Is sports technology the answer to match fixed betting?
Do you know that feeling when you’ve bet on your favourite team to win a match but, for some reason, they capitulate to a series of goals an under-11s side could have scored and you smell a rat? Well, what if you could eliminate all cheating from sport and sports betting?
As of 12 months ago, the gross gambling yield – the amount betting firms retain after payments to punters but before operating cost – in Great Britain was estimated to be around £14bn, up from £12.5bn the year before. So with the Covid-19 pandemic appearing to have fueled our betting habits, how do we ensure what we bet on is untainted?
Punters have seen allegations of match fixing in football and snooker in recent months, with entire sports being thrown into disarray by the allegations.
Bet on table tennis?
Computer Vision is a form of artificial intelligence by tech company Sportradar (shown below) that can train machines to understand sports and automate data collection. Crucially, its chief product officer Luka Pataky says it can aid the reduction of suspicious activity.
“Computer vision can absolutely be used to improve the integrity of sports and alert to doping amongst athletes,” he tells Morning Wire
“You’ve got to think that every athlete has a unique, signature style of play and certain characteristics which can be tracked over time.
“That signature will naturally evolve over their career but unnatural changes can also be identified.
“If there’s suddenly a marked change in performance on these mechanical characteristics, it provides valuable insight into suspicious activity.”
At the ICE 2023 conference in London’s ExCeL last month the technology was demonstrated using table tennis.
Data trumps all
A small surface area with two players means there are fewer data points to analyse, but the number is still well into its hundreds.
As the two players compete over a point, data screens record possession, net contact, which hand the bat is in, the bounce and even distance from the table.
The point to all of this? To measure player activity across time and identify subtle changes which could be deemed suspicious. Thereafter investigations can take place to decide as to whether the player in question is part of a larger web of cheating.
“Because of the markets we serve, we need to have [the technology] highly accurate,” Pataky adds.
Accuracy
“You have two levels of scoring [in table tennis], you see the umpire flipping the score – that’s 100 per cent accuracy.
“AI scoring on its own is, at the moment, about 99.3 per cent accurate. That means there’s enough information for even that to be really really accurate.
“The more you expand into bigger fields [and] bigger sports that cover bigger fields, you normally would have to go into more cameras – and that’s the main limitation.”
Betting habits are changing and punters are getting smarter. But the number of those looking to profit illegally from betting, match fixing and immoral behaviour continues to grow across a number of sports.
Sometimes fans want sports to remain traditional, to stick to their roots and reject technology, but what if AI advancements can ensure punters aren’t screwed over?
Stamping out any form of sports doping can only be a positive. So if in future technology like this can help to eliminate fixing, it’s got to be worth a shot.