That’s the chunk of truth that no US journalist or blogger or prediction market scholar will dare telling you.
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Czarek Sokolowski / AP
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The Los Angeles Times has a two-page investigation into the alleged corruption of that tennis game.
[...] In the room, it turns out, toil 40 people with 40 unusual jobs. They’re the “fraud team” and the “integrity team” of the Internet gambling colossus Betfair, which handles more daily trades than the New York Stock Exchange. Barton-Nicol heads the Risk Investigations department, and the specialists who undergo three months of training and spend eight-hour shifts scrutinizing wagering patterns had detected something with Davydenko-Arguello that qualified as, to use a popular British word, dodgy. “If they suspect something, they go in with all their toys and look closer,” said Robin Marks, a spokesman for Betfair. Their “toys” include software that allows Betfair to track every bet by every wagerer, even given the three billion hits, five million bets and one million account holders from the last year. If a wagerer bets only on soccer but suddenly turns to tennis, it shows. With the Davydenko-Arguello match at the Orange Prokom Open in Sopot, Poland, though, they didn’t need to track any individual. They just followed the galloping money total. [...]
[...] Those numbers would climb as match time approached, but they’d never reach the $7 million visible on Davydenko-Arguello in a mere $500,000 tournament in Poland. [...] On Aug. 2, though, once Davydenko won the first set, his match became official by Betfair policy. It would have a winner, whether through match point or injury retirement, and it apparently would pay out. That’s when seasoned bettors began peppering Betfair’s online forum with suspicion, and when an unassuming room in West London started buzzing.
Midas Oracle and CFM are the only webspots that report both the good side and the bad side of the prediction markets.
Previous: SPORTS CORRUPTION: The dark side of the prediction markets + CORRUPTION IN TENNIS: the Nikolay Davydenko vs. Vassallo Arguello prediction markets at BetFair + CORRUPTION IN TENNIS: Nikolay Davydenko claims that he is innocent.
UPDATE: Los Angeles Times
Next: Cooperation between BetFair and the British Horseracing Authority: IT IS WORKING.
NEXT: BetFair-TradeFair fights corruption, while TradeSports-InTrade does not.
