How Accurate are the Election Predictions of India's Illegal Bookmakers?

Girish Menon

'Satta Bazaar' is the name given to Indian bookmakers. Bookmaking is banned in India, however there exists what appears to be a huge underground network of bookies and punters who take bets on most events where the outcome is unknown. Here, I am going to test the bookies' predictions on the Indian election results with the actual results which will be available to the public on 4 June 2024.

---Also read

Indian Elections 2024 - A Personal Note

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Economic Truism: The Wisdom of Crowds

In economics, market prices, such as share prices in stock markets, are generally considered an accurate reflection of ground realities and available information. This is because share prices are determined by the collective buying and selling decisions of numerous investors, each acting on their analysis of a company's fundamentals, future prospects, and other relevant factors. Similarly, bookmaker odds and prices in betting markets are driven by the weight of money being placed on different outcomes, reflecting the collective assessments and expectations of bettors. Just as share prices adjust dynamically to incorporate new information, bookmakers continuously update their odds based on the flow of bets, aiming to balance their books and minimize risk exposure. This market-driven price discovery mechanism ensures that both share prices and bookmaker odds serve as reasonably accurate reflections of the underlying realities and expectations of market participants.

So let me list the predictions of various Indian bookmakers as mentioned in Times Now's programme on 1 June 2024 around 5-6 pm.

Satta Bazaar on 1 June 2024	BJP Seats	NDA (BJP’s alliance) seats	Actual Results on 4 June 2024
Phalodi	270-300		BJP-240, NDA-293
Palanpur	216	247
Vijayawada	270-290	300+
Hyderabad	270-290	300+
Ahmedabad	301-303
Karnal	235	263
Belgaum	223	265
Kolkata	218	261
Indore	260	283
Mumbai	295-305

Then there are the exit polls, most of them seem to predict a return of the BJP government with probably more seats than in 2019. However, I have preferred to stick to the bookies' predictions because the bookmakers and punters are betting with their money and so it will help me test the economic principle that market prices (satta bazaar prices) reflect reality accurately.

Cricket must confront the magnitude of fixing

The first step towards the solution is to appreciate the scale of the problem, something cricket still seems to be struggling to do

Former New Zealand international Lou Vincent. Photograph: Teaukura Moetaua/Getty Images

The sad truth is that the most recent spot-fixing revelations bring to mind nothing so much as Captain Renault’s line as he shuts down Rick’s Café in Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here.” What was it, exactly, about the evidence accrued in recent years that fixing has been committed in international and domestic cricket across all three formats by a mix of players, umpires, and administrators from across the Test-playing nations that has left us so startled by the allegations made by Lou Vincent?

Was the guilt of Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif, Mohammad Amir, Mervyn Westfield, Shariful Haque, Gurunath Meiyappan, Danish Kaneria, the Sri Lankan umpires Sagara Gallage and Maurice de la Zilwa not all the confirmation that was needed? Were the approaches reported by Shane Watson, Mashrafe Mortaza, Paul Nixon and so many others insufficient proof? Or is it that cricket, the community around the sport, is still in denial about the extent of the problem it is facing?

The allegations made by Vincent have, it is reported, been corroborated by at least three people, one a county player, another a friend in New Zealand, and the last involved in cricket but not as a player. Mal Loye, Brendon McCullum and Iain O’Brien have all said that they knew what Vincent was up to. Which rather begs the question as to why Vincent was allowed to go on playing top-level cricket for the Mid West Rhinos, Auckland, and the Khulna Royal Bengals long after he was trying to fix matches.

It is not just Vincent. The Anti-Corruption and Security Unit says it is monitoring more than 100 individuals around the world who it suspects of involvement in fixing. Depressing and distressing as it is to admit, this means that if you have been watching a lot of cricket and you have not been wondering whether at least some of what you have seen may have been fixed, you are either wilfully innocent or unwittingly naive. If that seems excessively cynical, then remember that as Sir Humphrey had it, that is only the label an idealist gives to a realist.

Time was when I would have thought differently. In the 2011 World Cup I was at Pallekele for a group match – almost a dead rubber – between New Zealand and Pakistan, which was illuminated by a spectacular century by Ross Taylor. It was all the more unexpected because he had been in such dismal form for so long, and had not scored a hundred in his last 48 ODI innings. This, though, was his lucky day. Kamran Akmal dropped him twice in his first full over at the crease. Thus reprieved, Taylor resolved to make the most of his good fortune and ground his way to 68 from 105 balls.

