A few years ago a friend of mine wrote a paper on a related issue in tennis: <a href="http://www.playthegame.org/fileadmin/image/knowledgebank/Tennisdraws_Katarina_Pijetlovic.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.playthegame.org/fileadmin/image/knowledgebank/Ten...</a>
The only way to stop this is to align incentives. The ATP (or whichever league) should open its own sanctioned betting market, then give the winning player a percentage of the pool. If they can capture a significant amount of the betting and give a reasonable percentage to the winning player, it will become very expensive (and hopefully not profitable) to fix a match.
IPython notebook with all the workings here:<p><a href="https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/2016-01-tennis-betting-analysis/blob/master/notebooks/tennis-analysis.ipynb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/2016-01-tennis-betting-analy...</a><p>Bravo, BuzzFeed.
Related BBC article: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921349" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921349</a>.
I investigated a bit this list for the officially banned players, but didn't do the sha256 matching yet for the rumored players. Should be easy though.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/41fpeq/tennis_match_fixing_evidence_of_suspected_match/cz2kfee" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/41fpeq/tennis_match...</a><p>Cracking the sha256 hashes like this, but still haven't confirmed anyone new:
<a href="https://gist.github.com/rurban/2f1eabc751ebdc3cd056" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/rurban/2f1eabc751ebdc3cd056</a>
I remember that corrupt match between Arguello & Davydenko. Betfair's forums were ablaze with speculation as people watched the ridiculous odds movements before and during the match. It's appalling that the tennis authorities did nothing about the corruption, you will never see a more blatant attempt to cash on a fixed match. (In time, the fixers would learn to not be so obvious in their betting).
Interesting how many people care about the authenticity and integrity of sport when it's just entertainment. Wrestling matches are fixed and orchestrated, but it's still popular.
Buzzfeed continues to impress. The other new content type I am really liking from BF is the "Tasty" cooking videos: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedtasty/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedtasty/</a><p>Well-done, easy to consume, perfect for social sharing.
tl;dr: Top tennis matches have been fixed, we have the evidence.<p>Importance:<p>1. This is from BuzzFeed News
("""BuzzFeed News began its investigation after devising an algorithm to analyse gambling on professional tennis matches over the past seven years.""")<p>This is a tiny marker of the emergence of the new promised data-led journalism. And its coming from a new kind of news outlet that has separated its journalism from its business model (its not about click-bait headlines for ads, its about providing marketing data or something?)<p>Who knew. Good for BuzzFeed<p>2. Good grief! If Tennis is dirty, then we can happily say that <i>all</i> major sports are dirty. Cycling and Atheltics has dopers, football is just wrecked, I think we shall see all major sports get hit soon. F1 crashes anyone?
While I love the fact that a native new media organisation like BuzzFeed is doing genuine investigative journalism, I don't understand why they feel compelled to use stupid animated gifs all over the page. e.g. <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/johntemplon/how-we-used-data-to-investigate-match-fixing-in-tennis" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzfeed.com/johntemplon/how-we-used-data-to-inve...</a><p>You can't imagine Bob Woodward of the Washington Post publishing the Watergate investigations with random cartoons interspersed throughout the content.
There was an article back in 2014 that examined the same thing. I dare to venture Grantland's reporting is bit better than the click bait Buzzfeed is:<p><a href="http://grantland.com/features/tennis-gambling-match-fixing-indian-wells-potential/" rel="nofollow">http://grantland.com/features/tennis-gambling-match-fixing-i...</a>
What buzzfeed did is nothing new. A lot of people in the betting "scene" observe obviously fixed matches on a regular basis, mainly in football but also in tennis. Some are extremely obvious, some are less. The main is that organisations such as FIFA, don't seem to care really. They are talking about having dedicated systems etc in place, yet there are obvious fixes going on quite often and rarely such cases will be investigated. As someone else mentioned, Davydenko is a classic.