Combat IQ, Bitcoin and Gambling Perfect Together
This week CoinGeek host Kurt Wuckert talked two things close to his heart during a recent CoinGeek Pulse episode: Bitcoin and martial arts.
Christian Giang, CTO and co-founder at Combat IQ, sat down with Kurt to discuss how joining the sports analytics platform for Mixed Martial Arts combines his passion for martial arts and his knowledge of the machine learning space.
Combat IQ bills itself as the world's first AI-powered Combat Sports analytics tool for fight promotions, sportsbooks and industry participants.
"Our goal is to become the leading data provider for Combat Sports," Giang says. "So the same way it exists for all the different sports, it doesn't exist in this way at the moment for combat sports, and the way we're talking about mixed martial arts and we're talking about boxing.
"I mean, in some of these promotions you have some stats, like how many strikes someone has thrown, or like simple kind of things, right?"
Combat IQ was founded in Toronto, Canada in 2021 as a betting data specialist, with the grandiose vision to become the largest combat sports technology companies on the planet. They already opened offices spanning three continents. In addition to Toronto, Combat IQ opened offices in Lausanne, London and Karachi.
The website's mission statement makes it abundantly clear that Combat Sports "deserve fair return on the engagement and commercial benefits their competitions create". Their technology connects all aspects of Combat Sports, from promotions taking control of their own office data, to the creation of immersive fan experiences.
"(But) using the computer, you can do a lot more things. And basically our business, the idea of our business, is to enable the extraction of this data from fights, so provide this data to a lot of different people that can use this data."
Giang discussed the importance of fan engagement but also the incorporation of this type of data into sportsbooks as a means of creating odds and predictions.
Today's top sportsbooks in fact now have whole departments dedicated to mixed martial arts events. Fights pretty much take place every week now. Some past UFC fights rank among the most wagered on events.
Combat IQ CEO and Co-Founder Tim Malik dismisses the notion that there are already an abundant number of sports data analytics companies in the gambling space.
“Typically when you look at some of the sports data companies, your Genius Sports of the world, Sportradar or Stats Perform, they all use computer vision machine learning for different sports, but largely what they use is similar to what Tesla uses, object identification,” he explained.
“They’ll use computers to figure out where a person is, where the ball is, but what we’re doing is so much more granular. We’re doing posture detection. We’re figuring out where fighters, how they move, look at their fist from point A to point B so we can calculate the velocity of their punch,” he described.
“There’s so many really cool data points that we can get into and extract and then use that to figure out what’s going to happen, so we’re in a really great position to provide unique and proprietary data to the market,” Malik added.
The startup has participated in the Satoshi Block Dojo program, a 12-weeks intensive incubator training regimen to guide companies like Combat IQ through the obstacles standing in the way of new businesses while providing access to investment funding rounds.
Combat IQ will utilize the BSV blockchain platform. BSV claims to meet the needs of large scale technology applications that include high transaction volumes, low fees and, something we've been reading quite a lot about here on the Gambling911.com website, micropayment capabilities.
“One of the great things about the Dojo is that they’re helping all the companies involved learn how to use blockchain in really unique ways for its utility. And typically, so many people think that it’s a transactional basis that blockchain comes into play, but it’s so much more than that,” Malik stated.
“And that’s why we’ve included it as a data audit tool for ourselves, so when we publish odds to books, we can quickly do dispute resolution and we can check back on what odds we published and we can really identify the point of error within the feed."
- Tyrone Black, Gambling911.com
