The BETBY team, including CPO Sergey Tsukanov, outline how innovation can be a “natural result” of solving industry problems.

At BETBY, our approach to innovation is built around understanding where operators and players still face friction and creating products around those needs. Novelty or first-to-market status can follow, of course, but we see those labels as a consequence rather than the objective.

The mindset has taken us into very different areas of sportsbook development, from proprietary esports and hyper-localised content to continuous chess betting, fixed-odds prediction markets and, most recently, the launch of SlotBets Games.

BLACKOUT TO GGR GROWTH

Betby Games is one of the clearest examples of that philosophy in practice.

Its origins go back to the Covid-19 period, when the suspension of traditional sporting events left sportsbooks with major gaps in their calendars and limited content to offer players. While everyone saw their numbers going down, we responded by developing an esports feed capable of delivering betting content 24/7.

What began in 2020 as a solution to a very specific problem has since become a major part of our offering. In just six years, Betby Games has grown to more than 40 titles and now accounts for around 15 per cent of GGR across our partner network. During the most recent World Cup, for example, it accounted for one in every six bets placed across that network. Betby Games has also become an important vehicle for localisation. After analysing the market, we started introducing industry-first, hyper-localised titles such as eVaquejada and eSumo, built around sports with strong cultural relevance in different countries.

That combination of 24/7 content, scalability and localisation has helped Betby Games become one of the industry's leading esports products, with its portfolio breadth, market depth and customisation options reflected in 10 industry awards over the past three years.

PREDICTION MARKETS FOR SPORTSBOOKS

The same thinking led us into prediction markets, where we faced a very different challenge.

Prediction markets were already attracting global attention, but major platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi relied on exchange mechanics, liquidity and user behaviour that did not translate naturally into a conventional sportsbook environment. That is why we rebuilt the format around fixed odds, creating the industry's first dedicated prediction markets feed for sportsbooks and casinos. This allows operators to offer markets across finance, crypto, technology, entertainment and global topics through a betting model their users already understand, without depending on buyer-and-seller liquidity.

A NEW ERA FOR CHESS BETTING

That same gap-led vision also extended into more traditional sporting content, with chess emerging as a particularly interesting area for us.

The success of The Queen's Gambit, the rise of content creators such as Levy Rozman and the growing visibility of players like Magnus Carlsen have helped chess reach audiences far beyond its traditional base.

Carlsen's success at the Esports World Cup also reflects chess' growing crossover into gaming and mainstream entertainment, while Chess.com now reports more than 260 million players. At that scale, chess cannot be considered a niche interest anymore, and naturally that raises the question of whether the betting product around it has evolved at the same pace.

In reality, it has not. Chess betting has historically offered very limited markets, partly because the huge number of possible positions and outcomes makes pricing and modelling exceptionally complex. That disconnect caught our attention, helped by our natural connection to the game, Magnus is our global brand ambassador, while chess also has a strong following internally at Betby.

Our solution? Developing an industry-first 24/7 live chess offering based on engine-versus-engine matches, with exclusive markets supported by our own trading model.

SLOTBETS GAMES

While chess showed us the potential to build a deeper betting proposition around an existing audience, Betby SlotBets is the latest and most ambitious example of the same philosophy, tackling one of the industry's longest-standing challenges: the divide between sportsbook and casino audiences.

The idea is to slotify sports betting, transforming real-time sporting action into fast-paced, slot-style gameplay built around familiar mechanics such as reels, winning combinations and multipliers. We call the wider category SlotBets Games, while the act of playing is “slotbetting”.

In SlotBasketball, the first real-sports application, each 15-second round is divided into three five-second windows, with the highest-value event in each determining one reel. The final combination is created directly by the live match rather than RNG.

SlotBasketball is available across the NBA, EuroLeague and ACB, alongside selected tier-two and tier-three events. The vision, however, goes well beyond an individual product. We believe SlotBets Games can develop into a recognised category in its own right, much as crash games evolved from a distinctive mechanic into an established category with its own terminology and player expectations.

PROBLEM SOLVING

WE look at where operators and players still face gaps, where something is missing or where the existing solution can be improved,” Betby's chief product officer Sergey Tsukanov told iNTERGAMINGi about the company's sportsbook strategy.

“If solving that problem takes us somewhere the industry has not been before, then innovation becomes a natural result of that process.”

With Betby Games now worth 15 per cent of GGR across the supplier's partner network, Tsukanov said: “That number is especially important for us because it shows Betby Games performs strongly even during the biggest traditional sporting events.

“It is no longer just content for off-hours or gaps in the calendar, but an established betting product in its own right.”

“We did not need to reinvent prediction markets,” Tsukanov added, moving through Betby's recent product launches.

“The opportunity was recognising why they had not translated naturally into sportsbooks and adapting the model around the operator and the bettor.”

On the company's focus on chess, Tsukanov said: “Chess already has a huge and growing audience, but the betting proposition around it has historically been very limited. We saw an opportunity to treat it seriously as a sportsbook category and build something continuous, scalable and much deeper.”

Speaking about SlotBets, Tsukanov concluded: “SlotBets came from a very clear industry problem. Sportsbook and casino sit next to each other on most platforms, but the player journey between them is still difficult.”

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