In the 46th over, bowled by Shoaib Akhtar, Taylor clicked. He hit a four past point, followed it with three sixes and another four. With two wides, the over cost 28. The 48th, bowled by Abdul Razzaq, was dearer still. It went for 30, and again there were a couple more wides in among it all. Taylor hit 62 off the final 16 deliveries he faced and, together with Nathan McCullum and Jacob Oram, scored 114 runs in the last six overs of the innings.

Startled journalists, long since snapped out of the torpor induced by the stifling heat, turned to each other, incredulous, exhilarated. And then an email arrived in my inbox, sent by a colleague who is not especially keen on cricket but who has an excellent eye for a news story. It said, simply, “Do we think this is legit?”

Pop. A pinprick to a party balloon. It had not even occurred to me to ask whether I was watching anything other than wonderful batting against some woeful bowling. The elation I felt seeped away and, in my irritation, I snapped back a short reply. The thing is, though I did not admit it at the time, he was right to ask. Only six months before, three Pakistan players had been caught spot-fixing in the Lord’s Test. Rumours, unsubstantiated, still swirled around some of their players. I knew all that, but in the excitement of the moment l preferred to suspend my disbelief, which is, after all, what we want to do when watching sport. I was thrilled by the fact that what I had seen seemed almost unbelievable. My colleague was only suggesting that it might be exactly that.

There is no evidence to suggest that any aspect of that match between Pakistan and New Zealand, least of all Taylor’s performance, was fixed. But the unpalatable question put to me is one that those of us who love cricket should be asking ourselves, and each other, far more often than we tend to do. Especially when you think that the sport we support has such a long history of fixing and cheating, and that, as Ian Chappell has just written, its administrators have so often sought to soft-soap the offences have come to light.

Later in 2011, I switched across to cover the athletics circuit in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. The small band of British athletics writers are a convivial lot but as sceptical as any group I’d ever worked with. And understandably so. Some of them had been on the beat since the early 1980s and, until Usain Bolt, of seven winners over nearly 30 years of men’s 100 metres finals only Donovan Bailey, successful in 1996, made it to retirement without his medal getting at least figuratively tarnished. A lifetime spent lionising athletes who are later found to have cheated is enough to disabuse even the most misty-eyed of us of our romantic notions.

On the athletics circuit, I learned, when something is celebrated as being too good to be true, the first thing to ask is, in private, if not in public, is whether it really is. Bitter experience means fans and journalists feel compelled to ask awkward questions. Similar thinking informed the remarks made by the US swim coach John Leonard about the Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen during the London Olympics. Leonard remembered the 1976 Olympics, when the East German women’s team, who were later found to have been doping, swept the swimming events. He had his suspicions, but said nothing about them, and regretted his silence ever after. So he decided that the next time he had misgivings about a performance, he would speak out about his doubts, which turned out to be unfounded.

Switch back to cricket, where there seems to be a striking lack of such scepticism – partly because the offences can be so subtle, and so similar to the inadvertent actions of innocent players. But even the more ham-fisted examples, like Amir’s infamous no-ball in the Lord’s Test of 2010, seem to provoke little suspicion. Amir was, as Cricinfo’s ball-by-ball commentator put it at the time, “a good half metre over the line”. Cricket fans, journalists too, simply weren’t, and perhaps still aren’t, attuned to the possibility that a player may be cheating. Sequences of no-balls, strikingly soft dismissals, sudden de-accelerations in the scoring rate, incongruously stodgy batting, these things should all raise red flags. Was a player involved in the ICL, or one of the teams implicated in fixing in the BPL, IPL, or county cricket? Are there whispers about him on the circuit? Is the match being televised in India? Are there curious betting patterns around the match online? Combinations of these criteria make it reasonable to ask “is this legit?” even if, as is likely, you do not know the answer.

The trouble is, of course, that you risk being paralysed by a paranoia that prevents you from being able to enjoy the sport. The idea that spectators and media will be forced to think this way is anathema to the authorities. The alternative, what they would have us do, is choose to believe wholeheartedly in what we see and leave them to make their investigations. These would be the same authorities, in the ICC’s case, who are about to appoint N Srinivasan as chairman even though he has been suspended from the BCCI by the supreme court of India while investigations are held into his conduct regarding allegations of spot-fixing in relation to his son-in-law and involving the team he owns, the Chennai Super Kings.

As is so often the case, the first step towards the solution is to confront the magnitude of the problem, something cricket still seems to be struggling to do.

Cricket fixing scandal: The day I confronted Lou Vincent

We in the New Zealand team knew without a shadow of doubt that our ex-colleague was cheating

Fixer: New Zealand players watched Lou Vincent score one from nine balls in the ICL and smelt a rat Photo: GETTY IMAGES

By Iain O'Brien, Former New Zealand player

10:30PM BST 16 May 2014

“Did you?” “Huh?” “Did you, you know, do some dumb things while you were playing?” I was sitting across from Lou Vincent, the ex-New Zealand cricketer and ex-team-mate of mine. We were in a curry house, not far from the HAC Ground in London, where we had both just played in a charity Twenty20. It was Aug 30, 2012 and I hadn’t seen Lou for a long time; in a lot of ways, intentionally. I didn’t really want to be seen with him, associated with him or considered a mate of his.

