1. The whole mental gymnastics of tournaments’ attempts to depict courtsiding as illegal, it feels reminiscent of many moral outrage arguments these days. It’s not enough to say that a certain behavior is wrong, we now need to broadly paint everyone who doesn’t follow our rules as bad people. I see this everywhere nowadays and I don’t like it, nuance and mutual understanding is the only way any adversarial situation ever achieves resolution.
2. You’d think that it’d be very easy with today’s technologies to remain undetected while transmitting these simple pieces of information. I'm curious how these spotters actually find courtsiders, especially those with no history in the industry.
I think demonizing your adversary is as old a trick as any, really. We have seen the end of the one-way media era, in which people believed that other people around the world all sort of thought the same thing about most things, but of course it was never so.
I also agree that it should be fairly trivial to hack up some bluetooth device with whatever buttons you need and have it relay using your phone to some server, then you just push those buttons in your pocket, virtually undetectable.
As they note in the article, there's only a small amount of known courtsiders, they have their pictures, they're taught to look for them. One of the courtsiders even says he just keeps his phone out, because it's his face that gets him caught.
"iirimets said that since just his face is enough to get him kicked out, he doesn’t make much of an effort to hide his cell phone anymore. For Pete, it’s the same. And I can see how they’re both distinctive-looking enough to stick out like sore thumbs—Rainer is tall with close-set eyes and thick eyebrows, while Pete has big, glowing eyes that take up much of his squarish face. The first catch instantly halves the viability of a courtsider’s career; the hundredth means it’s almost pointless to continue."
Yes, I read the article. I'm wondering how they catch those new to the game, how that record gets started. If you're telling me that all they need to do is rotate out the cast, sounds pretty simple, but I naturally doubt that it is just that easy.
> You’d think that it’d be very easy with today’s technologies to remain undetected while transmitting these simple pieces of information.
I'm imagining a pocketable Bluetooth device (paired with your phone) with a few buttons for the common stuff. That should be easy to conceal and use surreptitiously.
> A Wimbledon spokeswoman said in a statement that the All-England Lawn Tennis Club is “committed to achieving the ‘gold standard’ of measures to protect the integrity of The Championships,” including courtsiders.
Of course, courtsiders are simply transmitting factual information: they aren't harming the integrity of the games at all.
The integrity of those involved in catching, apprehending, and banning courtsiders for life, on the other hand, is certainly in question.
I wondered the same thing. You would think that betting on the match should not be under the jurisdiction of the tennis club, rather the gambling regulators.
I fail to see how someone electronically (or otherwise) relaying non-confidential information about a tennis match would in any way harm the integrity of the match.
I don't understand why the tennis organisers care so much about cracking down on this. Their incentives are mainly aligned with the courtsiders: they pay for seats and facilitate gambling which encourages viewers. The data firms like Sportradar are the only ones with a financial incentive to stamp them out: their service is worth more if it's a monopoly. So they must be putting the squeeze on the tennis federations and threatening to cancel contracts.
It's clear that the Sportradar service isn't competitive for real-time gambling, but why don't they offer a service that is? Put a guy at each match entering the scores (and any other information) faster than the chair umpire and sell that data. If there's enough money to have multiple spotters and courtsiders (up to 50) at the event, Sportradar should be able to capture enough of that to employ one person to do data entry.
The most interesting thing to me is that it appears that most of these bets are really just head-to-head between sparring courtsider: trying to control the betting line through speed (and betting algorithms.) It's just a high-stakes game of SlapJack.
"Often, courtsider-led betting syndicates will match up against each other, putting both the fast fingers at the tournament and their respective algorithms to a head-to-head test. It’s common for courtsiders to recognize one another from across the court at a match. At bigger tournaments, they may spot a dozen or more such familiar faces in the crowd. Brad Hutchins estimated that there have been as many as 50 courtsiders working simultaneously inside the main stadium at a Grand Slam; another thought the number could be nearly twice as high."
I'm looking forward to the day when people start using satellites to collect data on sporting events. Satellites can't trespass, and they aren't subject to TFRs. Too expensive right now, but won't be for long.
Of course, I guess the events can always be held indoors.
