Mark Johnston, Classic-winning trainer
I have been raising concerns about betting exchanges since their inception. With a traditional bookmaker you back a horse to win whereas with the exchanges you can lay them, that is, you are betting against the horse. My opinion is that betting on horses to lose, or for that matter, a football team or tennis player, is simply wrong. Everyone can surely see that this opens up an opportunity for corruption should anyone be that way inclined.
There are ways of ensuring a horse loses a race, but there are none to ensure that it will win. The arguments in favour of exchanges ignore this fundamental point but the head of Betfair, Mark Davies, is a superstar when it comes to arguing how they open the sport up to scrutiny. He has given the public a sense of security by explaining how exchanges track the betting patterns of registered users and so can expose suspect betting activity.
The argument runs that traditional bookmakers continue to take bets from anonymous punters so can neither track potential fraud nor expose it. Defenders of the exchanges also point out that bookmakers have always had informers and hence the potential for corruption has always been there. But you need to remember that before betting exchanges there were only a finite number of bookmakers who were licensed to lay bets.
Personally, I would rather there were none and bettors could only gamble on the Tote, but that will never happen. And while I am not naive enough to believe betting exchanges will be banned here as they are in Hong Kong, I would feel more comfortable to have a limited number of bookmakers able to lay bets rather than every individual around the world.
I am not convinced the system can track bets to provide evidence of wrongdoing because the person laying the bet and the one providing the information will not be one and the same. It is no different from corrupt practices under a bookmaker-led regime; except that it is available to the masses.
Exchanges give an opportunity to cheat that wasn’t there before their arrival. For example, if I gave you a job in my stable yard and you tried to sell tips on which horses were likely to win, no one would want to buy them because they would not necessarily trust the information. But if I tell you that you must remove the water from a horse’s stable at a certain time or else it hasn’t got a chance to come the race, it does not take a genius to work out that you now have a way of influencing the result and have something to sell. I have personally experienced how information can influence betting patterns.
When exchanges were in their infancy, I had a horse who was favourite for the Dewhurst. The night before the race we feared he was lame at evening stables but waited until the next morning to make a decision on whether he would race. At 6am my wife rode him up the road. After 200 yards, she knew he wasn’t sound, so we came back and made our minds up to wait until 8am before we phoned the owners with the bad news rather than wake them. At 7.30am, the press phoned the yard asking what was wrong with Lucky Story because he was drifting on the betting exchanges. Nothing illegal had occurred, but it just shows you how easy it is to act on inside information quickly.
Mark Davies, Betfair managing director
In the world of finance, it has always been far easier for employees to have a negative impact on a company’s share price than a positive one. Even a chief executive would be hard pushed to cause a price rise on any given day, but anyone with physical access to the company can very easily cause a fall. No one would suggest people should only be able to buy shares, and not sell them. Instead, regulators ensure that sanctions against corruption tip the balance heavily against trying it. Make the penalty draconian, and you deal with corruption at its heart.
Betting on sport is no different. The only people who can corrupt sport are those taking part — a fact unchanged by the existence of betting exchanges. If you prevent people from succumbing to the temptation, would-be corrupters have no one to help them. You and I cannot rig a race just because we can bet against its outcome: we need someone who can affect the result. If that person might lose a livelihood, would they risk it for a fast buck?
Attack corruption at source, and it does not matter where the bet was placed.
Nevertheless, some still long for the days when more traditional bookmakers held every card (an interesting notion considering what has historically been their dubious reputation); others prefer a Tote monopoly; and some believe that banning bets against outcomes would constrain corrupters.
This series of arguments is based on the naive belief that a black market does not exist. This is absurd. Asian syndicates behind apparently rigged football matches (like those who turned floodlights out at grounds in the late 1990s) are no more dependent on Britain’s legitimate market than Colombian drugs barons are on sales of aspirin at Boots.
The difference between legal, regulated, transparent betting — nowhere more so than on the leading betting exchange, where every transaction is open to scrutiny from 29 different sporting regulators — and the murky, illegal market, is the difference between chalk and cheese.
Black markets thrive where legal ones offer poor value. Now that the exchanges offer the best value, those previously tempted by odds on the black market are returning to the legal fold. Corruption-free sport comes from total transparency.
The exchanges are the only part of the market that offer it. People get hung up on ”betting to lose”.
Leave aside the obvious: bets to win (most clearly demonstrated in two outcome sports like tennis or snooker) are direct bets on the opposite outcome to lose. ”Betting to lose” is just betting at value: if the price unfairly reflects the realistic chance of something happening, why should you not bet against it?
Value bets, placed for or against, are perfectly legitimate; acting to impact a given outcome adversely is corrupt. But banning the former through fear of the latter is like ÂÂbanning cutlery because some ÂÂpeople use knives to harm. It is not the knives doing the damage, but the criminals using them. Legal ÂÂbetting does not corrupt sport; people do — and they are more likely to do it when they think they will not get caught. Measures to protect sport are not best aimed at open, transparent and audited betting markets but through its participants, where the corruption can occur. — Â