IPL: A Perfect Staging Ground for Corruption

[Sachin=GOD]

IPL: A Perfect Staging Ground for Corruption Indian Premier League is an exception. Fans should not lose faith in Tests, ODIs or domestic leagues just because the rotten core of the most hated tournament is exposed :: Ed Hawkins

The Indian Premier League is unique in world cricket. No other domestic tournament can boast the superstar players, Bollywood braggadocio, dancing girls, television audiences or, of course, matches which so consistently swing thrillingly in favour from one team to the other. It is also probably the most corrupt. Following the arrest of three Rajasthan Royals players for spot-fixing, the soul searching and hand-wringing has begun. Cricket has been here before. ‘Can we ever trust the sport again?’ is a familiar refrain. Previously when cogitating over the Cronje affair and the Pakistan ‘spotfix’ at Lord’s, it has not been easy to once again ‘play up, play the game’. This time around it might not be such a stiff task. ‘Oh well’, they’ll say, ‘it’s to be expected in India’. The Indian Premier League is indeed a separate case. We should not lose faith in the Test matches, one-day international or domestic leagues just because the rotten, ugly core of the most hated tournament in the world is close to being exposed. We should not tar cricket with its sickly brush. But that does not mean the cancer cannot or has not spread. Since the IPL’s inception in 2008 it has been a tournament which has had a reputation among players, administrators and betting experts for being rigged for the benefit of the bookmakers and punters who seek out the greedy, the impressionable and, depressingly, the wily who know that there is no law against match-fixing in India. The IPL has been, and always will be, the perfect breeding and staging ground for corruption. For a start, it had no anticorruption coverage from the International Cricket Council’s specialist unit until its third edition. Lalit Modi, the tournament’s first commissioner, admits that was a mistake and although the game’s watchdog has proved to be ineffective, the die had been cast. When speaking with bookmakers and punters from India, they insist that each season is rigged from ball one. One source told me that ‘all matches are fixed’. And he was talking about results, not just the brackets — runs scored in a segment of overs — which appear to have been manipulated in the case of the Rajasthan three. Even Modi admitted to me in an interview that he had to speak to players who were up to no good. As someone who has been researching corruption in the game for more than four years (in other words a crusted cynic) I have been surprised by the amount of information about fixing which has flowed forth during this season. It has been a deluge and I know of six matches which, if I was an anti-corruption officer, I would want to investigate immediately. To understand why the IPL has been such rich pickings, one needs only to look at its structure. For all bar one year – the second edition was played in South Africa – it has been staged on the home turf of the largest, and most efficient, illegal betting market in the world. Frankly, the Indian syndicates and punters who try to make a fast buck by asking players to do favours on the pitch couldn’t believe their luck. Instead of sending go-betweens to distant lands, all they need now do is step out of their front door. As the Delhi police have shown, the three Rajasthan players were easily accessible, allegedly meeting the mafia stooges in hotel rooms or suburbs of cities. And what of the players? In Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan, the perpetrators are homegrown. Interestingly, none of them were born in the state they represented which gives a clue to another important foundation stone for the architects of greed. The IPL has been so rife with corruption because the players have little or no loyalty to the franchises – and that word should tell you all you need to know – they play for, or to those whom they play with. For the rest of the year most of their teammates are the enemy. Teams are made up of dispirit, ‘in-it-for-myself’ mercenaries who only have love perhaps for the colours of their own team or flag. The worry is that players who have parachuted into the IPL will, at the bidding of their new-found murky mates, repeat dirty tricks elsewhere. The Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), a soiled young upstart, already has a burgeoning reputation for corruption. It is no accident that the BPL is another Twenty20 jamboree. Lord Condon, the first director of the ICC’s anti-corruption unit, said only two years ago that the format had returned ‘really bad people’ to the game. He is right. Twenty20 could have been invented for fixing. Disconnected players still view it as ‘hit and giggle’, betting interest is massive, wildly fluctuating odds guarantee profits. When the IPL trophy is lifted on May 26, billions would have been wagered. That is the price of integrity. The ‘mini’ IPLs in Australia, South Africa, England and the Caribbean are already for sale next.

link Before IPL fans start shouting "he's a communist" or he doesn't know anything about bookies/betting or about IPL, please check out his book "Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy" - he spent many years posing as a friend to many Indian bookies and the anti corruption unit members before writing this book which is considered as one of the best ever written on this topic.

