Category Archives: Gambling

Should Djokovic Be Fined for Lack of Effort Too?

Join us for the Paris Masters final! We’ll be blogging live this Sunday, November 4th, 7:30am Los Angeles/10:30am New York/3:30pm London (remember to set your clock back one hour Saturday night if you live in the U.S.).

Novak Djokovic had two wisdom teeth removed last week and while that may help explain his desultory play against Fabrice Santoro in Paris today, I have to ask: If Nikolay Davydenko was fined $2000 for lack of effort in a match in St. Petersburg last week – and he was – why wasn’t Djokovic fined?

Santoro was playing well and won the match 6-3, 6-2, but come on, he won 88% of his first serves and I can serve harder than he can. Djokovic is in the top ten in three of the four return of serve categories and he can’t return Fabrice Santoro’s serve?

If Djokovic is suffering from tooth problems, Santoro had it worse. One of his legs was taped up to protect his knee. Djokovic obviously noticed this and hit drop shot after drop shot. Santoro got to most of them, though, which was amazing for a guy taped up like a mummy. At least HE was trying.

To be fair, Djokovic had never played Santoro before and Santoro is absolutely unique. No other player on tour hits a slice forehand from the baseline and Santoro hits it probably 75% of the time, if not more. Djokovic had fought off three break points in his first service game and was facing another one serving at 2-3 in the first set. After seven attempts at trying to hit something solid off Santoro’s short and low slices, Djokovic tried to hit a winner down the line and sent it wide to go down a break.

Here’s the thing: it didn’t seem to bother Djokovic. Okay, he wasn’t smiling, but I never saw him get mad or even throw his hands up in frustration. If he didn’t get a fine for not trying, he should have gotten one for not caring.

There is a possible explanation. Djokovic has already qualified for Shanghai and he’s played lots of tennis this year since he reached so many late rounds. He might just be tired or he might be very smart and is saving himself for Shanghai.

For that same reason, I don’t understand why Roger Federer is here unless he wants to build up a cushion in the rankings. He hasn’t played Paris since 2003. Any good theories anyone? Did the ATP put pressure on the top three players to turn up in Paris?

Davydenko lost that match in St. Petersburg to Marin Cilic by the score of 1-6, 7-5, 6-1. He served six double faults in the third set. Clearly Davydenko would not have been fined if he hadn’t embarrassed the ATP with an irregular betting incident earlier this year.

The online betting exchange Betfair voided all bets on Davydenko’s match with Martin Vassallo-Arguello in August because the match looked like it was fixed. That incident unleashed a torrent of reports of suspicious match results and players – who’d seldom brought the subject of gambling up before – were lining up to talk about anonymous phone calls and shady characters offering them big bucks to throw a match. As you can imagine, the ATP was not happy about that.

I don’t think Davydenko or Djokovic should be fined. I have a better idea. The ATP should find out who placed repeated irregular bets on the Davydenko/Vassall-Arguello match. That way the ATP don’t have to pretend to be doing something about fixing matches by deciding who’s playing hard and who’s not, they could actually get to the heart of the matter


Check out our myspace page and add us to your friends network!

Federer’s Revenge

I wanted to write about the Andy MurrayRafael Nadal match but it’ll have to wait for tomorrow because there was too much good tennis for me to do it justice tonight. Meanwhile I’ll leave you with a funny video about a grunter, a new poll to figure out who’ll get the last spot in the year end championships, and a short bit about Federer and trading on betting exchanges.

Federer Beatdown

By the time I’d arrived in Indian Wells in March, Roger Federer had already lost his first match to Guillermo Canas. I was just plain annoyed but many people were shocked.

We understood it psychologically. Canas was convinced that he’d been suspended unfairly for being mistakenly given a banned substance by a tour-approved doctor. If you can’t trust a tournament doctor, who the hell can you trust? And what better way to express his frustration than knocking off the number one player.

As luck would have it, Canas got Federer again at the next tournament in Miami and beat him once again. Something appeared to be wrong with Federer in the first match but Canas outplayed him in the second. Federer was up a break in the third set and had two chances to go up another break but still lost the match.

