Stephen Baumohl, VP of trading at RedZone Sports, on beating low-margin rivals on US sports

The NFL announced last week it would play four games in the UK in 2017, and it was welcome news for one new British bookmaker in particular.

RedZone Sports, which launched in late November, is aimed squarely at the British US-sports fan, with the NFL front and centre.

“It’s a very up and coming area,” Stephen Baumohl, vice-president of trading at RedZone Sports, told EGR Intel. “I think it’s currently much underappreciated in the bookmaking industry.”

In this exclusive interview, Baumohl tells us how is firm plans to take on both shrewd punters and low-margin rivals like Matchbook and Pinnacle to lead the market.

EGR Intel: You don’t have any sign-up offers or other inducements on the site yet. How are you planning to reach new customers?

Stephen Baumohl (SB): We are still in our infancy and there will be offers and bonuses up there but we are going to let our pricing do the marketing for us, rather than gimmicky offers. We plan to do 1.95 each way for NFL handicaps and offer big limits and more markets than anyone else.

We think anyone that is into US sports will see we are better value than almost anywhere else. As far as getting that message out there, that’s yet to be decided. That’s up to the marketing team.

EGR Intel: So if you are targeting the value-conscious punter, is it important to be on Oddschecker and other price comparison sites?

SB: I think so, but to be honest we are using the current NFL season to get our feet wet. Before going on Oddschecker, we are making sure all our systems are operating correctly and then yes we would look to be on Oddschecker and The Racing Post and all the usual outlets.

EGR Intel: Are you confident you can drive enough volume to be profitable with such thin margins – around 2.3%?

SB: One of the things we do is try not to follow the market. We want to price things up ourselves and put our opinions into our odds. There’s always going to be a period of getting these things established but we feel we have the expertise on these sports that we can set the lines in the right place and make up for lower volume initially by being a little bit more efficient than the market. And as we get more and more turnover, we can become more flexible.

EGR Intel: The prop markets are obviously very popular in US sports with the heavy focus on stats and fantasy; will you be adding those to your offering?

SB: We will have all of those. We’re still in  a testing phase to make sure we can do the core markets properly but come the start of next season, if we’re not full of original props and fun bets that fans are going to enjoy then I’d very disappointed.

EGR Intel: Who would you say is your closest rival?

SB: Matchbook at the moment are probably the firm we are most closely modelled on in the UK. The Pinnacle model is also kind of where we are going and when/if they come back to the UK they’ll be a rival.

But we also want to add the extra things which those guys don’t do with the props. Things like ‘pick your own match bets’ or ‘choose you own yardage bets’ with different odds. We’d like to combine that with the daily fantasy stuff because it all runs together so well.

EGR Intel: Would you build your own platforms and models for these things or integrate something like Player Props which is live at Coral?

SB: We’ll look to build our own rather than integrate something like Player Props. I don’t think I’d want to put up 1.8 on both sides of a two-way bet. I’m a punter myself and I only want things up there I’d consider betting on myself. I strongly believe in offering a fair product and I don’t think 1.8 is fair. Hopefully we’ll have our own version of that up by next year and we can hopefully do it better.

EGR Intel: And what about the DFS product?

SB: It’s still to be decided but I’d like to incorporate a DFS platform into the site as a standalone offering. So you could do that FanDuel/DraftKings type betting straight onto our site. But that’s a long way off and hopefully it will be there for next season. I want a full US sports platform where a fan can come and have a bet if they have an opinion or play fantasy if that’s what they want.

I’m not a techy so I don’t know our limitations, but Amelco is doing all our technology, so they’ll help us and if we do need outside help, we will seek that.

EGR Intel: And how will you deal with summer, when NFL is in its offseason and there is a couple of months where baseball is the only major US sport on?

SB: We’ll have racing and the European sports but we’ll still concentrate on the American sports. Baseball will be big for us, but we’ll also use that relative downtime to prepare for the new NFL season and get those products ready. We’ll have the European sports but that will be more off-the-shelf.