We did, and do have, one thing in common; we both suffer with mental illness. That was the basis for a lot of what we talked about that day.

Lou had been touring in a camper van spreading his story of MI and raising awareness. What he was doing seemed great, but what he had been doing wasn’t.

I knew he had been up to no good. It becomes evident, as a player, that what you see is not always real. That moment you learn that wrestling on TV isn’t real. It is acting. It is hard to believe at first and then, when you have watched a lot, or been around it endlessly, you see it for what it really is. There is no going back.

On a Test tour of Bangladesh, 2008, we, the New Zealand team watched a lot of the Indian Cricket League; the ‘rebel’ T20 competition in its first year. We watched some of the most unbelievable cricket. Unbelievable in a way that we could not believe how obvious what was going on: leaving and or padding up to straight ones, run outs by massive distances in curious circumstances, batsmen playing out maidens, no-balls and wides just too big and too often to be natural mistakes. It looked a shambles. 

And this included Lou Vincent. He had walked away from a New Zealand contract to take part in a lucrative league. We knew what was going on.

Without a shadow of doubt Lou was fixing. From our Bangladesh telephone sims (when touring, typically, we buy or are provided with a local sim), players who had Lou’s number would text him with some rather unpleasant messages about what he was doing. He was called a “fixer”, a “cheat” and many more unprintable things.

Lou denied any involvement. I asked him again if he had “fixed”, if he had been a part of it. He straight out rejected my line of questions. I showed him a scorecard from a game I had watched live. I had the scorecard saved as a bookmark on my phone browser so that we could talk specifics. I showed it to him. He put his one run from nine balls, playing out a first-over maiden, to just good bowling. I called that “rubbish”.

Lou is a quality player. For a fix he promised to score, 30 inside three overs. He failed, but a player with that quality does not score one from nine balls. I have not spoken to Lou since.

It happens here, in the UK. More than in just the matches we have read about from Lou’s accounts.

I was commentating on a match at Chelmsford and Danish Kaneria, the Essex and Pakistan leggie, bowled one of the biggest wides I have ever seen. It was the first ball of a spell. In the box we were flabbergasted at how flagrant it was.

In the previous two World Twenty20s I watched a highly respected player swap his bat, make sure that the cameras caught it by taking a long time to complete the act, on three occasions. A wicket fell in the next over, either him or his partner. A coincidence? I don’t think so. A change of bat can be a sign to a bookie that the fix is on.

I have seen others too. The ones outlined by Vincent. I watched the Sussex v Kent game which we now know contained spot-fixing and I sensed something was up.

The issue is, knowing and proving. Should I, as an ex-player and now commentator, be reporting suspect activity to the Anti-Corruption and Security Unit? Maybe I should.

But, I feel it is so rife that they would get overrun by what I see as suspect actions which have become so blatant that it is hard to believe they even care about our game anymore.

Iain O’Brien played 22 Tests for New Zealand and now works as a BBC commentator based in the UK

10 ways to fix a cricket match

By Andrew Alderson

5:30 AM Saturday Dec 7, 2013

• Save  How do you 'fix' a cricket match? Andrew Alderson reports on the techniques used

Matches are difficult to fix as a whole, so spot-fixing is more common. Photo / Getty Images

1. The system works best through the illegal betting markets of the Indian sub-continent, which operate a money credit system so there is no paper trail.

2. The Indian gambling system generally offers four markets: match odds, innings runs, brackets (which are runs scored in a certain number of overs such as 11-20) and lunch favourite (betting that a team will go on to win after lunch in a test or the innings break in a limited overs match). This shreds the theory anyone would take a bet, for example, that the third ball of a random over would be a no-ball.

3. Captains, opening batsmen and opening bowlers are ideal targets for match-fixers. Openers of either discipline are guaranteed to be involved at the start of an innings (and therefore in brackets of overs), and captains dictate fielding positions.

4. Watch out for odd fielding positions - the sort commentators might generously refer to as "bold" - such as long on, long off, third man or fine leg being brought into the circle outside powerplay overs.

5. While No 2 indicates a restriction on possible bets, players might be paid by a fixer to perform a deliberate act on a certain ball to show bookmakers they are under a fixer's control. An example is the 2010 Pakistani no-ball scandal at Lord's.

