Have Betting Exchanges Corrupted Horse Racing?

Betting exchanges allow punters to bet on a horse to lose a race. This, many argue, has opened up the sport to a new form of corruption, where races will be deliberately lost in order to profit from betting. We examine whether anecdotal evidence of the fixing of horses to lose—of which there are many examples—is indicative of wider corruption. Following a “forensic economics” approach, we build an asymmetric information model of exchange betting and take it to betting data on 9,560 races run in 2013/2014. We find no evidence of the widespread corruption of horse racing by the betting exchanges

‘The only game in town?’: football match-fixing in Greece

Football match-fixing in Greece has a relatively long history, however, from the late 1990s it has been considered as a serious problem for the sport in the country. Despite the history of the phenomenon in the country, Greece has only relatively recently been identified as one of the hotspots for football match-fixing on an international level. Following the recent scandal exposure of fixed matches in Greece in 2011, also known as Koriopolis (a pun name on the Italian scandal Calciopolis and the Greek word ‘korios’ or phone-tap), detailed information about numerous matches played in the 2008/09, 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons that attracted UEFA’s attention were brought into the public eye. Soon after, legal action was taken against individuals involved in the process, with a number of club officials facing lifelong bans from any footballrelated activity, and football clubs either relegated or excluded from European competitions and the Super League itself for their involvement in the scandal. In May 2013, the number of people facing charges exceeded 200, with some of them having already been imprisoned for their involvement in the scandal. Following the aforementioned scandal exposure, a vast amount of information regarding football match-fixing was made available to the public. The aim of the current article is to provide an account of the social organisation of football match-fixing in Greece. Our account is based on three main sources of data: the telephone conversations that were the result of wiretapping by the National Intelligence Agency in relation to the latest football match-fixing scandal (of 2011), published media sources, and interviews with informed actors from the realm of Greek football

‘The only game in town?’: football match-fixing in Greece

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12117-014-9239-3Football match-fixing in Greece has a relatively long history, however, from the late 1990s it has been considered as a serious problem for the sport in the country. Despite the history of the phenomenon in the country, Greece has only relatively recently been identified as one of the hotspots for football match-fixing on an international level. Following the recent scandal exposure of fixed matches in Greece in 2011, also known as Koriopolis (a pun name on the Italian scandal Calciopolis and the Greek word ‘korios’ or phone-tap), detailed information about numerous matches played in the 2008/09, 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons that attracted UEFA’s attention were brought into the public eye. Soon after, legal action was taken against individuals involved in the process, with a number of club officials facing lifelong bans from any footballrelated activity, and football clubs either relegated or excluded from European competitions and the Super League itself for their involvement in the scandal. In May 2013, the number of people facing charges exceeded 200, with some of them having already been imprisoned for their involvement in the scandal. Following the aforementioned scandal exposure, a vast amount of information regarding football match-fixing was made available to the public. The aim of the current article is to provide an account of the social organisation of football match-fixing in Greece. Our account is based on three main sources of data: the telephone conversations that were the result of wiretapping by the National Intelligence Agency in relation to the latest football match-fixing scandal (of 2011), published media sources, and interviews with informed actors from the realm of Greek football

Gambling On Video Games: The Global Esports Betting Market And The Dawn Of Legalized Esports Gambling In The United States

This Note compares eSports gambling regulations in the United States with regulations implemented in various foreign countries. eSports is a rapidly growing form of sport competition centered around video games. Video games have been a widely popular form of entertainment spanning the globe for many years. However, treating video games as a professional sport and form of monetized competition is a very recent phenomenon in the global mainstream market. Like traditional sports such as football and basketball, eSports have garnered significant attention in the gambling market. Sports betting has long been prevalent in the underworld of the United States, but the recent Supreme Court repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) marked a historical development in legalized American sports gambling. This repeal has resulted in the legalization of betting for traditional sports in many jurisdictions; however, some states have been hesitant to also legalize eSports betting. As individual states continue paving the road to legalized and regulated sports betting, they should consider eSports gambling regulatory frameworks in jurisdictions like Isle of Man, the United Kingdom and South Korea as guidelines before adopting their own eSports wagering laws and regulation