[Sachin=GOD]

Fixing? It's people like us doing it It's convenient to blame the underworld for every instance of cricket fixing, but it's ordinary punters who are behind many of them Ed Hawkins May 22, 2013

In late 2011 and 2012 I met with some of India's illegal bookmakers, stayed in their homes, ate with their families, attended cricket matches with them, watched - and helped - them take bets. "You were brave," many people say. "Did you not fear for your life?" The answer is the same each time. "No, they were perfectly charming." Ah, but that is all part of the act, you might say. They are skilled manipulators, those bookies; one minute a flashing smile, the next a flashing blade. And so it has been following the allegations about three Rajasthan players having indulged in spot-fixing in the Indian Premier League. It is de rigueur these days when such a story breaks that attention is immediately turned on India's underworld, the mafia dons who cajole players into performing favours on the pitch. If they don't put up their side of the bargain, threats and intimidation follow. D Company, the mafia organisation run by the infamous Dawood Ibrahim, usually gets a mention. Then the stock phrase "Once a player is in, he can't get out" trips off the tongue. But is that really true? Are there players who fear for their life if they fail to concede a certain number of runs off an over? It is possible, but there is evidence that suggests that the underworld grip that threatens to choke a player is a convenient excuse for those caught with their hands in the till. The "fix" of the sort that Sreesanth, Ankeet Chavan and Ajit Chandila have been accused of is, in polite terms, chicken feed to D Company. They are far more interested in organising match results, where returns are incomparable to those from spot-fixing. This smacks of a low level scam, summed up succinctly by Vinay, a bookie from Bhopal. "We are trying to make our living in a corrupt country, and we do this by taking any opportunity we can," he says. Quite. The average Indian bookmaker is nothing if not an opportunist, and it is that personality trait, rather than a tendency for violence, that plays a part in fixes. It is an unpalatable truth for cricket that any bookmaker, or punter, given access to a player, can organise a fix without using the word "mafia" or whispering the name "Dawood". Yes, there is an organised crime network at play but the majority of corruption attempted is by small groups of ordinary folk. To understand why spot-fixing can be so easy to organise is to understand how the illegal Indian gambling market operates, and therefore how it can be manipulated. There are estimated to be more than 70,000 bookmakers in India. Despite it being unregulated, it is highly organised and works much like a legalised system. In England the big four bookmakers might be considered to be William Hill, Ladbrokes, Bet365 and Coral. Each of those bookies sets their own odds, and supplies them to the managers of their shops dotted all around the country. In India there are four big bookmakers, known as the syndicates. Two have their roots in Delhi and the others in Mumbai and Nagpur. Each of those bookies sets their own odds and supplies them to managers around the country. These "managers" - in actual fact they are bookmakers themselves - who take bets from their customers are ranked by the size of their customer base. First-tier bookmakers have up to or more than 1000. A fourth-tier bookmaker might have only 20 or 30. Like a franchise arrangement, the "managers" pay for the goods supplied. There are, though, two significant differences between the English and Indian models. The first is that whereas Hill's and Ladbrokes might offer a wide variety of bets, in India you can only bet on four outcomes: the match result, the innings runs, brackets (a certain number of runs to be scored in a certain number of overs), and what is known as the lunch favourite. The lunch favourite is where the customer is offered a bet on following the team that is the favourite at the lunch break or innings break. The second is that where Hill's will offer different prices from Ladbrokes for each of their various segments in an IPL match, the Indian system will be almost uniform; the majority of bookmakers will be using the same prices. One set of odds for only four markets, with each syndicate doing its share of the work. Each of those four syndicates has their own area of expertise. The top Delhi syndicate will look after betting before a ball has been bowled, providing odds pre-match. When the game starts, its work generally stops. The other syndicate connected to Delhi, known as the Shibu, operates the brackets odds. The Mumbai syndicate will take care of the ball-by-ball betting for match odds and innings runs. The fourth, the Nagpur syndicate, is a rival to the Mumbai operation. So we have a swathe of bookmakers all using the same odds. It is the perfect environment for corruption. However, it is not an exact science and the anatomy of fixes and the perpetrators can differ. Indeed, Vinay, who is a first-tier bookmaker and close to the syndicate kingpins, estimates that half of all fixes are organised by bookmakers, the rest by run-of-the-mill punters - any Tom, Dick, or Hari who has a relationship with a player. The most obvious fixes can come right from the top of the tree: the syndicates, who some believe take their orders from D Company. If a syndicate has organised for a team to lose or paid a bowler to concede a certain number of runs, they can supply "fake" odds to the tens of thousands of bookmakers, influencing millions of gamblers to bet the way they want them to. If we use a bowler agreeing to concede more than 13 runs an over as an example, the ability to coin the crores from market manipulation is clear. The bracket, normally set for the first six overs in an IPL match, is an over-or-under bet. The syndicate will estimate that, say, between 42 and 45 runs will be scored. Gamblers will reckon it will be lower/higher and bet accordingly. Before a ball has been bowled the syndicate would have set the bracket, usually for the number of runs in the first six overs, at a figure that punters would have reckoned was too high, tricking them into going low. It is an artful fraud and not 100% foolproof because of the need to get the "fake" bracket quote right from the start. If the syndicate was not in on the fix then it would have been created by a group of bookmakers who had decided to operate outside of the system. According to sources in the illegal market, this is the most likely scenario in the current case. This theory holds water, given the raft of bookmakers arrested. They could have manipulated the odds in exactly the same way a syndicate would, by convening what is known as a "party", a group of bookmakers who have agreed to pool resources and maximise profits. Another option would have been for this "party" to become punters for the day, and place multiple bets (the average bet in India dwarfs those in markets where betting is legal, and is estimated at Rs 100,000 or around $1800) by going "over" the brackets, cosseted by their arrangement with the crooked player. They would have roped in friends and family to place the wagers with as many bookies as possible. This is the method used by an ordinary punter with inside information, proving that you don't need to be a bookmaker to fix a match. What links punter and bookmaker - and there is a relative war for inside information on the illegal markets with one trying to outdo the other - is the acceptance that both are taking a risk. They know that, still, this is a gamble. A bet. Circumstances may conspire against them, so the profligate over organised or the maiden ordered may not transpire. If not, the player pays back the money. Call it honour among thieves. Ed Hawkins is the three-time SJA Sports Betting Writer of the Year. He is the author of Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: A Journey to the Heart of Cricket's Underworld, the 2013 Wisden Book of the Year