This brings up an interesting question. Let’s say Federer was injured at Indian Wells, sprained ankle, blisters, whatever. On the one hand you don’t want to reveal your injury else your opponent will smell blood. On the other hand, if your opponent beats you and thinks he’s beaten you straight up, that could give him a huge psychological advantage and that advantage may have carried Canas through the match in Miami.

In case there was any doubt about the matter, Federer reminded us today that Canas is not someone he worries about. It took him only 21 minutes to bagel Canas in the first set. That was a statement.

Federer was all over Canas from the get go. Federer won 80% of the points on Canas’ second serve and he won 25 more points than Canas in the match. That’s a huge margin in a two set match. The final score was 6-0, 6-3.

Traders and Punters

I realized this week that users on betting exchanges are sometimes traders, not betters. (Betters in England are called punters.)

A betting exchange is an open market – like a stock market – and the commodities being traded are odds. In this case, odds that a tennis player will win a match or a horse will win a race or a soccer team will win a game.

Tennis punters bet on a player at particular odds. They research a player and figure out the likelihood that the player will win the match. Traders bet on the pattern of the odds. They study price patterns and figure out the likelihood that the odds will go up or down.

It’s like betting on the direction of the Dow Jones Index instead of buying or selling a stock.

Lots of trades in stock markets are made by software programs not humans. According to this report by Aite Group, about one third of U.S. trades in 2006 were made by computer software.

Given that, I wondered if there were software programs for trading on the tennis market on a betting exchange. And if there were programs, could they have contributed to some of the irregular betting patterns we’ve seen. Computers can trade a whole lot faster than humans and it’s possible a piece of software went wonky and started spewing out repeated $30,000 bets.

I spoke to a Betfair user and he told me that some traders use software to make their trades but it’s not likely that they produced irregular results. After all, I now realize, an irregular betting pattern isn’t a random betting pattern.

If you were fixing a match or had inside information, these irregular patterns would look very regular to you. They’d be exactly what you expected.

One last comment about gambling. Betfair pays out bets on any match that completes the first set. Wouldn’t it make sense to pay out on a match only if the match was completed by both players? It wouldn’t stop match fixing or trading on insider information, but it would help if there was insider information about an injury that led to a retirement.

This, by the way, is a plausible explanation for the Nikolay Davydenko/Martin Vassallo-Arguello match that started our recent fascination with gambling in tennis.


Check out our myspace page and add us to your friends network!

Cellphones to be banned in tennis locker rooms

I was sitting in the food court at the ATP Los Angeles event this summer when I happened to speak to an older Asian gentleman. He told me that he knows the families of some Taiwanese tennis players and he used to go to the U.S. Open regularly. When one of the players he knew would lose her match at the Open and go home, he’d take a press credential from someone in her entourage and he’d use it to get access to the players lounge for the rest of the tournament.

He’d never get away with that today. In fact, this year the Media were even banned from the locker room at the U.S. Open. Now it looks like cellphones will be next.
The ITF, the ATP and the WTA – the three governing bodies of professional tennis – are planning to ban cellphones and handheld communication devices from players lounges and locker rooms. No more watching youtube videos on your iphone or calling up mum or laying bets while you wait for your tennis match to start. Players will now have to be satisfied with watching Novak Djokovic do his imitation of Maria Sharapova in person.

Why such draconian measures?

Ever since Betfair voided all bets on a dodgy match between Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo-Arguello in early August, new information about betting on tennis matches has been tumbling out of players mouths. Most of the time they described an anonymous phone call offering money to influence the outcome of a match or a stranger walking up to them and offering money. But last week, Belgian player Gilles Elseneer said someone offered him $141,000 to throw his first round match at Wimbledon in 2005. That someone was not a stranger and it was not an anonymous phone call. It was person who had access to the locker room.

I don’t know how banning cellphones will keep people out of the locker room but here’s a situation it could help. Let’s say Roger Federer is getting ready to play Guillermo Canas in the first round(?) at Indian Wells. Someone in the locker room sees that Federer’s ankle is all messed up and he’s getting treatment for it. The player flips open his cellphone and calls in a bet on Canas who is a huge underdog.

