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The Tennis Racket

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140 pointsjsvine72 comments

A few years ago a friend of mine wrote a paper on a related issue in tennis: http://www.playthegame.org/fileadmin/image/knowledgebank/Ten...

Summary: draws were hand-crafted by tournament organizers in order to up the likelihood that Federer and Nadal would meet in the finals which would increase viewership and be great for advertisers and sponsors. Insinuation that Nike was somehow in on it seems a bit far-fetched and the tennis landscape has changed a fair bit since the paper was written, but the statistics for the time periods and draws examined are pretty damning.

The only way to stop this is to align incentives. The ATP (or whichever league) should open its own sanctioned betting market, then give the winning player a percentage of the pool. If they can capture a significant amount of the betting and give a reasonable percentage to the winning player, it will become very expensive (and hopefully not profitable) to fix a match.

Or police it strictly and enforce lifetime bans on dirty players. It's not worth a $50k payday to throw a match if it's risking all of your future income.

IPython notebook with all the workings here:

https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/2016-01-tennis-betting-analy...

Bravo, BuzzFeed.

Related BBC article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921349.

Why is the list of "16 players" not being published?

"BuzzFeed News and the BBC have chosen not to name the players whose matches have repeatedly been flagged for attracting highly suspicious betting, because without access to phone, bank, or computer records it is not possible to prove a link between the players and the gamblers. The integrity unit has the power to demand all that evidence from any tennis professional, yet many of the individuals whose activity attracted the most serious concern are still playing at a high level."

because then it's libel.

I remember back in 2007 when Davydenko got accused of being part of a betting scheme. He said, "Its 2007, there is no mafia in Russia."

Ironic considering the mid 2000's had some of the most Russian born players on the tour. If you're the Russian mob, you're seeing nothing but dollar signs everywhere.

I investigated a bit this list for the officially banned players, but didn't do the sha256 matching yet for the rumored players. Should be easy though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/41fpeq/tennis_match...

Cracking the sha256 hashes like this, but still haven't confirmed anyone new: https://gist.github.com/rurban/2f1eabc751ebdc3cd056

How do you know Buzzfeed did not use a random salt along with the hash?

They have used a salt, they mention it on the repo.

Yeah I saw that. I'm brute forcing it now... perl is a bit too slow for 12-16 chars, so I'm rewriting it in pony. I assume a known plaintext of a popular player who should be in the top 4. And I'm assuming the spelling from the ATP rankins.

A much simpler way of de-anonymizing the results would be to "match" (lol) the stats to real players. For example, which player who first appeared in 2005 and has played 15 matches, faced off against another player who first appeared in 2007 and has played 5 matches?

I remember that corrupt match between Arguello & Davydenko. Betfair's forums were ablaze with speculation as people watched the ridiculous odds movements before and during the match. It's appalling that the tennis authorities did nothing about the corruption, you will never see a more blatant attempt to cash on a fixed match. (In time, the fixers would learn to not be so obvious in their betting).

I worked at betfair at the time. A couple of my colleagues had noticed and were also following the obviously rogue money. They weren't looking at customer betting, they were just observing that far too much money was being traded laying the favourite and copied, as it was obvious there was a fix.

It's ironic that Betfair seems to have the industry-leading fraud & corruption team, when their business model means that they are the least directly affected by betting corruption.

If only the sports bodies would listen to them, instead of burying their heads in the sand.

Betfair (and the other exchanges) need to have the best fraud and corruption teams to ensure the integrity of their marketplace. As it is possible to lay results on an exchange, it does present ideal opportunity for nefarious betting activity.

With a traditional bookmaker, it's extremely difficult to consistently win large amounts over time and multiple events. The bookmakers just close or severely limit winning accounts.

On an exchange, there's no incentive to limit these winning accounts, whether they're backing or laying. The marketplace needs liquidity.

However, I still think the government(s) who issue gambling licenses may at some point take a view that betting exchanges are no longer legal business ventures, if there is too much evidence of corrupt betting, especially on the lay side.

You may think that once the genie is out of the bottle, there's no way for a government to put it back again by banning or de-licensing exchanges. The exchange just moves offshore to Malta. However, I believe the current Authorised Betting Partner (ABP)[0] debacle happening in British horse racing is evidence that industry bodies could make it very difficult in the future for offshore bookmakers/exchanges to market themselves effectively.

Anyway, my point is, that it's really in Betfair's own self interest to be so hot on fraud and corruption, when they provide (unlicensed) people the ability to lay bets and that the legitimacy of exchanges may be called into question at any time. A prime example of this is what happened to Intrade.[1]

[0] http://www.britishhorseracing.com/press_releases/british-rac...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrade

Oh, I get that (which is why I qualified my statement with directly affected). If a sport gains a reputation for corruption, then betting on that sport suffers.

