

Inside the Shadowy World of High-Speed Tennis Betting - wallflower
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/inside-the-shadowy-world-of-high-speed-tennis-betting/

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No1
"Tennis bans courtsiders to protect the sport’s integrity, U.S. Open
tournament director David Brewer said."

"In 2011, the men’s and women’s tours made a deal to sell their scores through
a company called Enetpulse, majority owned by IMG. Many of the buyers are
sports-gambling websites that provide the scores for in-play betting —
wagering on the match after play has begun."

So when someone goes to a match and transmits the points, it ruins the
integrity of the game, and when the tournament operators do it, it's totally
fine. I wish there were a law against blatant hypocrisy.

~~~
Someone
Counterpoint: allowing those watching the game to place bets on an event after
it happened (or to pass information to others that enables those others to do
so) is dishonest towards those who do not have access to that information. In
some jurisdictions it also is against the law.

If the tournament organizer is the only channel through which information flow
as towards the betting office, by definition, it is impossible for the better
to know the outcome of something he bets on at the time of the bet.

Of course, there are other ways to prevent this. For example, one can forbid
bets on events that are expected to happen within five or ten minutes. I guess
that isn't done because it decreases revenue.

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yuliyp
5-10 minutes isn't what they're betting on. They're betting on matches. You
predict outcome of the match based on current information. If you have more of
the match behind you, you can make more accurate bets, even if the outcome is
still an hour away. The information asymmetry means you can find winning bets
even if the market is otherwise efficient.

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brucehart
Interesting parallels between this story and the prologue of the excellent
book Fortune's Formula. In the early 1900's a former Western Union employee
became rich by setting up a wire service for bookies. He hired men to watch
the horse races and flash the winner in code to a nearby building using a
mirror . Someone in that building would wire the results to bookies who paid
for the service. This prevented bookies from taking bets on completed races.
Of course if someone tried to bet on a losing horse, the bookies would take
that bet anyway.

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soup10
Funny how similar it is to high frequency trading. They both invest a bunch of
capital to get better/earlier information, then leverage it to make profitable
bets and trades. Atleast in the professional gambling world they don't deny
it's a zero sum game.

~~~
joosters
Aren't they both obviously a zero sum game? There's a winner and a loser to a
bet. If you buy a stock and it then rises, you profit and the seller has
missed out. There's really no magical insight gained by the phrase 'zero sum
game'.

~~~
rahimnathwani
No. The stock market isn't a closed system. The movements of capital and
prices in the stock market impact capital allocation overall. Hence the
arguments that HFTs that provide liquidity benefit the market because
liquidity enables a larger pool of firms to seek listings or issue equity or
debt.

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prawn
Even the basketball league in New Zealand is introducing courtsiding policy.
It strikes me as completely ridiculous in all sports.

If you want to offer real-time betting on sporting minutiae and for some
reason you can't do it such that some able to bet or gain information in real-
time could screw you over, tough luck.

What do we ultimately lose without the policy? An inability to bet on the next
point right up to it happening? Big deal.

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panarky
At the center of this is a Markov model that gives the courtsider's employer a
small betting edge with each additional point.

[http://summerofjeff.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/python-code-
for...](http://summerofjeff.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/python-code-for-tennis-
markov/)

~~~
vundervul
Much better statistical models are probably possible. That is basically the
simplest possible model of a match.

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malbs
There are services you can subscribe to for live (in-play) statistical
information for football. This is exactly the same thing. You position
yourself on betfair, pay a bundle of money for a "courtside" feed, because all
media broadcasts are delayed, and you have a slight advantage again the
average punter who doesn't have access to the feed, oh and the data feeds
aren't cheap either.

Usually it's the large internet based bookies who subscribe to these feeds so
as not to over-expose themselves to the public

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olliecod
This is a hugely interesting article. I used to prosecute corrupt betting
practices in horseracing - before I decided to join the startup ecosystem -
and this is a huge problem. A combination of human refereeing delay and TV
transmission, combined with the betting public's desire to have in-running
better on all points/outcomes, ensures that the race is on to get the result
of any point up to the exchanges before the market settles. Some say that the
advent of Betfair caused this problem, this is of course not true, it simply
gave the normal punter easier access to a greater range of options (i.e. lay
betting).

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malbs
Also back in the olden days of ring side bookies at the race tracks, it was
illegal to transmit information "off-track".

It didn't stop people inventing systems to do it though.

Clever use of very old mobile phones which used acoustics to transmit bookies
markets off-track, and then used for wagering purposes. It's been around for a
while.

These day's it's just not necessary. You have the William Hills, the
Ladbrokes, the Tom Waterhouses, the various on-line bookies, all providing
easily scrape-able data sources.

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atmosx
Sorry there's something I'm missing. Are talking about games with no coverage
at all?

When plays Djokovic vs Murray at US open, how many seconds before the
TV/iPhone/Android applications transmits the signal/point/data?

I don't get why do they need a courtsider. Can someone explain what I'm
obviously missing here???

~~~
giergirey
The television delay for "live" sports seems to be surprisingly high (and has
got worse since the advent of digital TV); we're talking 5-10 seconds here.
Probably even more for streaming video.

~~~
pimlottc
Would be interested to see a breakdown of how all the additional latency is
added. I'm sure part of it is from the increased of overlaid graphics. The
recently-posted article about the virtual American football firstdown line
mentioned that they added a 2/3 seconds delay to accommodate the technology
(at least, in the original implementation).

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rajacombinator
Having dabbled in sports betting this sounds like a business with terrible ROC
and no scalability.

~~~
ugexe
These aren't guys dabbling in sports betting, they are betting $50k+ per game
and often time it's multiple games a day. Having dealt with many of such
people I can tell you that the ROC can be ridiculous. Not only that, it
doesn't have to scale well because there are only so many sporting matches
each day. Universities already do this with recruiters (sending individuals
all over to get info on every kid in some assigned area)

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anonymousDan
I'm surprised they don't have custom hand-held score clickers that would allow
them to send out scores more discreetly (e.g. by forwarding over a phone
hidden in their pocket).

~~~
thesis
In the article it says that he does it with his phone in his pocket.

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pbreit
While I have some ideas, a bit surprised so little explanation on how info
used to improve bets. The article took forever to not say very much.

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jpatokal
_" The FFT bans courtsiding because it “owns the right to the data.”_

Wat. Especially given that courtsiders are usually making their point
determinations _before_ the official results. Has this argument ever been
tested in court?

~~~
sellandb
It never will be. Tennis tournaments take place on private property and you
agree to certain terms that ban you from "transmitting match data" by
purchasing a ticket and attending. The tournament can throw anyone out that
they please at their discretion.

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StefanKarpinski
Is this real and not just intended to make a point about high frequency
trading?