http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/637034.html

[ganeshran]

Before IPL fans start shouting "he's a communist" or he doesn't know anything about bookies/betting or about IPL, please check out his book "Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy" - he spent many years posing as a friend to many Indian bookies and the anti corruption unit members before writing this book which is considered as one of the best ever written on this topic.

Yup totally unbiased guy.

We should not lose faith in the Test matches, one-day international or domestic leagues just because the rotten, ugly core of the most hated tournament in the world is close to being exposed. We should not tar cricket with its sickly brush. But that does not mean the cancer cannot or has not spread.

I dont see how one believes that fixing is rampant in IPL but somehow International matches and tourneys are immune from it. Are the players different? Is there no money involved in high profile tourneys?

[G_B_]

oh yeah a guy who has written a Book on fixing is really unbiased. claims IPL is fixed and then claimed in his book that India v Pakistan (an international match in the WC) was fixed.

[Sachin=GOD]

Yup totally unbiased guy.

oh yeah a guy who has written a Book on fixing is really unbiased.

he may be biased against the IPL but the fact is that, unlike most of the news reporters etc or "experts", he knows what he's talking about w.r.t. fixing/betting.

[G_B_]

he may be biased against the IPL but the fact is that' date=' unlike most of the news reporters etc or "experts", he knows what he's talking about w.r.t. fixing/betting.[/quote'] i actually read his book. It also featured in the Daily Mail in large exceprts. The Daily mail was forced to take down his article for fear of being sued by the BCCI and PCB. All he ever does in his book is name a bookie called "k" all vague accusations. Claimed the ICC are investigating the claims in his book. ICC came out and denied it. Maybe you should actually read his book before commenting? He does not name anybody. Plus some of his trips explained in that book are laughable at best. I dont know where you are but this dude is considered as a joke in England. You know your a joke when a tabloid like the Daily Mail publishes what you have to say

[shortbread]