The Time Is Now: Why the United States Should Adopt the British Model of Sports Betting Legislation

Gambling has been the subject of controversy since its inception. While some claim that it is a “gentleman’s game” and a means of social entertainment, others argue that it is a sinful endeavor that enables corruption, scandal, and addiction. Today, there are several different types of gambling that occur in the United States—all with varying degrees of legality and regulation. For example, betting on horse racing is legal throughout the United States, and state-sanctioned lotteries are present in forty-four of fifty states.3 Commercial casinos, like those in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, are regulated on a state-by-state basis, and gambling on card games is legal in over twenty states (and counting). This Note focuses on betting in professional sports, which is more tightly con-trolled than any of the other games of chance. With the prevalence of daily fantasy sports and the tentative merger between its two largest providers, FanDuel and DraftKings, sports betting has been at the forefront of the news as it relates to gaming law. The United States has taken a strict regulatory approach toward sports betting, which is inconsistent with its stance toward other types of gambling, such as slot machines, horse racing, lotteries, and, most recently, daily fantasy sports. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United Kingdom has taken a drastically different approach. According to a study on gam-bling prevalence conducted in 2010, over seventy-three percent of the British population have engaged in some form of gambling. While there were certainly issues of concern with the legalization of sports betting, the U.K. Parliament believed it would be counterintuitive to outright prohibit a multi-billion dollar industry, especially one with overwhelming participation by a majority of the population. Part I of this Note examines the history of sports betting and discusses its origins and the motivations behind the legislation in both countries, such as notorious betting scandals in professional sports. Part II reviews the federal framework currently in place in the United States by surveying the history and implementation of the Wire Act and discussing the legislative history and subsequent enactment of PASPA. Part II also considers one of the latest attacks on these laws by state governments. Part III analyzes the sports betting landscape in the United Kingdom by reviewing the history of sports betting internationally and presenting a discussion of the laws that regulate legal sports gambling in the United Kingdom. Part III also examines the Betting and Gaming Act of 1960—the first major change in the United Kingdom’s betting policy—and reviews the Gambling Act of 2005 (on which this Note intends to base its model). Part IV proposes that the United States should adopt the U.K. model of sports betting legislation, wherein Congress should follow the lead set by the U.K. Parliament, and dis-cusses the economic benefits of a legalized sports betting industry. This Note concludes that the United States should set up a gaming commission and legalize sports betting nationwide, while regulating it to protect against corruption

A policy response to the e-commerce revolution: the case of betting taxation in the UK

Several environmental changes in the 1990s – including the introduction of a national lottery, the rise of Internet gambling, and the reduction of trade barriers within the EU – induced the UK government to initiate a large-scale review of betting duty. As a result of this review, the government recently announced a significant reduction in betting taxes. They also decided to replace the current general betting duty (GBD), levied as a proportion of betting stakes, with a gross profits tax (GPT), based on the net revenue of bookmakers. We examine the economic rationale behind these decisions and demonstrate how these tax changes have broad implications regarding optimal levels of taxation for other sources of government revenue

Robust Draws in Balanced Knockout Tournaments

Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning probability for a distinguished player, has received a lot of attention. Previous works consider the problem where the pairwise winning probabilities are known precisely, while we study how robust is the winning probability with respect to small errors in the pairwise winning probabilities. First, we present several illuminating examples to establish: (a)~there exist deterministic tournaments (where the pairwise winning probabilities are~0 or~1) where one optimal draw is much more robust than the other; and (b)~in general, there exist tournaments with slightly suboptimal draws that are more robust than all the optimal draws. The above examples motivate the study of the computational problem of robust draws that guarantee a specified winning probability. Second, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for approximating the robustness of a draw for sufficiently small errors in pairwise winning probabilities, and obtain that the stated computational problem is NP-complete. We also show that two natural cases of deterministic tournaments where the optimal draw could be computed in polynomial time also admit polynomial-time algorithms to compute robust optimal draws