A Different Approach To Covering Matchfixing

There's other ways to tackle the issue, one that puts the onus on the tournament operators and betting platforms

I don’t mind presenting myself as one of the foremost authorities on esports matchfixing. It’s not exactly a special qualification all things considered especially given the industry wide propensity to simply ignoring its existence. Despite over a decade of direct action against it, either through public reporting or backchannels, we’re not really any further forward. In fact I’d argue we’ve taken about six steps back and trod right in a pile of shit that the oldschool fixers of esport’s golden years could only dream about. The space is completely overrun by match-fixing now. There isn’t a single game across the world that doesn’t have fixing going on at all but the highest of levels and sometimes even then. Almost no-one is doing anything about it because they claim there’s not really anything they can do. What a message that sends out.

In my many years of trying to combat match-fixing I’ve worked with tournament operators, investigative groups, sports books, betting platforms, journalists and law enforcement. I even teach a sports integrity course at the University of New Haven which details, among other things, how to spot and where possible prevent and punish match-fixing. Yet despite all that I have arrived at a profoundly disturbing conclusion – no-one really cares about the match-fixing. Oh yeah, if a journalist like me serves someone up on a silver platter with irrefutable evidence then the stakeholders are all too happy to swing the axe. If it requires them to do some work or take a decision based on the balance of probability then it’s a different matter entirely. You see in the short term the integrity of a sport being compromised doesn’t lose anyone any money at first. You won’t feel those losses today or even tomorrow so, because esports is a short-sighted, unsustainable industry ran almost exclusively by greedy weaklings of low moral fibre nobody does anything. It’s only when a scene collapses in on itself and takes all the potential earnings with it that those same people posture like Edvard Munch’s The Scream and shriek “why didn’t someone do anything?”

I’ve written about this multiple times and it’s had next to no impact. After almost steering the industry back on the right course in 2016 we’re now on rails for the worst possible final destination; the world of tier one being bought and controlled entirely by despicable governments and everything below that irredeemably corrupted to the core. Exposing it does nothing. Everybody knows it’s the reality and just shrugs. As long as there are games to watch and no one has to consciously think about whether they are rigged or not then they’ll tune in for the spectacle. Talking about it and expecting action is pissing in the wind.

As an example of how bad it has got let me remind you of what happened around North America’s ESEA league owned by the ESLFACEIT Group. When it became apparent that the league was riddled with match-fixing, with some of my sources telling me that as many as 80% of matches had been tampered with in some way and that fixes were co-ordinated by dozens of players in spreadsheets, I contacted the people who ran the league with my findings. They effectively told me their hands were tied and that they had to defer to the Esports Integrity Commission. They then directly contacted staff that I suspected to be involved on some level and told them to ignore me. They essentially shut down that avenue of investigation and then reneged on punishing players who were so obviously guilty it remains an embarrassment they have had playing careers these past few years.

Oh well, at least there was ESIC to handle matters right? Well, whatever happened there I’ll never know because despite sharing all my findings with them as well and them making public proclamations in 2021 that bans were coming in a matter of weeks we’re still waiting. To this day the only bans they issued on that matter were for the players dumb enough to be recorded talking about it. We, myself included, were told that the delays were because the matter was now in the hands of law enforcement so naturally I didn’t want to compromise that and so we waited some more. In the end it seems that law enforcement didn’t want to wade through the jurisdictional murk (match-fixing individual sports fixtures wasn’t even recognised as a crime in Canada for example) and were reputedly more interested in ties to organised crime. Worth mentioning that even when it became clear ESIC weren’t going to dispense any punishments you are supposed to believe that the “agreement” in place with them precludes ESEA from issuing their own punishments. Total, grade-A bullshit.

it’s party time for the fixers at the moment

Oh well at least there’s other organisations above and beyond ESIC that are dedicated to shutting down match-fixing in any sport including esports. There’s a problem with that though. Many of these organisations aren’t investigative in nature and have a business model that is tied to offering “alerts” and “insight” only for the bookies that pay to have these protections. They don’t make their information public, they don’t sanction anyone, they simply pass on what they’ve seen as suspicious to the betting platforms and let them deal with it as they see fit. For instance when I became frustrated with ESIC’s lack of progress I contacted SportRadar and invited them to review all my notes and findings, tens of thousands of words complete with images and about 60 hours of recorded interviews. They didn’t reply because at the end of the day it’s about the moneylines.

