Washington & Poland - A dark day for tennis

Thursday, August 2nd was a day that many will remember for a long time to come for all the wrong reasons. As has been reported in the media, the tennis authorities are supposedly launching an investigation into the disgraceful betting patterns on the Davydenko v Vassello Arguello match in Poland.

I happened to be following this match, both the betting beforehand and the live stream from Poland and this is what happened: -

Davydenko's odds shifted from around 1-4 (which you would expect him to be against a much lower ranked opponent) to around 6-4 against before the players had even emerged from the locker room and rumours were rife on the betting forums that Davydenko would throw this match.

The Russian's price contunued to ease out from 6-4 to over 2-1 after he won the first set by six games to 2. Now, a player ranked number four in the world and defending tournament champion wins the first set easily against a guy ranked in the 80's and his price drifts out. At times during the match, Davydenko was trading at 10-1 and above, even though he was leading the match!

Of course, once the first set has been completed, Betfair will pay out on a result, even if one player retires and predictably enough, a couple of games into the second set, Davydenko, having shown no signs of injury, calls for the trainer and starts wincing in agony over a foot injury. He calls the trainer again twice during the second set, which surprisingly he lost and by this time his opponent's odds were around the 1-10 mark, where they stayed until Davydenko finally quit on his stool after three games of the third set.

The mainstream bookies were running for cover and refused to bet in play on this fixture, having seen the potential carnage and Bet 365 were purely betting on individual games of the match and not the outright result. Of course, most bookies won't pay out on an incomplete match, but there was £3.5 million traded on Betfair, which is a huge amount for a second round match of a minor tournament and it was blindingly obvious that for whatever reason, Davydenko was not going to win this encounter.

It is possible that Davydenko had nothing to do with this, rather his people, knowing that he had an injury decided, very unwisely to lump on Vassello Arguello and begin a betting landslide, where punters spotted free money and flooded the market. However, the Russian, along with several others, such as Volandri, Andreev etc does have a history of highly suspicious matches and quite correctly in my view, Betfair have suspended payments on this match.

I would imagine that Betfair will eventually settle and the ATP's inquiry will result in no findings of foul play, but this sort of thing will eventually ruin the sport if nothing is done to prevent the practice of match fixing, which is much more common than many would like to believe.