6. Players can be targeted in casual conversations by fixers for information on the pitch and expected conditions. That can help with bets on innings runs and brackets. Team selections can also be of "casual" interest from fixers posing as fans.

7. Players can be coerced into links with bookmakers through anything from "new bat deals" to honeytraps, where they may be caught in compromising situations. Whatever the lure, evidence is often recorded for blackmail purposes.

8. Matches are difficult to fix as a whole, so spot-fixing is more common. A specific number of overs, coinciding with a bracket, will be targeted.

9. A "bhao" line is established for matches. It involves someone sitting in a hotel room delivering odds into a microphone attached to phone lines. The location changes so fixers cannot be tracked. Punters ring and decide whether to bet on the odds which are broadcast live during the match.

10. The "hawala" transaction system is commonly used on the subcontinent. Under this, no money moves physically between locations; it is transferred by a telephone call or fax between countries. No legal contracts are involved, and, according to the Economist, recipients are given only a code number or simple token, such as a low-value banknote torn in half, to prove money is due. Over time, transactions in opposite directions cancel each other out, minimising the need for movement. If an imbalance develops, cash or jewellery are carried across borders, trade invoices are adjusted, or conventional banks are used. Ironically, the system is built on trust between bookmakers and fixers.

The gambling machines helping drug dealers 'turn dirty money clean'

Dealers talk to the Guardian about laundering drug money through fixed odds betting terminals in bookies across Britain

• 
• • Randeep Ramesh, social affairs editor
  • theguardian.com, Friday 8 November 2013 18.03 GMT

The Gambling Commission admitted in September what has long been privately acknowledged: FOBTs present a 'high inherent money laundering risk'. Photograph: Alamy

Dressed in a grey hoodie and jeans, James, 24, looks like just another lost soul in the high street, shuttling between the six betting shops in an east coast seaside town. It's a weekday morning and if you catch up with him inside a bookmaker, you'll find him peering intently into the green glowing screen of an electronic gambling machine – feeding in £200, "a score at a time".

But this is not a young gambler blowing his meagre wages. James is a drug dealer and his interest in the bookmakers – and the fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) in each shop – is all about laundering money. "That's what turns dirty money clean," he says. Dealers feed their drug money through the machines, losing a little and then cashing out with the vast majority of their stake, James says. They can then collect a printed ticket showing they have gambled that day – meaning that if stopped by police, they can answer questions about why an apparently unemployed young man carries hundreds of pounds in rolled-up cash.

The FOBTs are probably the single most profitable pieces of property in the town centre's shabby pedestrian precinct. Each machine, according to industry figures, grosses about £900 a week. The 24 FOBTs within a few minutes' walk are worth an estimated £1m a year in profits to the betting industry.

The terminals arrived in Britain in 2001 and were lightly regulated from the outset. Punters in bookmakers found that they could bet £100 every 20 seconds on roulette. The temptation of high-speed, high-stake casino games in the high street proved irresistible: there are now 33,345 FOBTs in the UK.

However, several high-profile cases have exposed a seamier side to the rise of the machines. Earlier this month the Gambling Commission, the industry regulator, finedCoral bookmakers £90,000 in profits it made from one drug dealer who had laundered almost £1m in its shops. Last month the industry regulator also publicly admitted what has long been privately acknowledged: FOBTs present a "high inherent money-laundering risk". In a letter to the industry trade association, the commission warned about "a retail betting model that includes high volumes of cash transactions, particularly where this includes low individual spend and a high level of anonymity... especially where that model also offers (FOBTs)."

What the machines provide is the chance for criminals to convert quickly large sums of money from the real world into virtual cash that can later be converted back into the real thing. There is little official research into the scale and extent of such operations. The 2005 Gambling Act, which regulates the terminals, says one of its primary objectives is "preventing gambling from being a source of crime or disorder, being associated with crime or disorder or being used to support crime".

However, it has long been obvious to the public that criminals can convert their loot into a clean win on an electronic roulette table. Surveys for the commission show that 40% of the public regularly identify gambling with criminal activity. The industry regulator found one in 14 respondents associated money laundering with gambling.

The Guardian persuaded a number of drug dealers to talk about their criminal pursuits. What was remarkable was that they saw FOBTs as both a nuisance and necessary, trapping "weaker" people into addiction while allowing the "strong" to prosper. All exchanged tips with fellow dealers on the best ways to launder money; all were surprisingly frank about their methods.

James's strategy is simple: £20 on black, £20 on red and £2 on zero. A press of a button and the wheel spins before the ball lands on red. That's a loss of £2. The money placed on the zero is the only risk James is taking with his cash. If the ball does land on zero, he wins £72.

