Before starting, I’d like to offer a general caveat to what you’re about to read. This post is not an endorsement of gambling. If you are reading this and are personally or philosophically against gambling, I respect that and am not attempting to change your mind. This post is an analysis of the fact that gambling is now offered on professional pickleball and is something that the PPA actively pursued as a business strategy for its product.

Online bets are not legal in all locations, and this content is meant for those aged 21 or higher. Winnings are not guaranteed, and you may lose all of your wagered funds. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER.

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An interesting news item was completely overshadowed by the “Tour Wars” that blew up during the late August PPA event in Kansas City, and now that the dust has settled in the PPA-MLP battle, I thought I’d circle back to talk a bit about the introduction of betting to the sport of professional pickleball.

On August 23rd, the Professional Pickleball Association officially announced the launch of its partnership with FanDuel’s sportsbooks to facilitate betting on the sport. This has been in the works for months, with the tour and its partners Genius Sports (which provides data and video) and Sportradar (which has created an integrity program for the tour officials and players) ironing out details for most of 2023, leading up to this announcement.

Quoting the press release from August 26th, 2023:

“Beginning today with FanDuel Sportsbook, fans across 10 legalized betting states and one Canadian province can now place wagers on PPA Tour events, including the Vulcan Kansas City Open which runs August 24-27. At launch, bettors will be able to watch the live action while placing wagers on different betting markets such as match winners, correct match scores, total points (over/under) and head-to-head. The PPA Tour expects all major U.S. sportsbooks to host pickleball gambling upon receiving approval in additional states.”

I spoke to some active bettors and a senior PPA tour official for this article, all of whom wished to remain anonymous. I’ll refer to them generically throughout.

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For those unfamiliar with sports betting and its terminology, here’s a quick guide to the types of betting initially being offered on Pickleball. Forbes also has an entire sub-blog dedicated to Sports Betting and separately covered the inclusion of pickleball betting in August when it was first announced.

There are three main betting options being offered in Pickleball: Money Line, Over/Under, and Point Spreads. Additionally bettors can combine bets into Parlays and the platform supports Dynamic In-Game Betting. We’ll introduce these concepts for the uninitiated here:

Money Line Betting. This is the simplest betting method in sports, and for betting on pickleball. For a given match (say Ben Johns versus Federiko Staksrud in a singles match), you can bet on who you think will win, plain and simple. The favored player or team will have odds expressed as a negative number, while the underdog will have odds expressed as a positive number, with these numbers indicating as the total amount of money that could be won based on a baseline wager of $100. The negative number indicates how much you’d have to bet to win $100, while the positive number indicates how much you’d win if you wagered $100.

Here’s an example Money Line bet:

In this case, you’d have to bet $600 on Johns to win $100, while a $100 bet on Staksrud would earn you $450. Betting on the underdog without any handicapping will normally win you many multiples of your original bet, while you’ll have to bet a lot on the favorite to win a small percentage of your initial bet. The bigger the negative number, the bigger the favorite. Despite being a prohibitive favorite in most of his matches, Ben Johns is being offered as a Money Line option, albeit at very large odds.

Over/Under Total Match Points. This is a bet on whether or not you believe a particular match will have more or fewer points than the stated Over/Under line (often abbreviated O/U). The Over/Under line is always expressed as a fraction so that there are no ties , also known as a “push” in betting parlance. Sports books do not want the hassle of ties/pushes, which means they have to return funds to bettors.

Here’s an example Over/Under line:

Non-finals on the PPA are played best of three-games to 11, win by two. An example match score might be 11-7, 11-4. Add up the scores of both sides from both games (11+7+11+4) and you would get 33 points. If you believe that a match between two players might be a blow-out, you would bet on the “Under,” thinking that the final score could be 11-3, 11-2 (total points just 27). If you believe a match could be really close, or could go to the third game, you would bet the “Over.”

Point Spreads: This would be a bet on how many points a player wins by, in a given game or match. Like with Over/Under bets, these are expressed as a fraction so that there are no ties or pushes.

Here’s an example Point Spread on an entire match:

If you believe that Ben & Collin will score 8 points more than Dylan & JW in this match, then you would take the Johns brothers in this bet and you would “give the points” to Frazier & Johnson. If you believe the reverse is true, you’d bet on Frazier & Johnson and would “take the points” in the bet. Once they play, you’d add up the total points scored for both teams. In the PPA Cincinnati Pro doubles final just competed, the Johns brothers topped Frazier & Johnson by the scores of 11-6, 11-6, 8-11, 11-8. Adding up the scores, the Johns brothers scored 11+11+8+11=41 total points. Meanwhile, JW & Dylan scored 6+6+11+8=31 total points.

So, if you had taken the Johns brothers -7.5, their adjusted points figure is now 41 minus 7.5, which is 33.5, which is more than the 31 total points their opponents scored, so they would be the “winner” in this point spread bet.

Parlays are combination bets that allow you to connect several individual bets together for a bigger payout, albeit at bigger risk. You could parlay any of the three types of individual bets listed above together and treat that as its own specific bet. For example, let’s say you were really confident that Ben Johns was going to have a strong match. You could parlay all three of these bets togethers:

If all three of these bets win, you would receive a payout likely several times your initial investment. But if any of these three individual bets lose, you lose the entire amount gambled.