Why only denounce IPL, why not the rampant spot fixing that happens in the county cricket circles in england. Does he know for sure first class cricket is clean??! When did this hawkins character decide where to put our faith in??!! The guy has been plugging his book at every opportunity possible. This guy is a spoilt ***** who lives a retired life in the south of France and I have no idea how he claims to be a sports journalist. If anyone has read is 'Bookie Gambler...' bullcrap book you will realise the only decent bit in the whole nonsense is he has an understanding of the booking structure in India. Otherwise the entire nonsense is based on his converstation with 'bookies' who claim to know the result of every friggin ball. Thats a bookies job to convince one to bet, if he tells you its all in Gods hands he wont pocket your money will he. So if I ran an illegal booking office and told a jobless Ed Hawkins that Rahul Dravid got bowled out on purpose, Will you swallow this f***ing nonsense?!! Ask him to take his information to the police, law, ICC or anyone who matters he'll simply hide between his girlfriend's legs. This is the same idiot who claimed India vs Pak WC semis were fixed cause a bookmaker told him so before the game, and made this claim long after the World Cup when he was about to launch his book. WTF was he doing if he knew about such a scam. As cricket fans let us apply our common sense rather that legitimatizing idiots like Ed Hawkins. This whole spot fixing affair is a big blow to Indian cricket but lets apply common sense rather than relegiously follow the news channel nonsense or far worse 'pundits' like Ed Hawkins who would claim anything as long as it sells 2 more copies of his crap book.

[G_B_]

Why only denounce IPL, why not the rampant spot fixing that happens in the county cricket circles in england. Does he know for sure first class cricket is clean??! When did this hawkins character decide where to put our faith in??!! The guy has been plugging his book at every opportunity possible. This guy is a spoilt ***** who lives a retired life in the south of France and I have no idea how he claims to be a sports journalist. If anyone has read is 'Bookie Gambler...' bullcrap book you will realise the only decent bit in the whole nonsense is he has an understanding of the booking structure in India. Otherwise the entire nonsense is based on his converstation with 'bookies' who claim to know the result of every friggin ball. Thats a bookies job to convince one to bet, if he tells you its all in Gods hands he wont pocket your money will he. So if I ran an illegal booking office and told a jobless Ed Hawkins that Rahul Dravid got bowled out on purpose, Will you swallow this f***ing nonsense?!! Ask him to take his information to the police, law, ICC or anyone who matters he'll simply hide between his girlfriend's legs. This is the same idiot who claimed India vs Pak WC semis were fixed cause a bookmaker told him so before the game, and made this claim long after the World Cup when he was about to launch his book. WTF was he doing if he knew about such a scam. As cricket fans let us apply our common sense rather that legitimatizing idiots like Ed Hawkins. This whole spot fixing affair is a big blow to Indian cricket but lets apply common sense rather than relegiously follow the news channel nonsense or far worse 'pundits' like Ed Hawkins who would claim anything as long as it sells 2 more copies of his crap book.

the worst thing about his book was that it was so incredibly vague.

[Sachinism]

Hawkins is one who has been moaning about IPL for ages, I don't think anyone doubted its a shifty, unregulated tournament, but Ed goes on like he knows more than he actually know. He provides tips for Betfair on IPL games, mostly they're wrong anyway. For someone who knows things we don't, he does a pretty *****y job of providing tips. Secondly if he feels the way he says he does about the IPL, why the hell does he follow it? Not denying there is probably a lot more fixing going on, that goes undetected, but this guy is a bit of an attention seeker

[Executioner]

gotta agree The hype around IPL is a grand oppurtunity for bookies.

[Executioner]

Then again, cricket is a heaven for bookies, with every sinlge event

[G_B_]

Hawkins is one who has been moaning about IPL for ages, I don't think anyone doubted its a shifty, unregulated tournament, but Ed goes on like he knows more than he actually know. He provides tips for Betfair on IPL games, mostly they're wrong anyway. For someone who knows things we don't, he does a pretty *****y job of providing tips. Secondly if he feels the way he says he does about the IPL, why the hell does he follow it? Not denying there is probably a lot more fixing going on, that goes undetected, but this guy is a bit of an attention seeker

thats exactly why he says "we should trust the international game" and IPL is bad. he will be out of a job if people stop betting.

[Prakat]

Circumstances may conspire against them, so the profligate over organised or the maiden ordered may not transpire.

How do you order a maiden over?

[Zelig]

I want this league to be closed too :agree: ...and start a new one :finger: