Online gambling revenue across the world is estimated to stand at well over $25 billion annually and, as we well know, where there is big business there are also people looking for any edge they can get their grubby paws on.

You may not have heard of the term ‘courtsiding’, but gamblers are using people at live events to send through instantaneous score updates to betting companies. They then use this information to make some serious money. I’ll hand over to the BBC for the breakdown:

Courtsiding is inextricably linked to “in-game” betting – gambling while an event is taking place.

This betting happens on exchanges like Betfair, where gamblers pit themselves against one another, offering constantly changing odds on a player or team winning or losing, as a match progresses…

That information would be fed back in milliseconds to the syndicate [ that courtsider] Dan [Dobson] worked for in London…

The difference in getting that data first and changing the syndicate’s betting position can be worth thousands of pounds per point, sometimes even tens of thousands, and there are a lot of points in a tennis match.

Yes, where there is money to be made people can become very creative. Now 22-year-old Dobson was having a whale of a time travelling the world and watching tennis, all the while earning some decent money, when it all came crashing down at 2014’s Australian Open.

He was arrested at the tournament and, if convicted, could have faced up to 10 years behind bars for ‘trying to corrupt the betting outcome of a match’. The charges have subsequently been dropped, although with the practice coming under fire many of the betting syndicates have cut ‘courtsiders’ from the payroll.

Maybe everyone should stick to the most tried and trusted way to make money out of sports – paying players to underperform with large sums of money and leather jackets.

[source:bbc]