There is a common act of gambling that happens in offices every February. It’s a simple game with no skill involved. You purchase one or more of 100 “squares” that are part of the event.
Every team sporting event ends with a numerical score (“14”, “10”, “3”, “0”, “35”,…). You use the last digit of the two team scores after each inning/period/quarter/half. So if the score is Home 14, Away 3, then you have (4,3). You look on the grid of 100 squares and see who owns Home (4), Away (3), and hope that it is you.
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DraftKings created a contest for the previous “Big Game.” There is an app on Google Play Store and Apple, but I would like to make something prettier and improve my React-Native skills.
The Pitch
A gambling app for betting on sports squares amongst friends and the world.
How Does it Work?
It should be easy for a user to join either a single event or league. The most basic version would be a universal challenge like DraftKings’ where you would be able to participate, but without any actual winnings. The legality of accepting money is a huge hurdle. I’m assuming some of the responsibility could be shifted on to the league manager as a second step where I just offer the service for a fee, and what the league does with it is up to them.
You would need a backend that can store all necessary company information like challenges, leagues, users and results. This backend service would also need to fetch sports results and cache them around every minute during live events.
A frontend client would allow a user to login and signup for challenges. They should also be able to receive push alerts if they desire when a game is in progress.
I would really like to leverage an expected payout algorithm so someone could get a sense of if they actually have any chance of winning and their live expected value. This could also allow users to bet on games with different odds for different squares using advanced analysis like this.
For Real?
I’m actually starting work on this app now. At my pace, there’s probably no hope it would be ready for The Big Game in 2021. But I would like to see some simple client where a user could see a UX of squares and pick one at random. Honestly, I just want to play with React-Native and make some pretty app.