Maybe it was an Italian player who nipped out to the players lounge and used one of the laptops to lay down a bet on his internet betting account. An AP article reported today that “several Italian players had online betting accounts.”

That’s trading in insider information and that’s a big no-no.

It isn’t just the players who are talking. British newspaper The Telegraph turned up a dossier compiled by a bookmaker that recorded suspicious betting patterns in 138 tennis matches dating back to 2003. No doubt many of those matches were not irregular but that still averages out to over 27 matches a year.

It’s a bit like the steroid controversy if you think about it. It’s been going on for years but no one has been talking about it. The Balco scandal broke open the steroid scandal in baseball and track and field. Gambling in tennis was broken open by a highly suspicious betting pattern on Betfair – an online betting exchange – during the Davydenko/Vassallo-Arguello match. If you’re using an online betting exchange, you can see the betting pattern right there on your laptop.

Is banning cellphones a draconian move? I’m not sure it’s draconian as much as ineffective. Unless tournaments ban cellphones from the entire tournament site, what’s to stop someone from stepping out of the locker room and making a phone call?

It would be more effective to require transparency for injuries. Any time a player gets treated for an injury, that information should be public knowledge. Players might run offsite to get treatment to avoid tipping off their condition to an opponent but that’s a lot harder than stepping outside the locker room and making a phone call.
It also shows you a problem with banning the media from the locker room: it’s easier for players to hide injuries.

Speaking of those online betting exchanges, sometimes it’s the betters themselves who alert the site to suspic/ should require timely and public disclosure of injuries and find out who’s laying the bets that drive suspicious betting patterns. They should try to avoid adding yet another security procedure to the many that we all have to endure as it is.

Pro Tennis Players Could Lose Their Cellphones

Cellphones may be banned from tennis locker rooms to prevent the flow of inside information to gamblers.

I was sitting in the food court at the ATP Los Angeles event this summer when I happened to speak to an older Asian gentleman. He told me that he knows the families of some Taiwanese tennis players and he used to go to the U.S. Open regularly. When one of the players he knew would lose her match at the Open and go home, he’d take a press credential from someone in her entourage and he’d use it to get access to the players lounge for the rest of the tournament.

He’d never get away with that today. In fact, this year the media were even banned from the locker room at the U.S. Open. Now it looks like cellphones could be next.

The ITF, the ATP and the WTA – the three governing bodies of professional tennis – are considering banning cellphones and handheld communication devices from players lounges and locker rooms. No more watching youtube videos on your iPhone while you wait for your tennis match to start. Players will now have to be satisfied with watching Novak Djokovic do his imitation of Maria Sharapova in person.

Why such draconian measures?

Ever since Betfair voided all bets on a dodgy match between Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo-Arguello in early August, new information about betting on tennis matches has been tumbling out of players mouths. Most of the time they described an anonymous phone call offering money to influence the outcome of a match or a stranger walking up to them and offering money. But last week, Belgian player Gilles Elseneer said that someone offered him $141,000 to throw his first round match at Wimbledon in 2005. That someone was not a stranger and it was not an anonymous phone call. It was a person who had access to the locker room.

I don’t know how banning cellphones will keep people out of the locker room but here’s a situation it could help. Let’s say Roger Federer is getting ready to play Guillermo Canas in the second round at Indian Wells. A person in the locker room sees that Federer’s ankle is all messed up and he’s getting treatment for it. That person flips open his cellphone and calls in a bet on Canas who is a huge underdog.

Maybe it was an Italian player who nipped out to the players lounge and used one of the laptops to lay down a bet on his internet betting account. An AP article reported today that “several Italian players had online betting accounts.”

That’s trading in insider information and that’s a big no-no.

In that AP article, by the way, notice that mainstream media finally caught up with the irregular betting pattern on the Poutchek/Koryttseva match a week after we first reported it here.

It isn’t just the players who are talking. British newspaper The Telegraph turned up a dossier compiled by a bookmaker that recorded suspicious betting patterns in 138 tennis matches dating back to 2003. No doubt many of those matches were not irregular but that still averages out to over 27 matches a year.

