Thursday, April 22, 2010 | 2:05 a.m.
Bet Tracker allows sports bettors to track multiple wagers and monitor their progress throughout a game.
The app gives up-to-the-minute probabilities of a ticket cashing and/or a team covering.
Kevin Torf kept thinking there had to be a better way.
As he spent the first weekend of the 2009 NCAA Tournament celebrating his son Kyle Torf's 21st birthday in sports books around Las Vegas, something bugged him.
The father and son would start their day by placing 20 to 30 parlay wagers and what ensued was a weekend of shuffling through tickets for Kyle Torf.
Kevin Torf, who considers himself only a recreational gambler, didn't understand.
"I was being pretty inquisitive," Kevin said. "I was asking him, 'Why are you looking at these tickets over and over?'"
Kyle kept looking at them because he couldn't remember all the spreads and combinations.
He even tried to separate the tickets into three piles — one for those looking promising, one for those looking like a lost cause and one for those in between.
"My memory wasn't serving me well," Kyle said. "It became a real hassle trying to keep track of it all. It wasn't working well."
Kevin Torf, a 47-year old technologist, had a thought. What if he could create an application that tracked all of the bets and gave a real-time calculation of their chances at cashing?
With that, Bet Tracker Pro for the iPhone was born.
"I experimented with my son's friends and other people I know who love gambling," Kevin said. "The feedback was really good."
The positivity continued when they released the app to the public in November. Bet Tracker Pro almost immediately made the top-purchased list in the iTunes store.
By the time Kevin Torf released a free version in March, he had sold thousands of copies. The free version was met with an even bigger response, and Torf said it averaged 200 downloads per day.
"Everybody bets these days," Kevin said. "This is a way for people to track that. Having this on a mobile phone means people take their passion with them. It's becoming a way of life."
Kevin Torf said the key to success for the app was differentiating it from other apps that provide scores by giving the probability of any single ticket winning.
Bet Tracker Pro updates game scores in real time and converts the momentum and scoring rate into a percentage that the bet will be a winner.
"If you're watching the game, you will come to a similar conclusion and know where you're at," Kevin said. "This is just a mathematic and scientific calculation to put that into a number."
It's a technological advance in the world of sports betting and syncs well with similar advances.
"It's very valuable with in-running betting, because it's giving you updates based on how the action is going," Kevin said.
A future version of Bet Tracker Pro will have the ability to analyze a gambler's betting history and give individual statistics. Although that wasn't the original purpose of the app, Kevin Torf said, he thought it was a logical next step.
For Kyle Torf and other bettors, it's so long to worrying about tickets.
"It's almost common sense," Kyle said. "It's just so much easier."
Join the Discussion:
Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.
Full comments policy