If you’re a sports fan you probably remember attending a game where you spent a fortune on tickets — and it was totally worth it. Your team won in overtime, there was a half-court buzzer-beater, etc. The kind of games that memories are made of.
But you also probably remember the opposite. Like spending $500 on Sunday Night Football tickets to watch your team lose to the Cardinals by 23 points in the sub-freezing Philadelphia winter (yes, if you can’t tell, I’m still bitter).
Enter GameHedge. The online ticket marketplace offers a 50 percent refund (on the price paid, not face value) if the home team loses by a certain amount of points. This threshold is 17 points for NFL games, 20 points for NBA games, 5 runs for MLB games and 4 goals for NHL games.
If the home team loses by that threshold or more, 50 percent of your ticket price is refunded to your credit card, from what they call the Good Game Guarantee. Pretty cool right?
So how is the startup able to do this and not lose money? GameHedge partners with a sports insurance company to “insure” themselves against the possibility that tickets they sold will need to be refunded. The insurance company is happy to underwrite this probability for a small fee, just like they underwrite other sports-related low-probability events like prize-winning half-court shots and holes-in-one.
And since GameHedge pays this insurance premium out of their own pocket, no fee is passed along to the customer — the startup says that tickets on their platform (which are sourced from ticket brokers around the internet) are “competitively priced and consistent with market prices.” So there’s really only upside if you decide to buy on GameHedge instead of a larger marketplace like StubHub.
So how often do these refunds happen? According to the startup, about one out of eight games will qualify for the refund. To date, the largest 50 percent refund issued by the startup was $3,300 for Game 4 of the 2016 World Series, where the Indians beat the Cubs 7-2.
The startup plans to add other leagues soon, but for now supports the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL.