college football this fall, Rithmm also offers WNBA, NBA and men’s college basketball. The company has plans to expand into additional sports and leagues soon.
“The official launch of Rithmm is the culmination of our vision, hard work and passion,” Lanham said in a press release. “With the Core and Premium offerings and our groundbreaking NFL product, we are excited to usher in a new era of personalized, immersive betting experiences for our users.”
One exciting feature Beachkofski shared for the Premium product was an injury evaluator, which took all the NFL play-by-play data to get an expected points added for every NFL player.
“Once Travis Kelce was declared out [before Week 1], all of our Premium users were immediately able to see he was worth 1.2 points and determine if the market was overreacting or not reacting enough,” Beachkofski said. “Based on a user’s model that may have switched the pick over to the Lions, which it did for a few folks who really benefitted from having that available.”
The definition of success, according to Beachkofski, will be helping people with a “better, more analytical process for making their bets.” He’d like to improve best practices for the casual bettor before making a wager, as well as help elevate the public discussion around sports betting.
“Hopefully, instead of saying, ‘Who you got tonight?’ people start saying, ‘Who does your model have tonight?’ Beachkofski said. “We’re a tool, not a tout. We’re trying to make modeling and analytics easier for the recreational bettor. If we can help out some of the higher-end bettors, that would be awesome as well.”