With no horses to run or dealer to shuffle and just the 20-second spin of an electronic roulette wheel to wait for, it takes a little over a minute for this drug dealer to cash out. James says he knows that unless he gambles at least 40% of the float money he has put in the machine, an alert will pop up on the staff computer warning them of suspicious activity. So he methodically places the same bet to make sure that he has wagered enough.

To ensure that his winnings are not an unlikely round number, he loses some more money on the one-armed bandit. Leaving the tea brought over by the shop manager to go cold, James wanders over to the counter to collect his winnings in the form of a receipt – transforming the money he made from cocaine into apparent gambling winnings. He has lost a little more than £10. "You have to make it realistic," he says. "Bookies get nervous if you come in and just lose the same amount every day. So I vary it a little."

Drug dealers say the reason fixed-odds betting terminals are used is precisely because they are so lightly policed. James is careful not to visit the same shops in a pattern. Handily there are 15 betting shops in the town within walking distance of the main bus routes that snake through the suburbs and along the Thames estuary. "Smart dealers don't drive around here. You are more likely to be stopped by police driving around late at night doing deliveries than if you are taking a bus somewhere into town."

Then there are favoured bookies. Ladbrokes, says James, is useful because you can transfer winnings in the shop to an online gaming account. In William Hill's you can ask for your winnings to be credited directly to your debit card, with the cash landing up in your bank the same day. "Look at my account and I am a very successful punter," he says.

The economics of drug dealing make it cost-effective to pay 5% to 10% to betting shops to launder the illicit profits. James claims to have "about 100K" in his bank account. He sells about 56g (2oz) of ordinary cocaine a week and another 28g of a purer, more expensive version. "Normal customers like teachers, doctors they get the ordinary stuff. The cleaner gear is for the City boys."

 Selling cocaine in 0.8g wraps, James, a dealer, says he turns over about £5,500 of drugs – of which half is profit. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

James left school at 16 and worked in shops and restaurants before ending up in the City of London. "That's where I saw people using coke and I was asked if I could get some. I knew some people and I did. Never looked back. How long would it have taken to save £100,000 if I just continued doing admin in a bank?"

Selling cocaine in 0.8g wraps, in a week James turns over about £5,500 of drugs, of which half is profit. "I buy it on tick so you end up carrying a lot of money around. The trade is run by Albanians around here, so it's best to have cash ready if you need to pay it back in a hurry."

Almost all his money is laundered via FOBTs. James calculates he is worth £15,000 a year to the betting industry. "Valued customer," he grins. "I'd say there were about half a dozen of us [dealers] around here using machines. We swap tips – where to go, least crowded, staff not bothered, that sort of thing. You don't want to be recognised too many times."

In opening up to the Guardian, James says there is a risk that bookmakers in the coastal town will tighten up on who enters and who leaves. "Sure, they could stop us, but in the end they want the money.We can hang back for a bit and go somewhere else. Pretty soon they will relax and welcome us all back."

Bookmakers essentially regulate themselves: deciding whether to bar problem gamblers, call the police over violent behaviour or report crime. As the machines contributed £1.4bn to its bottom line last year, there have been suspicions that the industry has played down the shadier side of the terminals.

Adrian Parkinson, a former regional machines manager at the Tote, now with theCampaign for Fairer Gambling, said: "Money laundering on FOBTs has been a problem since their introduction. Whether it's cleaning notes from the proceeds of crime or drug dealers legitimising profits, it is well known in the industry that it goes on.

"I raised the issue some years ago at the Tote after being swamped with incidents of money laundering following a series of armed robberies but it's still going on."

Even worse, Parkinson says, the technology is outpacing the law. He says by the end of the year, customers in Coral will be able to transfer any FOBT winnings to their online account. "The staff won't be able to intervene, whatever their suspicions. The industry is riding rough shod over the licensing objectives. Keeping crime out of gambling has to take precedent over profit."

The Association of British Bookmakers said the industry complied fully with the law. William Hill said it had "robust systems" to meet its regulatory obligations. In a statement, Ladbrokes said: "Any criminals attempting to launder large sums are placing themselves at high risk of detection as they will be on CCTV and staff are trained to spot suspicious behaviour. Given most stakes in shops are small, any large transactions are easily recognisable. Any attempt to transfer money to online accounts will require identity verification at account opening or first transactions which in conjunction with CCTV would be an excellent source of evidence for the police."

The media have helped to cement the place of gambling in the national psyche. Advertising during televised football matches exhorts audiences to have a flutter. Electronic gambling has found a younger audience through online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, in which players have been able to set up virtual casinos. This year the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned that such games were being used by organised crime to launder cash.

