Caught-siding
Courtsiding is the method used by people betting on Tennis to beat the in-play delay. The in-play delay is put on matches, such as the Australian open tennis, to stop people from placing bets before other people get to see what happened. It doesn’t work!
Because of the incentive of low risk profit, people will go to great lengths to beat the clock and this has become a feature of many in-play markets, not just Tennis. Like Biff in back to the future, if you can bet on a sure thing, you are bound to end up ahead. I am pretty sure this is one of the key reasons Betfair introduce higher levels of premium charge. My guess is that the clock beaters are some of the biggest earners at the lowest risk on exchanges and suck a lot of money out of the ‘ecosystem’. But even then, competition amongst them has worked to reduce the opportunity somewhat on an individual basis.
The ATP has a very dim view of courtsiding, as can be witnessed by this press story: –
https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-sport/6238956/Suspected-illegal-betting-at-Open
I spotted this story a few days ago but I see others have picked up on it also. This isn’t the first or last time people will be ejected for coursiding.
When the world tour finals came to London I thought it would be fun to do a bit of investigation myself. During a quiet doubles match I scanned the audience for activity. I soon found something and during the break I switched positions and sat right behind somebody courtsiding. They didn’t seem very careful about what they were doing, so if you were there I’d advise being less obvious in future; or at least looking behind yourself now and again!
Having watched for some time, I went off to return later for the singles match. This time I was armed myself to see if I was able to beat the clock beaters. I thought that an event staged in London may prove trickier than one elsewhere in the world. But to my surprise I was able to nip in ahead of others in the market and courtside. It just took a bit of intelligence and technology to figure out how to do it. But it was still pretty tight, which shows that courtsiders are no longer exploiting things that have happened, but are anticipating things that will happen. If betting exchanges think the existing delays are adequate then I would have to conclude that they are very wrong, as action leading up to a odds changing event is where the inplay delay should be targeted. Not the time difference from the venue to the TV screen of an event happening. I bet you that some very succesfull exchange users would suddenly hit a brick wall if the delay was increased.
So, as I have advised before, if you are trading Tennis try and open positions when courtsiders don’t have an advantage. To try and trade during a point or just before one starts will mean some of your hard earned cash will almost certainly end up in somewhen else’s pockets. I don’t think that’s fair.
I saw this a long time before you ever did!
Category: Tennis
