Bookies and bettors alike are not interested in wagering on professional wrestling, which is a situation unique among nationally televised sports.
The reason is not that fans don’t care about who is going to win a given
EXAMPLE 3. A Simulated 1–8–5 Trifecta Illustrating More Complex Tiebreaking
Queue Point Score
1 2 3 4 5 6 winner 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
3 4 5 6 7 8 1–beats–2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4 5 6 7 8 2 1–beats–3 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5 6 7 8 2 3 1–beats–4 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
6 7 8 2 3 4 1–beats–5 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
7 8 2 3 4 5 1–beats–6 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
8 2 3 4 5 6 1–beats–7 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 3 4 5 6 7 8–beats–1 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
3 4 5 6 7 1 8–beats–2 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 3
4 5 6 7 1 2 8–beats–3 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 5
5 6 7 1 2 3 4–beats–8 6 0 0 2 0 0 0 5
6 7 1 2 3 8 5–beats–4 6 0 0 2 2 0 0 5
7 1 2 3 8 4 6–beats–5 6 0 0 2 2 2 0 5
1 2 3 8 4 5 7–beats–6 6 0 0 2 2 2 2 5
2 3 8 4 5 6 1–beats–7 8 0 0 2 2 2 2 5
6 7 – – – – 5–beats–4 8 0 0 2 4 2 2 5
5 – – – – – 7–beats–6 8 0 0 2 4 2 4 5
– – – – – – 5–beats–7 8 0 0 2 6 2 4 5
– – – – – – 1–8–5 8 0 0 2 6 2 4 5
match – they cheermadly forStone Cold Steven Austin and theirfavorite stars. The problem isn’t market size because more people watch profes-sional wrestling than profesprofes-sional hockey games and hence are poten-tial bettors. The problem certainly isn’t that people have ceased look-ing fornew opportunities to gamble, foryou can now get odds on any-thing from the presidential election to the pregame coin toss at the Super Bowl.
Professional wrestling has no chance to succeed as a gambling venue because the betting public understands that the results of wrestling matches are choreographed in advance. Hence, to someone in the know, there is no uncertainty at all about who will win. I wouldn’t accept a bet from anyone who might really know the outcome beforehand, and neither would you.
Many people are afraid to bet on jai alai because they are betting on players who happen to be people. Professional players want to win. But
give them sufficient financial incentive to lose, and they will lose. In horse racing, you can be pretty sure that the horse did not bet on the race, but such confidence seems misplaced in jai alai.2
Obviously, the frontons themselves have a strong incentive to avoid betting scandals. Anything that scares away potential bettors is a funda-mental threat to their business. Every fronton pays players both a fixed salary and a bonus for each game they win, and thus they have incentive to play hard and win. The frontons have strong rules against match fixing, and any playernot on the up-and-up will become persona non grata at every fronton in the world. Players at a top fronton like Milford earn in the ballpark of $50,000 over the course of an 8-month season (for stars the earnings go into six figures), and thus they do have incentive to play fairly.
In the course of my research for this book, I have uncovered only lim-ited discussions of crooked jai alai betting. Nasty things apparently oc-curred in the United States in the late 1970s, which no one likes to talk about today, but several Florida and California state documents from the 1950s and 1960s I studied stress that the sport had no whiff of scandal up to that point. They credited this to a strong players union and the close-knit structure of the Basque community, which polices its own.
It is hard foran outsiderto fix a game with a playerwho speaks only Basque.
The one game-fixing scandal I have seen documented occurred in Florida, apparently during the strike years, when underskilled and unded-icated scab players roamed the court. Groups of three or four players per match were bribed by the fixer to play dead, who then bought multiple quiniela boxes covering all pairs of honest players. The betting volume required to turn a profit on the deal was also high enough to catch the attention of the fronton. Eventually, it was used to help convict the head fixerin criminal court.
The nature of jai alai particularly lends itself to suspicions of fixing.
Players have to catch a rock-hard ball hurled at 150 miles per hour using an outsized basket strapped to their arm. Often, a seemingly catchable ball will dribble out of a player’s cesta, and immediately cries of “fix” will come from bettors who have invested on this player’s behalf. But let’s be fair. The width of the cesta in the area where the ball enters is only 3 to 3.5 inches,
2 Of course, one may be concerned about the jockey’s possible investment strategy.
whereas the diameter of the ball is almost 2 inches. This leaves only an inch orso as the margin of error, which is not much – especially when the ball is curving or wobbling.
The fan’s fearof cheating has some interesting consequences. The pub-lished program listing the schedule for each match always includes each player’s birthdate, even though some of the players are quite long in the tooth. Why? I’ve heard that suspicious fans think that Joey’s fellow players will, as a present, let him win matches on his birthday, and these bettors want to share in the celebration.
All this said, we don’t worry about fixes in our betting system and won’t concern ourselves with them any more in this book. Why? That our sys-tem predicts the outcome of jai alai matches much better than chance tells us that most games are not fixed. Even the most cynical bettor will admit that performing a successful fix requires a certain amount of en-ergy, investment, and risk. These considerations dictate that only a small fraction of games will be fixed. For a system like ours, which relies on making lots of small bets instead of a few big ones, fixes can be written off as a cost of doing business. Spend too much time worrying about fixes and you turn into a conspiracy theorist and then a nut case. I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.