Also helping to rehabilitate gambling is a new range of interactive TV programming. Late-night shows such as ITV's Jackpot247 – in which television viewers place bets online or over the phone, playing along to a live presenter-hosted roulette show – repolish gambling's image by treating electronic betting as a form of mainstream entertainment.

This shift in the marketing of electronic gambling has taken place as suspicions emerge that the industry has been targeting poor people. Last December, in a paper for the Journal of Gambling Studies, Heather Wardle, a former project director of the British Gambling Prevalence Survey, warned that gambling machines were more likely to be found in areas of high socioeconomic deprivation. Earlier this year, the Guardian revealed that in the 50 parliamentary constituencies with the highest numbers of unemployed people, punters visited 1,251 betting shops and wagered an astonishing £5.6bn through 4,454 fixed-odds betting terminals.

 Salford has 72 people chasing each vacancy. It was the only part of Greater Manchester which last year recorded a rise in numbers on jobseeker's allowance. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The presence of these machines appears to have a distorting effect on these moribund local economies. In a pub near Salford's Duchy estate, close to where rioting took place in 2011, two young men nursed pints of soft drink and explained how a vortex of soft drug sales, payday lenders and betting shops kept the local economy afloat. Salford has 72 people chasing each vacancy. It was the only part of Greater Manchester which last year recorded a rise in numbers on jobseeker's allowance (JSA).

Unemployed Jake, 28, sells marijuana on the local streets and smokes some of the profit. He recoups any losses by gambling and taking out loans at payday lenders. He points out the brown shopping arcade in Salford lined with bookmakers and loan companies. "It's the only thriving industry around here," he says.

"There are six bookmakers, one more is on its way, and five loan shops. Even if you are on JSA you can borrow money from Speedy Cash. It's the main business around here.Take dole, turn it into weed, sell them, take your profits and put them into the machines. If you win, you are quids in. If you lose, you get cash from the money shops to cover your losses. Back to dole and buying drugs. There's nothing else around here to do."

The drug dealer admits that he is "a bit" addicted to gambling, comparing the thrill of betting on the electronic spin of a roulette wheel to the rapid highs and lows of drugs. "You get a buzz. Which is why you might lose £16 or £1,600 and not notice until it's too late. I've done both."

The spread of betting shops in this part of the north-west is astonishing. Manchester city centre has 26. A few miles away in deprived Cheetham Hill, dubbed the "Bronx of Britain" for gang violence, there are four bookies in the high street, with another scheduled.Such bunching could be linked to the fact that bookmakers are limited to four machines a shop. As the machines are hugely lucrative the betting industry has bypassed the restriction by opening branches in high streets – "clustering" in poorer areas.

A betting shop manager in Greater Manchester, who agreed to be interviewed anonymously, said the FOBTs in Cheetham Hill easily earned £10,000 a week, four times the over-the-counter trade, and that local mobsters gambled heavily. "We get punters who lose big time on the FOBTs, punch them, chuck them to the ground. Smash them. We tell staff to play it cool. Don't call police. We don't want to arouse suspicions. It's madness. We employ young mothers in those shops.

"You have people laundering money every day with cash from robberies and drugs. Do you know that dyed notes from bank robberies can be submitted to the Bank of England and the company gets reimbursed? Staff know what pays their wages. They stay quiet."

Cricket Betting in India

For the better – or worse?

Ed Hawkins in Wisden India

 | 

2 July 

It is just not possible to bet on the minutiae of a match, including that of a bowler sending down a pre-designated no-ball. © Getty Images

 

Never meet a hero, they reckon. But what of a villain? Say hello to Vinay, from Bhopal, capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. He is an illegal bookmaker, which also makes him a scourge of the game, and a malevolent, match-fixing mobster. Right?

When I met Vinay in a hotel lobby, the reputation of his brethren – there are estimated to be more than 70,000 bookies in India – preceded him. All, bar those who work at race courses (where gambling, so the argument goes, is based on skill rather than luck, and therefore socially acceptable) are illegal. It is said – by the ICC, corruption officers, national boards and player bodies – that the illegal bookies are dangerous men from the underworld. People fear them. And so, in truth, did I, as I waited for Vinay, nervously tapping my feet to inane pan-pipe music.

Yet when he arrived, I immediately felt at ease. There was no cloak, no dagger. His smile was brilliant, his handshake warm, his enquiry after my health genuine. We had already exchanged emails, Twitter messages and phone calls. What followed was a crash course in India’s vast gambling industry. Over several weeks as part of my research for a book on corruption in cricket, I would spend time living with him and his family, and watch him run his business (he also owned a construction firm); I would hide from the police, learn how bookies control betting markets, and hear of fixes before they happened. When we parted, I told Vinay of my initial apprehension. “Me?” he guffawed. “This is too much amusement for me. I hope you know me now, ya? But perhaps I understand why you were like this. Bookmakers in India are supposed to be all bad. No. We are trying to make our living in a corrupt country, and we do this by taking any opportunity we can.”

