Loser's Lunch
longreads.com
longreads.com
1. The whole mental gymnastics of tournaments’ attempts to depict courtsiding as illegal, it feels reminiscent of many moral outrage arguments these days. It’s not enough to say that a certain behavior is wrong, we now need to broadly paint everyone who doesn’t follow our rules as bad people. I see this everywhere nowadays and I don’t like it, nuance and mutual understanding is the only way any adversarial situation ever achieves resolution.
2. You’d think that it’d be very easy with today’s technologies to remain undetected while transmitting these simple pieces of information. I'm curious how these spotters actually find courtsiders, especially those with no history in the industry.
I also agree that it should be fairly trivial to hack up some bluetooth device with whatever buttons you need and have it relay using your phone to some server, then you just push those buttons in your pocket, virtually undetectable.
"iirimets said that since just his face is enough to get him kicked out, he doesn’t make much of an effort to hide his cell phone anymore. For Pete, it’s the same. And I can see how they’re both distinctive-looking enough to stick out like sore thumbs—Rainer is tall with close-set eyes and thick eyebrows, while Pete has big, glowing eyes that take up much of his squarish face. The first catch instantly halves the viability of a courtsider’s career; the hundredth means it’s almost pointless to continue."
I'm imagining a pocketable Bluetooth device (paired with your phone) with a few buttons for the common stuff. That should be easy to conceal and use surreptitiously.
Of course, courtsiders are simply transmitting factual information: they aren't harming the integrity of the games at all.
The integrity of those involved in catching, apprehending, and banning courtsiders for life, on the other hand, is certainly in question.
I fail to see how someone electronically (or otherwise) relaying non-confidential information about a tennis match would in any way harm the integrity of the match.
It's clear that the Sportradar service isn't competitive for real-time gambling, but why don't they offer a service that is? Put a guy at each match entering the scores (and any other information) faster than the chair umpire and sell that data. If there's enough money to have multiple spotters and courtsiders (up to 50) at the event, Sportradar should be able to capture enough of that to employ one person to do data entry.
"Often, courtsider-led betting syndicates will match up against each other, putting both the fast fingers at the tournament and their respective algorithms to a head-to-head test. It’s common for courtsiders to recognize one another from across the court at a match. At bigger tournaments, they may spot a dozen or more such familiar faces in the crowd. Brad Hutchins estimated that there have been as many as 50 courtsiders working simultaneously inside the main stadium at a Grand Slam; another thought the number could be nearly twice as high."
Of course, I guess the events can always be held indoors.
that stuff goes through walls. and if we can get a THz emitter in the range of affordability, that'd be a neat way to get realtime 3d scans of environments.
Back to satellites, then.
1. Decision about action is made (Firm decides on merger during board meeting/Roddick decides to serve a topspin/Dealer decides to deal in alternating order)
2. Action occurs (Firm announces in press release/Roddick serves/Dealer deals)
3. An observer relays info about action (Stock trader instantly reports shares beginning to soar/Courtsider pushes button for "it's a topspin" and potentially "point scored"/Card-counter relays number of cards in dealer's hand to player or himself)
Insider trading is when a person who was present at step 1 performs step 3 (relays information) ahead of step 2 (Action). The analog in tennis would be if Roddick (insider to his own playing) told someone he would serve a topspin prior to serving it, or worse, if Roddick told someone he would lose a match on purpose.
Courtsiders, unlike a typical inside trader, have no special inside knowledge about what kind of serves a player shall make, and they certainly cannot influence a player's playing. Just like a stock trader, their only power is transmitting the events that do occur at lightning speed. Rapidly counting the number of cards in a hand after they've been dealt (action) is this, too.
As you can see, insider trading is the wrong analogy to make.
To me, insider trading is analogous to court siding, in that, in both cases, someone is seeking to use "private information" (information that isn't yet publicly available) in order to make money. So I would order the system:
1. Action occurs "privately" (firm decides on merger but hasn't announced it publicly; court sider reports data that the ump hasn't recorded yet/doesn't record; player notices how dealer plays the cards)
2. Party with the private information makes bets based on this information in an effort to beat the system
3. The public finds out about the previously private information and responds accordingly.
So, courtsiders don't have knowledge about what the player WILL do, but they can tell people what the HAS done faster than they would get normally.
Though I can understand how card counting may be a better analogy for courtsiding simply because of the fact that they're both legal gray areas, as opposed to insider trading, which is explicitly illegal.
The extent I could agree with it largely depends on how well this step - "courtsider reports [private] data that ump hasn't recorded/doesn't record" - represents the real game.
I would think the courtsider and ump record scores at an almost equal pace (and the advantage a courtsider might get from guessing a score ahead of the ump by a few milliseconds is likely negated by wrong guesses). But the stuff the umpire "doesn't record," like a player's injury, can be seen by every attendant of that match.
If the injury (or some other event the ump doesn't record) is seen by most of the stadium, isn't it more "public knowledge" than "private information"? If so, then courtsiding isn't like insider trading. If the stadium full of people counts as a "private" party, then it is.