[sinker]

https://mmabetsharp.com

A website to help make informed bets on the UFC. It presents a lot of relevant data if you're serious about MMA sports betting.

I made this during the pandemic and tried to promote it through Reddit and Twitter, but it mostly fell flat and ran out of steam. I only scratched the surface of what I intended here. The data on the site is a bit outdated since neither I nor anyone has used it in a while.

A bit bummed that it never caught on within the MMA capping community, but I've felt I could always come back to it if the potential expressed itself.

[hnrodey]

This is rad. I'd love to see it updated with current data. I've tried to bet on MMA with mixed results, but ultimately tried to find a data driven approach to place wagers. My approach would net me tons of open browser tabs trying to track down stats about each fighter :(

I really like what you've done.

[sinker]

Thanks I really appreciate that. MMA (UFC specifically) is still wide open to advantage betting because lines are often highly narrative-based. Data itself WRT to MMA is often misleading though for so many reasons (e.g., low quality of opponents presenting a skewed perception of fighter ability). However, looking at specific things is often quite useful.

The submission charts section of the site was particularly useful to me. You find that some fighters are skilled at one specific submission and that sometimes their opponents are highly vulnerable to that particular submission.

A big issue I found when trying to market the site was that, the majority of bettors have no interest in looking at data, reviewing fights, or putting any time towards making informed bets. Most people prefer to place bets naively primarily for the sake of entertainment.

[jjxw]

I think an interesting observation here is that the very thing that makes it difficult to get adoption of this product/data is the thing that makes the product/data valuable. Without the naive/narrative/entertainment bettors it would be more difficult to find an edge.

Presumably there is a very small, niche population that would find this information very valuable. Funnily enough, those that do find it valuable are unlikely to share it - if they're acting in their own self interest they don't want other sophisticated bettors to enter the market and inadvertently help the bookies set the line more accurately.

[hnrodey]

I've done (by my own definition) quite a lot to scrape and analyze NCAAF and NFL games in order to identify trends for sports betting. I'm somewhere between your average sports bettor versus a data scientist, probably closer to the former.

Let me know if you'd ever like to connect. It would be cool to expand my network of people in this area.

[sinker]

I'm far from a data scientist. I'm just someone that has an interest in building UIs and saw a potential to look at data in a way I hadn't seen before. I'm not actively working on this right now, but if you'd like to drop a line for whatever reason, I still check my Twitter for messages when they come up.

https://twitter.com/mmabetsharp

[kennyloginz]

Could see this applying to the upcoming market in chess betting. Good luck!

[potamic]

Where do you collect the data from? Accurate sports data is generally hard to come by unless you pay for it.

[sinker]

It's freely available on Wikipedia, UFCstats, sherdog, and tapology. You have to scrape it, but you can also find large collections of structured data if you look around.