The backdrop to my visit was the sound of exploding myths. Chief among them was the notion that it is possible to place a bet on a no-ball, a misconception that called into question the precise nature of the conviction of Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamer in the spot-fixing trial of November 2011 – though there is no doubt that the News of the World sting showed them to be corruptible. But preconceived notions about corruption in cricket simply collapsed, for it is just not possible to bet on the minutiae of a match: a batsman scoring a certain amount of runs, a fielder being placed in a particular position, a bowler operating from a specific end – or even sending down a pre-designated no-ball. Why? Because just as Indian bookies are not the threatening hoodlums of popular depiction, neither are they knuckledragging imbeciles. “Do you think we’re fools?” asked Vinay. “If someone says they want this no-ball bet for big monies, and I’m Ladbrokes in London, I tell them to go away. No bookmaker in the world takes this bet.”

One does not need to be invited into Vinay’s home to understand that any bookie worth his salt would suspect that this customer had inside information. Yet throughout the Southwark trial of the three Pakistanis and their agent, there was a wilful acceptance that the News of the World would have been able to place a bet on the timing of a no-ball, had they so wished. This was clear from the sentencing remarks by Mr Justice Cooke: “Bets could be placed on these no-balls in unlawful markets, mostly abroad, based on inside advance knowledge of what was going to happen… Individuals in India were making £40,000–£50,000 on each identified no-ball. On three no-balls, therefore, the bookmakers stood to lose £150,000 on each bet by a cheating punter.”

In fact, this is impossible. The illegal Indian market is highly organised and, crucially, uniform. It offers only four markets for its gamblers: match odds, innings runs (known as lambi), brackets (the number of runs scored in a certain amount of overs), and lunch favourite (essentially, betting that the team who are favourites at lunch in a Test, or at the innings break in a limited-overs match, will go on and win the game). In the case of the lambi and brackets, a spread is set for the number of runs to be scored, and gamblers bet over or under.

The odds for these markets are provided by four syndicates, who have reached the top of the food chain through their expertise in the field. They charge a fee to bookmakers to use those odds, then take a cut of the profits from all over the country. Think of the syndicates as wholesalers, and the bookies as convenience-store owners, who buy the goods, then sell them on. Vinay is what is known as a first-tier bookmaker. Occasionally, because he is highly regarded, he acts as one of the syndicate heads, who are often based in Mumbai or Dubai, sending out odds to bookies lower down the chain; bookmakers from the second, third or fourth tiers have fewer customers, and receive the odds via SMS, with the syndicate able to reach hundreds of them at once using bulk messaging software. “All bookies in India are connected,” said Vinay. “They will send on the prices to even more.”

Because the syndicates are so dominant, the potential for the manipulation of markets is obvious. And it is certainly more profitable than paying a bowler to overstep. “The Indian market is very big and powerful,” Vinay told me just before England’s One-Day International against India at Hyderabad in October 2011. “There are much smarter ways to manipulate betting. Look, I’ll show you.”

On his laptop he logged on to Betfair, the person-to-person betting exchange with more than four million customers around the globe. After it was announced India had won the toss, he sent updated odds to 200 bookmakers across the country. On the match-odds market, India were favourites at 1.95 (even money would be 2.00). These decimal odds translate into the traditional fractional odds used in the UK as 20-21: in other words, if you bet £21 you can win £20.

“Now watch how I move the Betfair market,” said Vinay. When he sends the SMS to his cohorts instructing them to lower the odds, they flood Betfair with money – or, to be precise, with people prepared to place bets at these odds. He explained: “It is currently India 1.95. Watch how they become 1.85 in line with our odds… wait, you’ll see here how it works… we want to get India short.” Vinay was keen to price India as short as possible because he knew most of his punters would back the home team. Since an Indian victory would have been certain to cost him money, he wanted to discourage punters from backing them. Seconds later, he chirped: “There, you see: India 1.85 now on Betfair. We have moved the market.” And all this from a text message which simply read: “India 85”.