Note that Betfair is an authorised betting partner, as shown in [0]. They used to play completely fair with the BHA and the tax authorities, before the company was floated and they moved offshore to dodge taxes, but they still pay the levy (or equivalent)

I thought the whole 'laying' controversy was long dead and buried, IMO. (At least, I hope so, for my own sake :) It's a non-issue in tennis betting, where laying one player is so obviously exactly the same as backing the opposing player.

It is very much dead and anyone who says laying is a special case of betting does not understand betting. There's now been two court cases in the UK - one of which went to the court of appeals about this - and the matter is settled in law firmly. Betfair punters are 100% not bookmakers, regardless of how they behave. One of the key issues was that the betfair punter has no idea who they are trading against. For their purposes, they trade vs betfair who happen to have a perfect hedging model (eg only accepting a bet when there is an equal and opposite bet to hedge it with).

Yes, Betfair is a BHA authorised betting partner, which is why it is important for them to be seen to tackle fraud and corruption on their platform. The BHA could conceivably decide to withdraw that status.

I was very careful in my earlier post not to specifically mention the UK government, although perhaps it was too strongly intimated. Your points about laying on an exchange not being a special case in betting does absolutely hold true in the UK. The point is not so well established in other countries. Why is Betfair regulated by the Tasmanian Gaming Commission in Australia? Other States wouldn't issue them a licence at the time. Why does Betfair restrict access by residents in so many other countries? See the recent withdrawal of Betfair from the Canadian market.[0]

The point being, Betfair isn't just a UK operation anymore. They need to take into account global jurisdictions and being high profile about fraud prevention can only help their image when hoping to expand to new markets.

Lastly, I use Betfair, Smarkets and to a lesser extent Betdaq every day. They are really the only way to get on a decent bet in the UK today. I think it would be devastating to the punting population if exchanges were no longer available.

[0] http://calvinayre.com/2015/12/24/business/betfair-goes-full-...

What's your experience of Smarkets? I've been skeptical of them because it's not clear how money really gets traded there. Are the markets full of bots blindly copying Betfair or is there real activity?

Smarkets has been OK. There's very little scope for arbitrage between Betfair and Smarkets markets, although I've had a couple of small scores doing that. Mostly, I can usually get a reasonable amount matched at the same price as Betfair, and only pay 2% commission on profits.

I don't trade that much or play in running. Smarkets is really crap for in running bets. It takes far to long for the bet to be placed. They also don't offer an SP option, if that's important to you.

I don't know about bots, because they don't have an official API, just an XML odds feed.

However, it would appear they used to have an API in the past. No idea if it still works.

https://smarkets.com/api/

http://smarkets.github.io/smk_api_docs/

They developed all sorts of automated and human-assisted fraud alerting systems. I worked on a couple of them. No details, obviously, but they were good. If the authorities were not doing anything, it was not Betfair's fault.

Interesting how many people care about the authenticity and integrity of sport when it's just entertainment. Wrestling matches are fixed and orchestrated, but it's still popular.

Because people invest their own time and enthusiasm in spectating, and sometimes amateur participation, and they don't want their sport to degenerate into a farce like American professional wrestling.

Common, Davydenko incident is already in betting folklore and have been excessively documented. Where are the other names in top 50?

Layperson methodology here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/johntemplon/how-we-used-data-to-inve...

Detailed methodology/code here: https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/2016-01-tennis-betting-analy...

Wow, this is really good to see. Buzzfeed have wildly exceeded my expectations here.

BuzzFeed's model seems to be "start with the low end, work our way up". They're using listicles to pay for this sort of awesome reporting.

It will be interesting to see how successful Buzzfeed is at maintaining both models -- a huge array of clickbait, low-quality, traffic-driving (and revenue driving, I'd venture) content, and also a investigative journalism unit doing this type of work.

If Buzzfeed is committed to this and has the financials to support it, I think they'll eventually win people over. Al Jazeera America never really had the time to establish itself as a respectable journalistic unit. Their recent report on Peyton Manning having HGH shipped to his house was met with a fair amount of skepticism, just based on what news outlet reported it. They folded their American division a week or two later. I'd guess the same thing will happen with people questioning Buzzfeed's reporting based solely on what Buzzfeed is generally associated with. But if they can persevere that and continue to produce quality investigative reporting like this, the mainstream will eventually have to accept them.

It is interesting that the BBC seems to have taken Buzzfeed to its heart.

