The Tennis Racket

[jnsaff2]

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...

[roymurdock]

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.

[unabridged]

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.

[jonknee]

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.

[genericpseudo]

IPython notebook with all the workings here:

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

Bravo, BuzzFeed.

[dang]

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

[unfamiliar]

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

[ChicagoBoy11]

"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."

[masmullin]

because then it's libel.

[rickdale]

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."

[at-fates-hands]

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.

[rurban]

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

[chatmasta]

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

[joosters]

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).

[chillydawg]

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.

[seanp2k2]

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.

[marshray]

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.

[stplsd]

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

[jsvine]

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...

[jstanley]

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

[pbreit]

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.

[lifeisstillgood]

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?

[moron4hire]

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.

[Cthulhu_]

> 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.

[puranjay]

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.

[david-given]

<tangent>

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...

[gadders]

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.

[adhipg]

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

[chillydawg]

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.

[_pmf_]

> F1 crashes anyone?

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

[omegaham]

> 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...

[lqdc13]

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.

[blowski]

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.

[nols]

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

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

[forgetsusername]

>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.

[bradleypowers]

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

[p4bl0]

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

[zkar]

Yes, second that.

[at-fates-hands]

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...

[skhro87]

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.