{"id":220504,"date":"2025-10-17T19:44:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T19:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/220504\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T19:44:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T19:44:07","slug":"how-draftkings-turns-a-mind-bending-menu-of-player-props-into-mlb-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/220504\/","title":{"rendered":"How DraftKings turns a mind-bending menu of player props into MLB gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few hours before the first of Thursday night\u2019s two LCS games began, the DraftKings<\/a> app was awash in betting options around both baseball games.<\/p>\n

\u201cThursday Night Football\u201d occupied the top of the screen -\u2013 or at least my screen, an important distinction since DraftKings serves some content based on user habits — but below that was a carousel that allowed bettors to swipe left through 20 prepackaged MLB parlays, many cleverly named.<\/p>\n

\u201cHollywood\u2019s Greatest Hits\u201d had Dodgers sluggers Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman all getting hits. \u201cPatience, Power, Precision\u201d had the game scoreless after the first inning, Vlad Guerrero Jr. homering and Max Scherzer striking out more than five. \u201cBats Bailed \u2019em Out\u201d had Scherzer yielding four or more hits, Guerrero homering and the Blue Jays winning. \u201cRoll out the Barrel\u201d had William Contreras and Jackson Chourio each getting hits and Christian Yelich getting two. Each showed updated totals of how many users had placed that bet.<\/p>\n

The prepackaged parlays were the first MLB bets users would see, atop the \u201csix pack\u201d of standard bets that seem to be sliding steadily down the hierarchy of bettors\u2019 interests.<\/p>\n

After the six pack came wagers on how many strikeouts each of the night\u2019s starting pitchers would post, with a horizontal wheel that allowed users to toggle across the odds for each total ranging from three or more to 10 or more.<\/p>\n

A click through to each game\u2019s page offered a head-spinning menu of options, splitting them into arrays of game lines, batter props, pitcher props, either-player props, combined-player props, first inning, plate appearances, first of game, innings, game totals, team totals, game props, correct score and head-to-head player props.<\/p>\n

Those who forego that menu see opened pull-downs with the most popular player props \u2013- most often home runs and hits -\u2013 followed by a lengthy list of other props.<\/p>\n

A better baseball betting engine<\/p>\n

The first order of business in building a baseball offering this deep is creating an engine that can quickly and accurately set odds around the myriad possible bet types and the exponential assortment of combinations that can flow from them. The second, and perhaps more important, step is to present them in a way that users can discover and act on them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith baseball, there\u2019s a ton and ton of stats, but you can get lost in the stats,\u201d DarftKings Chief Revenue Officer Greg Karamitis said Friday morning ahead of another night with two LCS games. \u201cWhen we think about our product and how we build it, we try to … [get] deep in the head of our customers. When people are watching sports and engaging, what do they talk about? What do they think about? We\u2019re making sure we bring that narrative to the forefront. That\u2019s really our goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, there\u2019s an algorithm for that. DraftKings knows what each user is most likely to click on and can serve up bet types accordingly. But the bulk of content it highlights at the top of an MLB, NFL or NBA listing is led by narrative, especially around higher-profile events like the playoffs.<\/p>\n

That is most apparent in DraftKings\u2019 prepackaged parlays, which it strips across the top of its daily MLB offering, largely because parlays have come to dominate pregame betting in all major sports in the U.S., and especially in baseball.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe key is not to just jam together non-contextual markets that are not in line with what people are talking about,\u201d Karamitis said. \u201cWhat we said when we built this product is we want to leave space to build narrative around it, and we want to only put together combinations that we think are going to really resonate with our customers. So, each prepackaged parlay you see up there is trying to tell a story. That\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to do with our content cards \u2013- tell the stories and make sure we\u2019re putting together packaging that\u2019s interesting about that game and unique to that game and really tell the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

While prepackaged parlays have become increasingly popular, the most active baseball bettors often prefer to build their own, a process that can be frustrating on an app that\u2019s not laid out intuitively and difficult to discover for those who haven\u2019t typically bet baseball.<\/p>\n

Heading into this season, DraftKings launched a \u201cKing of the Diamond\u201d promotion designed to introduce more users to baseball prop betting, awarding bonus bets to those who correctly picked which player would hit the first home run in the highest-scoring game of the night.<\/p>\n

The popular promotion was a simple twist on DK\u2019s \u201cKing of the Court,\u201d which awarded bonus bets to anyone who placed a prop wager on the NBA player who ended the night with the most combined points, rebounds and assists.<\/p>\n

Both were designed to helped introduce users to the breadth of prop bets and parlays readily available -\u2013 if you learn to navigate them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to be able to price it all, to be able to have all the great micro markets and really push the player stuff and be able to do it really really fast,\u201d Karamitis said. \u201cTo keep those markets up while the games are going on is super hard. So, you have the content side and the story-telling side making sure we\u2019re paying attention to what people care about and then crafting the app around those storylines [so users discover them].\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few hours before the first of Thursday night\u2019s two LCS games began, the DraftKings app was awash…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[23073,49,48,16234,462,448,82],"class_list":["post-220504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-blues","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-draftkings","tag-mlb","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}