As US basketball fans, fresh off another memorable March Madness, look ahead with excitement to the start of the NBA playoffs this week, those planning to make a Same Game Parlay may be interested to know the inside story of how teams across Flutter created their favourite bet type.

It goes all the way back to June 2014, when 'Coxy85' - a frequent contributor to a popular Australian betting forum - posed a question to the group. "Can someone explain why you can't place a multi on the same event?" he asked, frustrated at an inability to select, combine and bet on several outcomes playing out within a single match. "Good question," replied another member. "If you send an email to Sportsbet, they may take it on board."

A message soon made its way to John Maguire, Head of Trading Solutions for one of countries biggest bookmakers, who was used to hearing what had become a common request from customers. At the time, Sportsbet was Paddy Power's emerging brand in Australia and John - an Irishman now with FanDuel - had just moved to join its risk and trading team in Melbourne, where he was focused on adding crucial talent in data analytics and quantitative modelling to take it to the next level.

"We were a single team allowed a lot of autonomy, but were definitely seen as the little brother," explains John. A chance office encounter between John and a senior leader who had travelled from Dublin changed all that. "We had dependencies on other teams to deliver the product, but following a sliding door moment, we realised we could use an approach that the Paddy Power's quant team developed and were using for another sport."

The Paddy Power Quants team were industry leaders in sports model simulations and had developed a model which enabled pricing simulations to be run within the model rather than simple event probabilities. While both teams had found a solution for 'Same Game' challenging, this cross-brand collaboration - an early example of the Flutter Edge - allowed John's team to "join the dots to solve a problem that had been staring us in the face for years."