You quite often hear Buzzfeed editors being interviewed on Radio 4 news shows, or indeed presenting shows in the same positions that have hitherto been reserved for newspaper journalists. This too, seems to be jointly credited as Buzzfeed/BBC.

They're using listicles and $200+ million in funding.

They're trying...

"Headquartered in [BuzzFeed's] new San Francisco bureau, The Open Lab for Journalism Technology and the Arts will be dedicated to coming up with new tools and technology that will benefit reporting and journalism"

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/buzzfeed-founder-launches-new-l...

Buzzfeed continues to impress. The other new content type I am really liking from BF is the "Tasty" cooking videos: https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedtasty/

Well-done, easy to consume, perfect for social sharing.

tl;dr: Top tennis matches have been fixed, we have the evidence.

Importance:

1. This is from BuzzFeed News ("""BuzzFeed News began its investigation after devising an algorithm to analyse gambling on professional tennis matches over the past seven years.""")

This is a tiny marker of the emergence of the new promised data-led journalism. And its coming from a new kind of news outlet that has separated its journalism from its business model (its not about click-bait headlines for ads, its about providing marketing data or something?)

Who knew. Good for BuzzFeed

2. Good grief! If Tennis is dirty, then we can happily say that all major sports are dirty. Cycling and Atheltics has dopers, football is just wrecked, I think we shall see all major sports get hit soon. F1 crashes anyone?

I played a lot of sports when I was a kid, but the last few years have taught me to hate the phrase, "Sports builds character." I can only hope I can pass on a love for sport to my child, while avoiding the adoration of sports celebrities (major or minor, we all have our local heroes) that led to my eventual disenchantment[0], contributing to my sedentary lifestyle that I hope he never has.

[0] 15 years and 40 lbs ago, I was a semipro martial artist. It's hard to get into any school when you have a prejudice against martial arts school owners of a certain extremely common type of school. Ethics isn't a strong point for most people.

I suspect professional sport actually discourages amateur participation. At the least there is wide spread confusion between sports fans and sports participants.

We have some evidence of this in the UK in - participation in the wake of the 2012 London Olympics dropped significantly across the board, this despite the UK public being peddled an ‘olympic legacy’ [1]

Obviously sat watching sport equals not participating.

(I swim daily and enjoy it. I don’t recall ever watching a swimming race on TV or being able to name any current professional swimmers.)

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2015/jul/05/olympic...

It's sad to hear about your disenchantment. I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but... why don't you do some sport that's more independent? I enjoy kettlebell training, running and playing tennis. For the first two sports, it's entirely on me: I don't need anyone else, and it's all about the joy of the movement. In tennis you need an opponent, but that can just be one other person whom you regularly play with.

I guess there must be a feeling of sunk costs, in that you reached a high level in your martial art(s) of choice. But surely it would be better to do any kind of exercise, just for health and happiness, than to be thwarted by your ego? (When I say your ego is thwarting you, I mean to say that you control your reaction. The groups you mentioned are contemptible, but it is your choice whether you stop exercise entirely because of their malfeasance.)

If you can ever figure out a single solution to "why don't people 'just' start exercising", you'll probably solve the global obesity epidemic.

I have not provided all of the details, because they aren't really that pertinent to the topic (hence why I had tossed it in a footnote), but it really is about choices, as you have said. And one of my choices was that I would spend a lot of time on my projects. That has come at the expense of other things--not just exercise, but playing games, or learning a musical instrument, or traveling the world.

You don't "just" choose to exercise. It necessarily must come with a choice to stop doing something else. What that something else is, and how much to curtail it, those are the reasons people persist in not exercising.

That choice for me is probably "stop commenting on HN". So you can probably see the problem.

> If you can ever figure out a single solution to "why don't people 'just' start exercising", you'll probably solve the global obesity epidemic.

I've seen this at my workplace. There is a gym that is available to all employees. Like, a nice gym. Fantastic assortment of weights, free classes from legitimately knowledgeable people at all sorts of times, free consultations for further instruction...

Very few people use it. It's right there, damn it!

I think that your reason is spot-on. Going to the gym takes a sacrifice elsewhere, whether it's shortening your lunch break or watching Netflix / TV for an hour less per day. And, well, it's not enough of a priority for people to make that sacrifice.

>Sports builds character. >Ethics isn't a strong point for most people.

If you want ethics, professional sports really may not be the best place to find them.

The reality is that many sports are closely linked to large-scale betting rings which buy results, and a few have much closer links to organised crime.

We always have climbing.

> If Tennis is dirty, then we can happily say that all major sports are dirty.

