Pioneering trading best practice for over two decades, we often do things differently to the market, having been the first to overcome various modelling hurdles, while also needing to find creative solutions to compete in the most challenging betting environments.

One reason why we’ve been able to hold an edge in recent years is through our use of R.

What is R?

R is a statistical programming language that allows our trading and risk teams to visualise and better analyse data. Developed by two Kiwi professors who wanted an intuitive statistical platform that their students could use to dissect data and present visual representations of it, R has grown in popularity ever since.

R’s strength lies in its relative simplicity yet endless scope for applications, and this has positioned it as a pivotal tool for the world’s brightest statisticians and data scientists, including within our own team at Pinnacle Solution. Facebook have used R for analysing status updates, word clouds are often populated with R, and sports betting and risk management is also a prime use case.

Basic R

So R is a language – designed to be intuitive, mirroring the way people think – which can be used to perform specific data tasks. These tasks are achieved by applying the language through what are called ‘packages’. These can be basic calculations, such as:

The sum of 2 and 2

>2 + 2 = 4

Or more complicated, like:

The probability that a coin tossed 100 times is fair if it lands on heads 40 times

>pbinom(40, 100, 0.5) = 0.028

R for betting analysis

These examples only show a snapshot of what can be achieved. To optimise our partner hold, we take it up a level, applying packages to data that concerns sports action and bet flows. These include data manipulations, statistical models, and various charts that we can use to look at player statistics, historical performance, and other betting data that gives us the edge to generate the optimal hold for clients.

Pinnacle’s data analysis teams have shared many of these packages for free, in order to educate bettors on the B2C side, but also to help advance the R community and its user knowledge.

We’re only scraping the surface of what R can achieve for bettors and for bookmakers, and it goes without saying that there’s many insider secrets that we can’t share publically. However, partners can be sure that Pinnacle Solution is at the cutting-edge when it comes to risk management and trading expertise, and R is one key tool that allows to excel in those areas.