God, I hate sports betting. Not to put too much on this article, but it seems to exemplify so much of what's currently wrong about the world. Have some standards, people!
Ben, I am in awe of the research and fact checking you did for this piece on 1XBet, which seems to be a shady outfit. Now that online betting gets its foot in the sponsorship door with the ATP Challenger Tour and Dallas, are the established gambling sites like FanDuel aiming for sponsorship of big tournaments or even Slams? We certainly hear plenty on telecasts about the odds on a given matchup. Displaying the logo of a site where you can test those odds would seem to be the next step. But not a good one, in my opinion.
I hate it in all its aspects and you can’t escape it as there ads for it all around and what makes them laughable is when they say if you have a gambling problem call 1 800 We Screwed You. What a joke.
I’m late to this … Terrific work. One could draw so many sad conclusions from this about the prevalence of laziness and incompetence (and greed) in the world. Shady outfits (but they’re not lazy!) seek out the lazy and incompetent to expand their “business.” Would be interesting to know if anyone rejected their offers before the Dallas Open and BJK Cup accepted them. Apparently the rigorous vetting didn’t include typing the company name into a Google box. FFS.
Great reporting Ben. The common thread in trying to pin down what betting companies like this are doing is always that they have shady founders, “headquarters” in places which don’t ask questions about where money has come from, and are impossible to pin down.
And of course those who bet through them.. are just making it all worse.
I honestly cannot understand betting: it’s a frequency I can’t hear, a language I can’t understand. But it’s absolutely evident that it’s a toxic mix when it gets near enough to sports to be given any official imprimatur, as the social media posts from people such as Monfils and Svitolina have demonstrated.
This screams money laundering risk. Any tennis organisation legitimising such a company is foolish, reckless and negligent. These tennis administrators are not serious people.
Great reporting! I wonder how tennis can dig itself out of this one. What I am reading about “prop bets” seems to make tennis very vulnerable to this kind of corruption. And we’ve already learned that a lot of the online abuse of athletes, particularly female athletes, is not coming from fans. It is coming from unhappy bettors.
God, I hate sports betting. Not to put too much on this article, but it seems to exemplify so much of what's currently wrong about the world. Have some standards, people!
Props to the Mark Wilson spokesperson name. Is it Marc Babolat in France? Maruko Yonex in Japan?
Ben, I am in awe of the research and fact checking you did for this piece on 1XBet, which seems to be a shady outfit. Now that online betting gets its foot in the sponsorship door with the ATP Challenger Tour and Dallas, are the established gambling sites like FanDuel aiming for sponsorship of big tournaments or even Slams? We certainly hear plenty on telecasts about the odds on a given matchup. Displaying the logo of a site where you can test those odds would seem to be the next step. But not a good one, in my opinion.
I hate it in all its aspects and you can’t escape it as there ads for it all around and what makes them laughable is when they say if you have a gambling problem call 1 800 We Screwed You. What a joke.
I’m late to this … Terrific work. One could draw so many sad conclusions from this about the prevalence of laziness and incompetence (and greed) in the world. Shady outfits (but they’re not lazy!) seek out the lazy and incompetent to expand their “business.” Would be interesting to know if anyone rejected their offers before the Dallas Open and BJK Cup accepted them. Apparently the rigorous vetting didn’t include typing the company name into a Google box. FFS.
Great reporting Ben. The common thread in trying to pin down what betting companies like this are doing is always that they have shady founders, “headquarters” in places which don’t ask questions about where money has come from, and are impossible to pin down.
And of course those who bet through them.. are just making it all worse.
I honestly cannot understand betting: it’s a frequency I can’t hear, a language I can’t understand. But it’s absolutely evident that it’s a toxic mix when it gets near enough to sports to be given any official imprimatur, as the social media posts from people such as Monfils and Svitolina have demonstrated.
This screams money laundering risk. Any tennis organisation legitimising such a company is foolish, reckless and negligent. These tennis administrators are not serious people.
Good grief, that is really shocking. How can they not do basic due diligence?
Great reporting! I wonder how tennis can dig itself out of this one. What I am reading about “prop bets” seems to make tennis very vulnerable to this kind of corruption. And we’ve already learned that a lot of the online abuse of athletes, particularly female athletes, is not coming from fans. It is coming from unhappy bettors.