Dynamic In-Game Betting: for some of the matches, there will be constantly changing betting options as each match progresses, and bettors can make in-game bets capturing these modified odds.

For example, let’s say a match started and Tyson McGuffin was initially a -400 favorite to win from the onset. Tysons then wins the first game; the Money Line odds may then change and you can now bet on Tyson to win, but the odds may now change to be -800 (meaning, you’d have to bet much more since he’s an even heavier favorite than at the onset). These kinds of in-game betting are useful if you suspect that the first game may not be indicative of what the final score might be, or if you want to play a hunch.

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So, now that gambling on the PPA is here, are there any opportunities to be had in the market for those pickleball fans who are “in the know” about our sport? Yes, it seems definitely so. Astute pickleball fans and insiders who follow the sport closely have some clear built-in advantages right now, and those who know where to find information and how to use it are finding themselves coming out well ahead in their betting experiences. Here’s a few examples from the first two weekends of betting.

1. Editors at The Dink documented their betting patterns for the first couple of days at the latest PPA event held in Cincinnati to decent results. They tripled their money on singles day, playing hunches and trying a number of different combinations of bets. They were not nearly as successful betting Mixed Doubles the next day, but were also attempting to bet on every single match available as opposed to being strategic on the matches they bet. A good lesson here; it is harder to bet doubles than singles.
2. The brains behind DUPR’s algorithm Scott Mendelssohn provided some analysis of DUPR’s predictive model versus FanDuel’s model to compare performance. These results were posted to this reddit thread after the first weekend of betting in Kansas City. The methodology is listed (Scott is quite meticulous and documented his work excellently in the thread), but the results were clear: had you followed DUPR’s recommendations, you would have gone 14-2 in betting and turned $100 into $829.
3. Lastly, I spoke with two active bettors C.J. and H.J. from Illinois (who wished to remain anonymous) about their experiences and strategies. They’ve turned a $4k initial investment into more than $16k thus far and have reported pretty astonishing results (17 for 17 the first day they bet in KC, then 23 for 24 during doubles day).

For those inclined to give betting a try, the following points are clear (some of which C.J & H.J also noted):

Are there inherent advantages to people in the know? Absolutely. But that’s the inherent battle between the bettor and the betting marketplace (aka, FanDuel). As long as there’s no chicanery going on with the players, it’s fair game. I suppose we’re lucky that most of the players on the PPA just got paid big time; the last thing they want right now is to jeopardize the fat contracts they just got guaranteed during last month’s latest episode of the “tour wars.”

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I gleaned some interesting information from my discussion with the senior PPA tour official that is of note for those interested in betting.

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Now for a larger question: Is betting in Pickleball a good idea? The answer to this question may come down to your pre-determined opinion of betting in general. Just after the announcement, Arvind Prabhoo (President of the International Pickleball Federation) posted an Op-Ed to the federation’s website denouncing the introduction of betting. So we know where he (and the IFP) stand; whether he speaks for the entirety of the international community seems to be up for debate. Personally, I have no problem with gambling in general or sports betting in particular, but that’s just my opinion.

Like it or not, sports betting has become completely normalized in the United States, especially with the huge rise in online betting sites in the last 10 years or so. $16B was legally wagered on the last NFL Super Bowl, and an estimated 50 Million people placed a bet of some sort on the game. That’s 1 out of every 5 adults in this country. Even more will place a wager at some point throughout a typical NFL season. Most of the major sports franchises in this country have some sort of partnership with a betting site already. 44 of the 50 US States now have a Casino presence, many of which have Sports Books. 45 of the 50 states have lotteries or enable Powerball purchases (not the same as sports betting of course, but still a form of gambling). So, betting in general is here to stay.

Betting on racquet sports (primarily Tennis) has been in existence for years and has a large, globally established market. And, yes, there’s absolutely been chicanery within that betting market. Ironically, just as the PPA announced its deal the Washington Post’s Kevin Sieff published a fantastic two-part series on a global match-fixing ring in professional tennis. The article claims there’s a $50B global betting market on tennis, and the subject of the piece boasted a network that included 180 players fixing matches amongst the 1,300 pro events held each year.

Match fixing is, of course, the main worry when sports betting is introduced. The PPA tour officials and its players all took comprehensive integrity training, and the PPA’s Integrity Policy is documented in detail on its website. According to a senior PPA official, the training focused on education for the players and staff, showing how to recognize attempts at information soliciting that may impact someone’s betting choices, understanding how “Insider Information” is critical, and discussing the care with which players and officials should share information on social media. Of course, despite taking training and signing agreements that they won’t cheat, the PPA and FanDuel cannot guarantee that there will always and ever be above-board behavior from its players and staff going forward. That’s the “danger” of sports betting in general, impacting the integrity of the sport and thus damaging the credibility of the competition.

But do these possible downsides outweigh the potential benefits of adding betting to the sport? Clearly, the PPA has decided they do not. Betting will bring a ton of added attention to the sport, exposing it to a larger sports-consumption audience, which will only help it grow.