Definitely the ones that involve large amounts of money for the players and the betting companies. You'd probably see a lot less corruption if you remove the legality of betting or the exorbitant amounts of money being spent on teams, players, and advertising.

F1 would be a lot more difficult to 'fix', since there's a lot of teams and players; the fixers could only target individual racers to not win, and even then there's chance of accidents and such. Tennis and other two-player sports seem a lot easier.

A path of less resistance would be to offer officially sanctioned betting that benefited players. Legalizing and institutionalizing the flow of betting money into players' pockets would price the mafia out of that market, and attract bettors away from illegal bookies. Every legitimate participant gets a better outcome and it drains the money swamp in which the mafia is the apex predator.

Cricket has long been known to be dirty.

As a fan of the sport, I don't even care anymore. If I ever watch it, I treat the results the same way I would treat WWE matches.

Is there a good way to separate Buzzfeed's long form journalism, which can be excellent, from the vast outflow of septic tank discharge which is their website?

I've occasionally seen some really good articles from them, but the links have always been passed round by samizdat because they're completely unfindable...

You can go to http://www.buzzfeed.com/bigstories or http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform

Interestingly, they're the same page (the Long Form URL redirects to the Big Stories one).

Thanks --- unfortunately it's not searchable, and looking at the headlines makes me want to throw up...

> looking at the headlines makes me want to throw up...

This man found the best single way to purge after a big meal. Bulimics hate him.

Follow the journalists doing investigative journalism on twitter (thats how I found this article yesterday).

Was just about to ask the same.

I have enjoyed their longform 'legitimate' journalism, but want to not lay eyes on all the click-bait toxic sludge they publish.

I heard this story being announced on the BBC this morning. When they said it was a joint investigation with "Buzzfeed News" I nearly choked on my toothbrush.

Talking about F1 crashes there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Formula_One_crash_cont...

Gambling on F1 is extremely difficult to do profitably, far far far harder than football or tennis. Simply because the rules change all the bloody time and there's only ever a handful of matches to train your models on in any given season. At least with soccer there's thousands of very high quality, highly competitive matches every season in the top european leagues.

> F1 crashes anyone?

There is basically no conceivable way of interpreting F1 as something other than a circus for some automotive OEMs.

> football is just wrecked

Association football or American football? In the US, it's pretty much open knowledge that all NFL players are doping, but there isn't really anything dirty going on.

Now, college football, on the other hand...

Or it's a bet to gain some legitimacy even though most of their things are click bait.

If it's all chaff and no wheat, fewer people would read it.

I'd love to think that's the case, but Buzzfeed got to the place they're in now off the back of all that chaff which huge numbers of people love.

While I love the fact that a native new media organisation like BuzzFeed is doing genuine investigative journalism, I don't understand why they feel compelled to use stupid animated gifs all over the page. e.g. http://www.buzzfeed.com/johntemplon/how-we-used-data-to-inve...

You can't imagine Bob Woodward of the Washington Post publishing the Watergate investigations with random cartoons interspersed throughout the content.

That's the silly summary, there's a much better one here

https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/2016-01-tennis-betting-analy...

I just don't understand why they need a silly summary. It makes it hard to take BuzzFeed seriously as an authoritative news source.

We're the adults now and we* get to decide what that means. It's not an easy change to affect I know but we* can be authoritative and well researched and right and have gifs of getting hit by tennis balls at the same time. It's one thing if those gifs are trying to use an appeal to emotions to paper over weak logic/arguments/data but in this case they don't really do anything--which also yes does mean they could be removed without loss too.

*we: that is the hypothetical we, I am in no way associated with buzzfeed

As an adult, I prefer my news without animations everywhere. It's one of the reasons I read news online rather than watch TV news.

>I don't understand why they feel compelled to use stupid animated gifs all over the page

It's a style. It might not be your style, or my style, but I'm sure Buzzfeed knows their audience.

Was anyone else disappointed that this wasn't an article about the engineering behind the tennis racket?

Yes, and just before this one my first thought was of the Racket programming language…

Yes, second that.

There was an article back in 2014 that examined the same thing. I dare to venture Grantland's reporting is bit better than the click bait Buzzfeed is:

http://grantland.com/features/tennis-gambling-match-fixing-i...

What buzzfeed did is nothing new. A lot of people in the betting "scene" observe obviously fixed matches on a regular basis, mainly in football but also in tennis. Some are extremely obvious, some are less. The main is that organisations such as FIFA, don't seem to care really. They are talking about having dedicated systems etc in place, yet there are obvious fixes going on quite often and rarely such cases will be investigated. As someone else mentioned, Davydenko is a classic.

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