Unfortunately for cricket and the ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, some fixes are almost impossible to prove. © AFP

This, of course, is not corruption – just the sheer weight of (illegal) Indian money. Yet no matter what wagers are struck, the bookmaker and the syndicates are able to avoid losses by using betting exchanges to hedge their bets. For example, a bookie may have accepted a wager from any Tom, Dick or Hari of £10 on England to win at even money. This has the potential to cost the bookie £10. However, when England’s odds during the game drift to 6-4 (greater than even money) – either because momentum has shifted towards India, or because Vinay has manipulated the market from a hotel room in Bhopal – the bookie can lay off, or hedge, his bets. The original bet risks him £10. But by placing a wager himself on England at odds of 6-4 for £10, he stands to win £15 if he’s successful: £15 minus £10 is a guaranteed profit of £5. (In the case of an Indian win, Vinay would have hedged his position too, although – because of the amount of money wagered on India – he would be merely seeking to reduce his losses to a manageable level.) Now consider the potential when four or five figures are involved.

Hedging is not illegal, but it shows that corruption is not an exact science: there is more than one method and more than one protagonist. The assumption that it is largely bookmakers who fix matches would appear to be wrong. Vinay worries that punters close to players or officials do the fixing, costing him money. Yet there seems little doubt that the all-powerful syndicates have massive influence, as well as the funds and organisational ability, to fix elements of matches – or even the results themselves.

The bookies and the professional punter can be considered enemies, in the mould of the old-fashioned pork-pie-hat-wearing odds-maker and his traditional chancer customer. It is a war for inside information: who knows more? The only consistent loser is the less clued-up customer, who is in effect betting blind. The syndicate operates a subtle fix. By sending out false odds via their bookies, they tempt customers into taking them. Vinay gave the example of how, armed with prior knowledge that a well-known Test match in 2011 would not end in a draw – when a draw looked at one stage the only possible result – the odds were set so that more people would bet on the stalemate. This is a ruse that hundreds of thousands fall prey to, and the money tots up.

The professional punter can do likewise, but he is a simpler operator. His original way of making money from fixes, which would have been used in the days of Hansie Cronje – and before the betting exchanges were commonplace – is less sophisticated. It requires much poking and prodding of contacts up and down the country, hoping minions will then place the bets correctly. It is a system that primarily takes advantage of the sheer size of the industry: a few lakh in Mumbai (one lakh equals 100,000), a few more in Delhi, a few more somewhere else. Next week, mix it all up again in an attempt not to draw attention to the scale of the enterprise – and hope you don’t get found out.

“The punter will have his friends placing the bets all over,” said Vinay. “There is a big connection. Some punters are connected like the bookmakers are connected. If a punter has 50 friends, he can get 50 bets.” The aim of fragmenting his bets by placing many smaller ones instead of a couple of large ones is to prevent the bookmaker from suspecting inside knowledge. The subtle nature of the sting fuels the belief that a wide array of markets are available to bet on in India. But it is not because there is a betting market for fielding positions that a syndicate or punter has cajoled a captain into moving a fielder from third man (there is no such market). It is because, without a third man in the first ten overs of a one-day international, more runs are likely to be scored. This allows the syndicate to set false odds on a bracket, knowing that, if they offer runs in the first ten overs at, say, 70–75, most gamblers will bet under. Similarly, a punter who has a close friendship with a batsman might have arranged for him to score fewer than 25. This will give him an edge when it comes to the lambi, bracket and match odds. If it sounds like insider trading on the stock market, that is precisely what it amounts to.

Unfortunately for cricket and the ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, it is almost impossible to prove. The fixes are so minute – at least in terms of the impact on the match result – as to be virtually undetectable. How, for example, could the ACSU prove in court that a batsman has scored deliberately slowly for just one over in a Twenty20 match to sate a syndicate or a punter playing the brackets?

But the ACSU do not help themselves by failing to grasp how the illegal market in India works. They were embarrassed when Ravi Sawani, their former boss, admitted in the Southwark trial he had not heard of the term “bracket”. They should also be pilloried for failing to grasp the nuances of spot-fixing, wrongly believing there are manifold markets for bookmakers or gamblers to exploit. Yet we should not simply criticise the governing body. Rarely are players, the collective, admonished. “It’s down to them to take ownership,” said an ACSU source. “A few players have said: ‘There should be more ACSU people.’ No, we should have 20 guys on the field naming the two who are at it.”

There is hope – but only a little. If India’s bookmakers were legalised, they would have to operate exactly like Ladbrokes or William Hill. That would mean an end to the credit system, where bookies accept customers on trust. Instead, they would need money in their account to wager. And to have an account, they would have to hand over their personal details. When accounts are kept and verified, you have a paper trail. If you have a paper trail, you have no rogue punters setting up fixes with their friends in cricket teams. At a stroke, the potential for corruption would be reduced by half.

Vinay is not convinced: “People say: ‘Legalise betting in India and fixing will stop.’ Yes. We are ready to pay tax. I’m tired of paying off the police. But it will not stop fixing. Never.”

 

Ed Hawkins is the author of Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: a journey to the corrupt heart of cricket’s underworld.