How to catch a match fixer.
October 28, 2015 3:18 PM   Subscribe

 
Don't allow gambling on sports. Problem solved.

*checks headphone* Oh, people will do that anyway? Oh shit.
posted by Bringer Tom at 3:55 PM on October 28, 2015 [3 favorites]


Where's the part about the NBA finals?
posted by 7segment at 4:05 PM on October 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


That was an interesting article. I am happy they have so many statistical tools and models to bring to bear on this issue. As fixers become more sophisticated in their methods it becomes even more important that those policing the matches also step up their detection capabilities.
posted by mosk at 4:13 PM on October 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm trying to imagine how a second-string soccer match here in Melbourne (where it's AFL/Aussie Rules football or GTFO) could have enough riding on it to be worth shipping players around the world.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:20 PM on October 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


Not only that, but shouldn't the bookies themselves be concerned by fifth- and sixth-tier club matches suddenly attracting large amounts of action? This would be a flag for me, before even involving stats.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:26 PM on October 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


I remember in the film version of Freakonomics there's a section on how stats was used to spot match fixing in sumo.

I was always amused by this story where match fixers were literally turning off the floodlights at football games. A bit unsubtle that.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:33 PM on October 28, 2015


People bet on a lot of crazy things, like US high school football, for instance. Or even Little League baseball.

The more bush the league, the less policed it is and, in theory, the easier it should be to corrupt a player and/or an official, or to find one who is already corrupt.
posted by mosk at 4:34 PM on October 28, 2015


That was a great article -- I support a team that play at the same tier as Hornchurch and you can see how it could happen - part-time players with the sudden opportunity to earn large sums. Or part-time largely unpaid referees doing it for the "love of the game" suddenly offered a wodge of cash just for a single dodgy performance.

Though -- why football? It's notoriously unpredictable -- on their day and with a bit[1] of luck, Vauxhall Motors can beat Manchester United. In order to properly fix a game you need co-operation from several people, not just one. Unlike various other sports, it's far harder to throw a game of football. But perhaps that's part of the reason, fixing football is hard, therefore suspicion is in general a lot less, and of course it also helps that football is the #1 watched sport in the world. That said, if a bookmaker takes large bets on, say, Gainsborough Trinity vs. Lowestoft Town, there's obviously something going on and that's what Sportradar's system is picking up on -- too much money going on an insubstantial game[2] will ring warning bells. This problem is exacerbated by illegal betting. Whereas licensed bookmakers effectively pass on risk (if you got a £1000 bet on the aforementioned game, you'd pass £800 to the next bookie and slash the odds assuming something funny is going on -- or use Sportradar), it's much harder for illegal betting to do this.

It's not unknown for the higher leagues to be doing this (Hi Bruce Grobbelaar!) and probably happens to some extent, but the difficulty is always needing several people involved and at the sums Premiership players are paid they become less easy to bribe ("You'll give me ten grand to throw the match? Dude, I earned 50 grand this week already!").


[1] Ok, a lot.
[2] with apologies to Gainsborough and Lowestoft. Though not big apologies to Lowestoft, you came back against us last season to draw 3-3 after we went 3-0 up and you'd been reduced to ten men. I'd claim match-fixing but we were pretty awful and I think it's just incompetence on our part.
posted by BigCalm at 5:02 PM on October 28, 2015 [5 favorites]


I'm surprised that the match fixers go through all the trouble of doing silly things like sabotaging stadium floodlights when it's so much easier just to cast a charm on the Snitch instead. I mean that thing is worth a riddikulus number of points.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:22 PM on October 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


But then you have to find a bank to change Galleons back into paper money.
posted by solarion at 5:47 PM on October 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


"Unlike various other sports, it's far harder to throw a game of football."

There were a couple of things in the article that implied to me that the fixing was mostly not about win-loss, but other stuff. At the beginning of the article, it talks about specifically betting on late goals or goals by a particular player. And with regard to the Southern Stars, it wasn't about the loss, it was about the margin of the loss. (Although, wouldn't that be more difficult than merely throwing the game?)
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:54 PM on October 28, 2015


Not only that, but shouldn't the bookies themselves be concerned by fifth- and sixth-tier club matches suddenly attracting large amounts of action? This would be a flag for me, before even involving stats.

Yes and no, I can only speak for tennis here - but small satellite or challenger tournaments routinely have big money bets on them - gambing addicts gonna gamble, and if they think they have inside info etc, they're more likely to feel they can beat the odds where the bookies may not know as much. Grand Slam matches are analysed six ways from sunday and there's a perception that the odds are pretty finely balanced.

That said, challenger tournament grapple with a terrific amount of match fixing. For bookies, one of the key things is how much, out of the ordinary, the volumes of betting are - especially if they are heavily coming in one direction. Fixers are smart enough to generally not place large single bets, but rather a multitude of bets from different accounts. Late-placing, high volume betting in one direction is usually a good indication of something dodgy, but don't forget also, you can bet on a lot more than just win or lose, you can bet on first or second set win/loss; the margins of sets; numbers of service games, all kinds of stuff. Makes tracking the fixing more challenging.

here's an example, and another. I suspect the practice is widespread to be honest.
posted by smoke at 6:34 PM on October 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


BigCalm, bang on. Fixing outcomes is fraught with difficulty. Hence it's all about spot fixing, shout out to Matt Le Tissier.

Also, who is Sportradar's PR agency? This is first class stuff.
posted by dmt at 7:16 PM on October 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


I have ... a friend ... who interviewed to work there. Tons of extremely detailed algorithms/number theory questions that had nothing to do with sports or betting whatsoever. Didn't get a call back.
posted by miyabo at 7:53 PM on October 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


Tons of extremely detailed algorithms/number theory questions that had nothing to do with sports or betting whatsoever.

Yeah, I'd expect that alternate jobs for most of their analysts aren't elsewhere in the sports industry, but at financial regulators, or at GOOG detecting advertising click-fraud. "Sport Betting" is just the source of their particular dataset.
posted by russm at 8:42 PM on October 28, 2015


It's an impressive operation. They can report in real time on every action happening during essentially every pro sporting event in the world (using an army of data entry people watching on special TVs with DVRs), feed it into their internal real-time feed, and update performance models and statistics as events unfold. They probably know more about many teams than their coaches or owners. It would make Nate Silver cry with tears of joy.
posted by miyabo at 9:08 PM on October 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


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