Glossary
Same vocabulary.
Different businesses underneath.
Words such as engagement, personalisation, liquidity, platform and play sound aligned until somebody has to fund, design or govern them. These are the definitions used across this site—plain enough to expose where the real strategic disagreement begins.
Formats
- In-play
- Markets offered while an event is running, rather than before it starts. Now the majority of activity in most sports, and the reason latency and settlement speed became product problems rather than technical ones.
- Micro market
- A market on a small unit of play — the next corner, the next pitch, the next possession — usually resolving within seconds. The appeal is speed of feedback rather than size of return.
- Free-to-play (F2P)
- A prediction or contest format with no stake. Sits outside most gambling regulation, which makes it the only prediction product many rights holders will attach their name to.
- Play-along
- Any format designed to run alongside a live broadcast rather than replace it. Distinguished from second-screen by intent: play-along is scheduled against the match clock.
Data
- Momentum index
- A live score derived from possession chains, territory and shot cadence, used to describe how much pressure a passage of play carries. Mostly used for analysis; rarely used to decide what a product does next.
Mechanics
- Settlement
- The moment a market resolves and the result is known. The gap between the decision and the settlement is the single biggest determinant of whether a product feels like a wager or a game.
- Soft currency
- In-product value with no cash redemption — coins, points, XP. Usually framed as a step toward real stakes, though for a large part of the audience it is the product they actually want.
- Bet builder
- A tool for combining several selections from one event into a single priced market. Commercially successful and, structurally, the sports product that behaves most like a casino game.
- Cash-out
- Settling a position before the event finishes at a price reflecting its current state. Imported casino pacing into sports betting before anyone described it that way.
Audience
- Second screen
- The phone in someone’s hand while sport is on the television. Near-universal behaviour, almost entirely uncaptured by the companies producing the first screen.
Pricing
- Overround
- The margin built into a set of prices — the amount by which the implied probabilities exceed one hundred percent. Invisible to most users, which is precisely the design question raised by writing markets in plain language.
- Implied probability
- The probability a price corresponds to, before margin. The translation step a user has to perform in their head, and the reason odds function as a vocabulary barrier.
Interface
- Sentence market
- A market expressed as a written claim rather than a priced selection. The pricing engine is unchanged underneath; only the surface differs. See the Post-Odds Betting exploration.
- Conviction staking
- Letting a user express how confident they feel rather than how much they want to stake, and mapping that to an amount behind the scenes. Removes the multiplier from the interface entirely.
Strategy
- Convergence
- Used here specifically: the collapse of sport, betting and media into a single attention layer where watching, predicting, playing and posting are the same motion. Not a synonym for partnership or bundling.
- Entertainment layer
- The surface where a fan actually spends their attention, regardless of which company owns it. Whoever controls that layer sets the terms for everyone still selling the individual parts.
Distribution
- Creator pool
- A contest run by an individual host for their own audience, using platform infrastructure but carrying the host’s brand. Distribution shifts from media plan to person.
- CPA (cost per acquisition)
- A flat fee paid for delivering a registered or depositing user. Rewards the introduction and nothing that follows, which is why the hosts who drive retention tend to leave.
Infrastructure
- Fan wallet
- A single balance and identity spanning ticketing, streaming, commerce and prediction. Frequently a regulated product depending on market, so the legal question precedes the design one.
- Moment identifier
- A stable reference for a single passage of play, linked to the event, the fixture and the rights holder. Nothing in narrow rights licensing works without one, and almost nobody issues them.
Rights
- Clearance
- Establishing whether a specific use of footage or data is permitted. For small buyers this routinely costs more than the licence itself is worth, which is the real bottleneck in the long tail.
- Unbundling
- Selling narrow slices — a clip, a moment, a data field — rather than a full package. Consumption unbundled years ago. Licensing largely has not.
Responsible design
- Session shape
- Whether a format has a designed beginning, middle and end. Most betting products are built to be endless, which makes stopping feel like restraint rather than completion.
- Near-miss framing
- Presenting a loss so that it reads as almost a win. Well documented as a driver of continued play, and one of the mechanics worth naming explicitly on an exclusion list.
- Exclusion list
- A written record of the mechanics a team will not build, agreed before the spec. More useful than a policy document because it constrains the design rather than describing it afterwards.
- Harm metric
- A measure of player harm tracked with the same visibility as a revenue metric. Rare. The tail of heaviest users matters here, not the average.
Studio
- Strategic exploration
- A focused engagement built around one strategic decision: challenge the premise, develop credible alternatives and define the smallest experiment capable of proving the recommendation wrong.
- Decision sheet
- The compact end point of an exploration: the position, product and commercial options, risks, dependencies, recommended move and the evidence that would change the recommendation. Designed to create a decision, not document a process.
Which word is wasting your meetings?
Send me the term everyone appears to agree on but nobody defines the same way. That is usually where the useful argument starts.
mateo@nameless-stud.ioOr book thirty minutes to test the fit first.
See the thinking before you buy it
No polished case studies.
The unfinished edge is public.
SportsHack is an open R&D library for the ideas, interfaces and business models that could reshape sport, betting and media.
It shows how I think before the hindsight, the client language and the safe ending. Paid work applies the same discipline to your question, constraints and decisions.