[TMS Symposium] Smashing the Racket: Detecting Match-fixing in Tennis via In-play Betting Irregularities

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• Dr. Jonathan Nelson (ATASS Sports)
• Sunday 21 February 2016, 11:20-12:05
• Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jason Kwong.

An unfortunate consequence of the recent growth in tennis betting markets has been a heightened incentive for match-fixing – particularly at lower levels of the sport, where earnings are modest, and where the market for one match may dwarf the prize money for an entire tournament. Against this backdrop, an unscrupulous player may be tempted to profit from their position of influence by secretly agreeing to “throw” a particular match, with a complicit third party betting on the result. This talk summarises the results of a match-fixing study spanning over 5,000 in-play tennis betting markets. After developing a natural point-by-point probabilistic model, featuring novel mechanisms for selecting parameters robustly from the data, we demonstrate that the observed market trajectories correlate extremely closely with this model. We argue that substantial discrepancies represent a “red flag” that something is amiss – either an injury, or something more covert. We also provide visualisations of recent matches where the market evolved pathologically, and assess the evidence that these matches were fixed.

This talk is part of the Trinity Mathematical Society series.

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