It’s a bit like the steroid controversy if you think about it. It’s been going on for years but no one has been talking about it. The Balco scandal broke open the steroid scandal in baseball and track and field. Gambling in tennis was broken open by that highly suspicious betting pattern on Betfair – an online betting exchange – during the Davydenko/Vassallo-Arguello match. If you’re using an online betting exchange, you can see the betting pattern right there on your laptop.

Is banning cellphones a draconian move? I’m not sure it’s draconian as much as ineffective. Unless tournaments ban cellphones from the entire tournament site, what’s to stop someone from stepping out of the locker room and making a phone call?

It would be more effective to require transparency for injuries. Any time a player gets treated for an injury, that information should be public knowledge. Players might run offsite to get treatment to avoid tipping off their condition to an opponent but that’s a lot harder than stepping outside the locker room and making a phone call.

It also shows you a problem with banning the media from locker rooms: it’s easier for players to hide injuries.

Speaking of those online betting exchanges, sometimes it’s the betters themselves who alert betting sites to suspicious matches. It doesn’t take an Einstein to detect an irregular betting pattern.

Tennis’ organizing bodies should require timely and public disclosure of injuries and find out who’s laying the bets that drive irregualr betting patterns. They should avoid adding yet another security procedure to the many we already endure.


Check out our myspace page and add us to your friends network!

Gambling Problems Spread to Women’s Tennis

Tatiana Poutchek and Mariya Koryttseva played a quarterfinal match at the Sunfeast Open in Kolkata, India, last Friday and yet another irregular betting pattern popped up in the world of tennis. The ATP is still investigating an irregular betting pattern on a match between Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo-Arguello at the Prokom Open in early August.

In both cases the irregular betting turned up on Betfair.com, a betting exchange based in England. And in both cases, the pattern was similar: the odds changed significantly before the match started and they continued to change despite the fact that the action on the court did not warrant it.

Koryttseva started the day as the underdog in the Kolkata match but by the time five games had been played in the first set, Koryttseva’s odds were almost even making her the favorite. The problem is that the players were on serve at this point, meaning that neither player had an advantage, so there was no justification for such a big change in odds. If Poutchek had shown signs of injury or Koryttseva had taken a commanding lead, the betting would have made sense.

I understand that Befair contacted WTA officials and the tour doctor to verify that Poutchek was indeed healthy. I left a phone message with WTA’s media contact to check this information but my call was not returned. Befair eventually decided to pay out all bets on the match.

The total bet on the Kolkata match did not equal the $7 million placed on the Davydenko match, but it was over $1.5 million, more than you’d expect on a match in a Tier III tournament between two players both ranked lower than 120.

Koryttseva won the match, 6-4, 6-2.

Betfair made the unprecedented decision to void all bets on the Davydenko match. Since then, gambling had become an open conversation on the pro tennis tour and a number of ATP players have come forth and said that they were offered money to influence the outcome of matches.

It would be tempting to blame the increase in irregular betting on internet gambling. Indeed, gambling on tennis has increased with the establishment of betting exchanges – online betting sites that allow users to offer each other bets. But it’s more likely that internet gambling has uncovered gambling problems that already existed.

Take horse racing for example. In a September 13th article on majorwager.com, Nelson Lardner described three cases where betting rings in horse racing were uncovered by Betfair. Two of the cases resulted in significant suspensions for those caught. In Lardner’s view: “…Betfair and the like are helping to enforce sporting integrity more than any other oversight body in this day and age.”

That’s not true for incidents involving performance enhancing drugs – another ethical problem in sports today – but for gambling it certainly is true.

I don’t know yet whether the WTA will investigate the Kolkata match further but the ATP has been smart enough to consult with the British Horse Racing Authority (BHA). The BHA has a close working relationship with Befair. They have employees who monitor betting patterns on the site.

Knowing what has already happened on the ATP, the WTA would be silly not to take the ATP’s lead by doing something similar.


Check out our myspace page and add us to your friends network!

Read about the Davydenko match and how the ATP should deal with it.