In the USA, you'd almost certainly be in violation of a TFR (Temporary Flight Restriction) which are usually established over stadiums during games. That is a federal problem that'll get your pilot in a huge amount of trouble.
The Goodyear blimp looks to be getting some kind of allowance to fly over the same areas. I wonder if that flight path has to receive approval from the company that runs the sporting event, or if it's more of a government shall grant situation.
Quite likely the TFR is actually to protect the blimp! TFRs pop up for all sorts of reasons - rocket launches, presidential motorcades, volcanoes, sporting events... They're situational and specific rather than blanket restrictions.
terahertz imaging, or perhaps multispectral imaging from cell frequencies, 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz wifi?
that stuff goes through walls. and if we can get a THz emitter in the range of affordability, that'd be a neat way to get realtime 3d scans of environments.
This is an interesting concept. I'm somewhat surprised the author didn't draw a connection between the stock market and insider trading, which is more analogous in my mind than card counting in black jack.
In cards, stocks and tennis, we can map the system thus:
1. Decision about action is made
(Firm decides on merger during board meeting/Roddick decides to serve a topspin/Dealer decides to deal in alternating order)
2. Action occurs
(Firm announces in press release/Roddick serves/Dealer deals)
3. An observer relays info about action
(Stock trader instantly reports shares beginning to soar/Courtsider pushes button for "it's a topspin" and potentially "point scored"/Card-counter relays number of cards in dealer's hand to player or himself)
Insider trading is when a person who was present at step 1 performs step 3 (relays information) ahead of step 2 (Action).
The analog in tennis would be if Roddick (insider to his own playing) told someone he would serve a topspin prior to serving it, or worse, if Roddick told someone he would lose a match on purpose.
Courtsiders, unlike a typical inside trader, have no special inside knowledge about what kind of serves a player shall make, and they certainly cannot influence a player's playing. Just like a stock trader, their only power is transmitting the events that do occur at lightning speed.
Rapidly counting the number of cards in a hand after they've been dealt (action) is this, too.
As you can see, insider trading is the wrong analogy to make.
I would disagree that it's the "wrong" analogy to make... maybe just different.
To me, insider trading is analogous to court siding, in that, in both cases, someone is seeking to use "private information" (information that isn't yet publicly available) in order to make money. So I would order the system:
1. Action occurs "privately" (firm decides on merger but hasn't announced it publicly; court sider reports data that the ump hasn't recorded yet/doesn't record; player notices how dealer plays the cards)
2. Party with the private information makes bets based on this information in an effort to beat the system
3. The public finds out about the previously private information and responds accordingly.
So, courtsiders don't have knowledge about what the player WILL do, but they can tell people what the HAS done faster than they would get normally.
Though I can understand how card counting may be a better analogy for courtsiding simply because of the fact that they're both legal gray areas, as opposed to insider trading, which is explicitly illegal.
The extent I could agree with it largely depends on how well this step - "courtsider reports [private] data that ump hasn't recorded/doesn't record" - represents the real game.
I would think the courtsider and ump record scores at an almost equal pace (and the advantage a courtsider might get from guessing a score ahead of the ump by a few milliseconds is likely negated by wrong guesses). But the stuff the umpire "doesn't record," like a player's injury, can be seen by every attendant of that match.
If the injury (or some other event the ump doesn't record) is seen by most of the stadium, isn't it more "public knowledge" than "private information"? If so, then courtsiding isn't like insider trading. If the stadium full of people counts as a "private" party, then it is.
Insider trading is relying on secret information to gain an advantage, and is illegal. Card counting and court siding both rely on storing and transmitting public information, and is not illegal.
1. The whole mental gymnastics of tournaments’ attempts to depict courtsiding as illegal, it feels reminiscent of many moral outrage arguments these days. It’s not enough to say that a certain behavior is wrong, we now need to broadly paint everyone who doesn’t follow our rules as bad people. I see this everywhere nowadays and I don’t like it, nuance and mutual understanding is the only way any adversarial situation ever achieves resolution.
2. You’d think that it’d be very easy with today’s technologies to remain undetected while transmitting these simple pieces of information. I'm curious how these spotters actually find courtsiders, especially those with no history in the industry.