Utopia, you are standing in it!

Court-siding in the Cricket World Cup yesterday reminded me of the 1973 classic movie The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. This movie is still worth watching today – a great Robert Redford, Paul Newman movie told with great wit.

Both court-siding and The Sting were both sharp practices by gamblers based on the delay in broadcasting sports results.

In court siding, the six or seven second delay in cricket broadcasts allow spectators with mobile phones to tip off gambling confederates in other parts of the world to place last second bets.

Court siding carries a 10 year prison term in the Australian State of Victoria. It is not illegal elsewhere and some have suggested that gambling syndicates turned to court siding because it’s easier to accomplish than match fixing.

Dozens of people are ejected from cricket games every year for court siding. They are easy to spot. They take no interest in the game, don’t cheer or clap and spend all their time on a mobile phone or laptop.

In The Sting, a bunch of grifters conned a gangster by pretending they could manipulate the distribution of horseracing results by the local telegraph office in the 1920s. The confederate delays the distribution of the racing results for several minutes, so the race is run and the result known before the bets are placed with the unsuspecting betting shop, relying on Telegraph racing results.

Central to the con, which is called the Wire is setting up a betting shop filled with grifters in on the con placing false bets. The only gambler who places a real bet is the mark.

The wire was most popular in the early 20th century, when horse and dog race results were sent to betting parlours via the telegraph. As with court-siding, the con is time and personnel intensive requiring a large gang to be involved.

As with most cons, the Wire is based on manipulating the greed and deep pockets of the mark, including a willingness to act illegally to profit from gambling or other business ventures.

In the case of The Wire, there is corruption involved because a confederate of the telegraph office is supposed to be on the take. The confederate in the Telegraph office delays distribution of the race results, while the tips of his co-conspirators giving them enough time to place a bet.

In the case of court siding, this practice seems to me to be simply entrepreneurial alertness or arbitrage.

Betting in sport is often on spreads such as when a no ball is bowled, who is the first change bowler, who bowled a no ball or got out before a milestone such as 50 or 100 runs.

Court siding cannot be stopped by closing the betting shop 10 seconds early because they are not events that happen to a timetable such as closing the betting before the race starts.

It is up to bookmakers to solve this problem because it is an ordinary business problem. There is no corruption, bribery or any form of conspiracy between the employees of the bookmaker and the gamblers or between the gamblers and the players of the particular sport. The police should not be wasting their time with court siding.

Bookmakers could stop the practice of court-siding dead if they introduced a 10 second delay between lodging a bet online and when the bet is accepted. This 10 second delay is longer than the broadcasting delay that makes court siding possible and profitable.