Want a sure-win football tip?

MARCH 20 — A friend sent a very interesting email on Wednesday night which I’d like to share for the benefit of all readers. It’s a tip for a sure-win bet on a match in the Italian Serie A this weekend.

Yes, that’s right, a sure-win bet. I can see I certainly got your interest now.

The match is not surprisingly one from the Italian Serie A. It’s the match between Chievo and Catania which kicks off at 10pm (Malaysian time) tomorrow.

To quote my friend, “the best way to make money on sports-betting is when the result is already known.”

In Asia, we are more likely to believe that a match had been fixed.

“Match-fixing happens all the time lah”, we would happily say to our doubting friends from the west, especially those from the United Kingdom.

They were brought up on the respectable view of sports being played on a level field with both teams giving their all for the sheer joy of playing the game, let alone winning it. Until some unscrupulous people were caught red-handed in the early 1990s, most people there thought you just couldn’t “fix” the outcome of matches in England.

About that case, proudly, or maybe not in this case, a Malaysian or two were involved in the plan to fix the result of a match at the home of Charlton Athletic. The tactic was to set the floodlights to fail about 5 minutes into the second half of the match.

Back then, before football live telecasts became the norm, the bookies in Asia would settle bets and consider the result of a match as final, as long as the second-half had kicked off.

So, they could take all the “live bets”, or “running ball” (“bola jalan” in BM) bets, towards the end of the first half as well as during half-time, weigh the outcome on both sides, then decide whether to “end” the match for their benefit.

Anyway, getting back to the match in question this weekend, the big tip is that the result has been fixed to be a draw. No surprise there for an Italian match, right?

True, but not when you have people betting more than GBP100,000 on a drawn game four days before the match.

That’s the “action” that had already gone down in a few online sports-books, as well as betting exchanges, such as Betfair, on Wednesday evening. Incidentally, all other matches being offered for early betting had no more than GBP5,000 laid on any of the possible outcomes — home-win, draw or away-win.

If there’s one thing that people do online, it is that they do it fast. Sure enough, within hours, most of the sportsbetting websites started taking heavy bets on a draw between Chievo and Catania.

The typical reaction from UK bookmakers is to suspend the betting entirely for this game, so as to minimise their liability, as such a high volume of betting so early before a match raises all kinds of questions.

A quick check with a few of the established UK bookmakers, such as Ladbrokes, Stan James and Victor Chandler, shows that the Italian match in question had been suspended.

Not surprisingly, the Asian bookmakers, SBOBET, 188Bet and Mansion — incidentally all three are shirt sponsors for English Premier League (EPL) teams — all still carry the match but with a huge anomaly for what is considered a draw bet.

For all the other matches in the Serie A played this weekend, the draw bet in all these websites is paying more than either a home-win or away-win, but for Chievo v Catania, the draw bet is paying lower than the other two betting options, not to mention it is the lowest price for a draw game you can get on any of the top four major leagues in Europe – EPL, German Bundesliga, Spanish Primera Liga, Italian Serie A.

Speaking of which, the Italian leagues have always been plagued with claims of match-fixing. It’s a question of survival – in more ways than you can imagine – and with Italy being the home of the mafia, you can bet that it goes all the way to the top of the club and football administration in the country.

That is why, every season, by the time the Serie A season gets to the months of April and May, that is, when the top of the table is pretty much down to the usual suspects – AC Milan, Juventus, Inter Milan, Roma – and the relegation battle is tight among a handful too, many of the UK sportbooks do not even bother to offer matches that involve two mid-table teams.

By the way, there are no guarantees in betting on football, so if anyone should decide to place a bet on a draw for the match tomorrow between Chievo and Catania, you would do so at your own risk. My comments above are purely based on information that was given to me, and which I analysed over a few sports-betting websites. It is not to be seen as a guarantee on the result nor an encouragement to place a bet on such a result.

There’s so much more to talk about football betting than can be mentioned in just one article. With the world cup coming in June, I expected to read a lot more stories about police clamping down on illegal betting syndicates around the country, like in years past, but things have been surprisingly quiet.

It is either a case of the syndicates getting smarter in evading the police, or the police are too busy looking after a certain political party’s interest in holding on to power to have time to go after the real criminals out there.

My guess is the latter.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.