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Betting industry leader calls for sport world anti-corruption agency
8 April 2008
by Michael Herborn
Mark Davies, managing director of global betting giant Betfair, has called for a world anti-corruption agency for sport. He envisions that the anti-corruption agency would operate along the same lines as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), perhaps encompassing the role as both global watchdog for financial as well as pharmaceutical corruption of sport. “There isn’-t a body that sits at the top of sport that’-s something we’-d love to see, a world integrity agency that encompasses both drugs and betting and any other form of corruption,” Davies told New Zealand newspaper the Sunday Star Times at the Leaders in Sport conference in Auckland on 4 April 2008. “For me it should be the same body. If a sportsman is trying to corrupt by enhancing his performance by drugs or trying to corrupt by minimising his performance and make money off the back of it, I don’-t see a distinction.” […-]
Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
- 50% of our prediction market luminaries have a MacBook.
- STRAIGHT FROM OUR TRUISM DEPARTMENT: Money buys happiness.
- Ron Paul (R) and Barney Frank (D) ally together to attack “the practical hurdles of the federal law, known as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, rather than its legitimacy”.
- Clicking on the “SPHERE: RELATED CONTENT” button, at the bottom of each Midas Oracle post, will bring you a list of external webspots.
- FRIGHTENING: Jed Christiansen’s prediction market blog was briefly overtaken by web spammers, who inserted invisible links to their commercial sites so as to game the Google PageRank system.
- InTrade ditch market-leader Bloomberg for low-cost, second-tier data provider eSignal.
- Drawing a parallel between our reluctance to seek advice and the experts’ reluctance to take the market-generated probabilistic predictions in an un-discriminating, un-critical fashion
Erm, I find this statement from Mark Davies really weird.
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Davydenko had a string of suspicious matches, as did Arguello. When the played each other, it looked and smelt like a monumental fix, and BF ended up voiding it, after Russian based accounts won several hundred thousand pounds betting on Davydenko to lose.
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The truth is, that BF’s own integrity team should have flagged up both these two players a long time previously, and not been offering markets on either player. Problem solved. it was the BF market that the “suspicious” money was flooding into.
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I think that the decision to sweep the earlier (blatant) funny matches under the carpet, with an ever-escalating crescendo of funny prices and walls of money smashing into seemingly the wrong player (until the inevitable win for the heavily backed player) caused Davydenko v Arguello at Sopot. Without a BF market, the match would have been played out normally. It was (arguably) the fault of the BF integrity team. It was blatant that both players had had a number of funny matches previously.
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I really don’t understand Davies’s call for a world anti-corruption body. How can BF ignore overwhelming walls of money on certain matches, voiding only one of them, sending out the message that people backing “suspicious” players get paid out almost no questions asked, and then decide to call for a World Anti-Corruption body. Surely BF’s own integrity team are competent enough to stop glaringly obvious “suspicious” matches/players? There is no legal requirement to offer markets on every single player on every single match they play.
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By settling match after match, putting up fresh ones, it was no surprise when the car crash of Davydenko v Arguello happened. I did just check the date of this article as I thought it might have been put up on April 1st.
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My own assumption is that tackling corruption is in BF’s interests (reduces the rate of churn, stops insiders scooping out money risk free from the pool of losers losses that BF is trying to make money itself from). I just feel this story is like turkeys calling for Christmas. Its straight off a list of “101 things unlikely to be called for by BF”.
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Btw, I’m all for an integrity team to protect sport and the exchange markets. It has often felt like there isn’t one at BF, and an outside body that doesn’t have to worry about bad publicity from voiding markets etcetera, that is independent to exchange business, should only be a good thing (as long as the benefits from it aren’t outweighed by the costs of setting it up and running it).
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Cranberry sauce anyone?
Erm, I find this statement from Mark Davies really weird.
–
Davydenko had a string of suspicious matches, as did Arguello. When the played each other, it looked and smelt like a monumental fix, and BF ended up voiding it, after Russian based accounts won several hundred thousand pounds betting on Davydenko to lose.
–
The truth is, that BF’s own integrity team should have flagged up both these two players a long time previously, and not been offering markets on either player. Problem solved. it was the BF market that the “suspicious” money was flooding into.
–
I think that the decision to sweep the earlier (blatant) funny matches under the carpet, with an ever-escalating crescendo of funny prices and walls of money smashing into seemingly the wrong player (until the inevitable win for the heavily backed player) caused Davydenko v Arguello at Sopot. Without a BF market, the match would have been played out normally. It was (arguably) the fault of the BF integrity team. It was blatant that both players had had a number of funny matches previously.
–
I really don’t understand Davies’s call for a world anti-corruption body. How can BF ignore overwhelming walls of money on certain matches, voiding only one of them, sending out the message that people backing “suspicious” players get paid out almost no questions asked, and then decide to call for a World Anti-Corruption body. Surely BF’s own integrity team are competent enough to stop glaringly obvious “suspicious” matches/players? There is no legal requirement to offer markets on every single player on every single match they play.
–
By settling match after match, putting up fresh ones, it was no surprise when the car crash of Davydenko v Arguello happened. I did just check the date of this article as I thought it might have been put up on April 1st.
–
My own assumption is that tackling corruption is in BF’s interests (reduces the rate of churn, stops insiders scooping out money risk free from the pool of losers losses that BF is trying to make money itself from). I just feel this story is like turkeys calling for Christmas. Its straight off a list of “101 things unlikely to be called for by BF”.
–
Btw, I’m all for an integrity team to protect sport and the exchange markets. It has often felt like there isn’t one at BF, and an outside body that doesn’t have to worry about bad publicity from voiding markets etcetera, that is independent to exchange business, should only be a good thing (as long as the benefits from it aren’t outweighed by the costs of setting it up and running it).
–
Cranberry sauce anyone?