Oh well, at least you can rely on the betting platforms themselves to do something about it because after all they’re victims too, right? Well beyond occasionally voiding bets due to suspicious activity and blacklisting certain team and player names they make almost next to no contribution to combatting the problem either. I strongly suspect that because of the small market nature of esports they simply don’t care because if you’re betting on fixed matches at least you’re still betting. Some of this is pretty brazen in nature, such as some platforms removing the limit on esports bets if you parley it with another non-esport bet. There’s no feedback for tournament operators about their findings, there’s no public statements about who they’ve removed and why. They just do it and get back to counting the money. Remember they could end esports matchfixing tomorrow if they just didn’t offer any action on the sketchy tournaments we all know are filled with it.

So where does that leave us? Well, with a mostly corrupt chain from player to bookie not in a great place but there are middlemen that are trying at least. A number of oddsmakers monitor moneylines as closely as the sportsbooks and bettors do with the difference being when they see the very clear and obvious fixes coming in they compile a “recommended blacklist” for the sportsbooks that use their services. Oddsmakers say to their clients we will not offer action on the following teams or players based on our findings and on that basis teams may or may not participate in competition at all. Often in these tournaments invites are rescinded mysteriously if teams aren’t able to be bet upon. Again, none of this is public but it is uniform. Each platform that uses them for setting odds will get the same recommendations and, assuming that they follow them, it will limit how much of a return the fixers can make. Of course the private nature of that activity doesn’t help the bettors or anyone else but it’s something.

Now, what if a journalist had spent the last few months leveraging their network to gain access to several of these industry blacklists and was willing to publish the names of the theoretical worst offenders on it? I reckon you’d be able to publish that information with the qualifier “we’re not saying the names on this list engaged in any improper behaviour but whenever they play suspicious bets occur so proceed with that information in mind.” Seems reasonable to me. After all reporting on the existence of a “blacklist” doesn’t mean the reporter advocates for its contents. It wouldn’t be their blacklist but drawing attention to its existence and content should prompt other invested parties to ask questions, which is nominally a good thing.

One question to think about were that to happen is “why do the teams and players on this list still get invited to tournaments” and it’s a good one. You see, you don’t have to ban people. I wouldn’t support any one being sanctioned on anything other than strong evidence. However as a private company you can choose who you invite to participate in your tournaments and if certain players and teams are shrouded in unfortunate consequences you don’t have to invite them. There should be a clear divide in where we see those teams play and where we don’t. I wrote about this way back in 2015 when CS:GO Lounge had mainstreamed matchfixing Counter-Strike and the obvious, traceable chain of skins exposed culprits in ways that were hard to defend. No-one listened then of course because 2015 was a year where I was made into an esports pariah and relentlessly attacked by community and mainstream games journalists alike. Now we have tournaments that solely exist for the purposes of matchfixing.

Given that the only real mechanism to be caught matchfixing in esports is self-incrimination all it really takes to avoid getting caught is a functioning brain. I’ve written about the mire and the murk of trying to cover match-fixing in CS:GO and how the impossible expectations of what the community considers “evidence” make even publishing what you find a waste of time. Despite that, I’ve never stopped turning over stones because ultimately this will kill the grassroots of any scene it is left unchecked. What I’ve come to realise is that the best approach to this isn’t to accuse people of matchfixing but rather to talk about what happens when they play. After all, it is entirely possible that some crazed bettor just likes to go big on all their games and has a 100% rate of being correct. What you think or do with that information is up to you but you can’t do anything unless you know about it so let’s start there.