Skip to main content

IPL spot-fixing saga

To anyone who watches the IPL regularly, today's news of arrests in the IPL are no surprise. Well actually... the arrests are a surprise, there's absolutely no shock that it was going on. The IPL is the WWE of cricket - huge TV contracts at stake so they need to keep TV ratings high, and plenty of rich folk that are often above the law. There's no way some of the results occurring over the past few weeks are 100% clean. The market knows in advance far too often. Computer pricing models for cricket are far too accurate these days for some of the big anomalies in the market, followed by the money being absolutely spot on.

Anyway, I can't say anything on today's incident any better than professional cricket trader Mark Iverson. View his post here

IP-Smells?

As we approach the end of this years tournament, the IPL, the world’s showpiece T20 competition, has once again been rocked by spot fixing accusations. This won’t come as much of a surprise to many of the regular cricket traders but what is a bit of a turn-up is the swiftness of the Indian police to condone and even arrest the 3 suspects; Ajit Chandila, Sreesanth and Ankeet Chavan.

Their crimes? Well allegedly there were 3 matches where underground bookies had controlled the players actions:


Replays etc all embedded on his site.

Plenty more stories coming out of this including an Australian player alleged to have been caught with a bag of cash in his hotel room. Chances are it's more than just tax evasion...

Time for India to get serious on this and dig much, much deeper. After all, shamed captain Mohammed Azharruddin is now a Federal MP!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spot-fixing - you will never, ever be able to stop it

According to this report , IPL tournaments so far have been rife with spot-fixing - that is fixing minor elements of the game - runs in a single over, number of wides bowled etc. The curious part of that article is that the Income Tax department are supposed to have found these crimes. What idiot would be stupid enough to put down 'big wad of cash handed to me by bookie' as a source of income? Backhanders for sportsmen, particularly in a celebrity- and cricket-obsessed culture like India are not rare. They could come from anything like turning up to open someone's new business (not a sponsor, but a 'friend of a friend' arrangement), to being a guest at some devoted fan's dinner party etc. The opportunities are always there, and there will always be people trying to become friends with players and their entourage - that is human nature. This form of match-fixing (and it's not really fixing a match, just a minor element of it) is very hard to prove, but also,

It's all gone Pete Tong at Betfair!

The Christmas Hurdle from Leopardstown, a good Grade 2 race during the holiday period. But now it will go into history as the race which brought Betfair down. Over £21m at odds of 29 available on Voler La Vedette in-running - that's a potential liability of over £500m. You might think that's a bit suspicious, something's fishy, especially with the horse starting at a Betfair SP of 2.96. Well, this wasn't a horse being stopped by a jockey either - the bloody horse won! Look at what was matched at 29. Split that in half and multiply by 28 for the actual liability for the layer(s). (Matched amounts always shown as double the backers' stake, never counts the layers' risk). There's no way a Betfair client would have £600m+ in their account. Maybe £20 or even £50m from the massive syndicates who regard(ed) Betfair as safer than any bank, but not £600m. So the error has to be something technical. However, rumour has it, a helpdesk reply (not gospel, natur

lay the field - my favourite racing strategy

Dabbling with laying the field in-running at various prices today, not just one price, but several in the same race. Got several matched in the previous race at Brighton, then this race came along at Nottingham. Such a long straight at Nottingham makes punters often over-react and think the finish line is closer than it actually is. As you can see by the number of bets matched, there was plenty of volatility in this in-play market. It's rare you'll get a complete wipe-out with one horse getting matched at all levels, but it can happen, so don't give yourself too much risk...