A major sports gambling website "suspended betting on Sunday for a mixed doubles match at the Australian Open, raising suspicions of match fixing at one of the world’s most prestigious tennis tournaments," according to Rothenberg & Glanz of the N.Y. TIMES.
Pinnacle Sports Head of Sportsbook Marco Blume said that ahead of a match pitting Lara Arruabarrena and David Marrero against Andrea Hlavackova and Lukasz Kubot, large amounts of money "poured in on what would normally be an obscure contest." Nearly all of the money, Blume said, "came down for Hlavackova and Kubot, which he said was an indication that the match might be fixed." Arruabarrena, the 33rd-ranked doubles player on the women’s tour, and Marrero, ranked 32nd among men, "rejected any possibility of fixing in an interview after the match." Marrero, who like Arruabarrena is from Spain, "cited a knee injury in explaining their performance."
The suspicious gambling activity "comes with the sport already under intense international scrutiny over possible match fixing." A spokeswoman for the International Tennis Federation, the governing body for tennis’s four Grand Slam events, said that "the organization had not been notified of any suspicious activity." She added that such information "would first go to the Tennis Integrity Unit, the sport’s internal watchdog."
Blume said that about 13 hours before the match was set to begin, Pinnacle’s traders "suspended betting on it." Blume: "We saw a small number of people placing a large amount of money. In context, these matches are rather small. That means that any aggressive betting behavior is very easy to detect on our side."
Blume said Pinnacle "had seen no such betting behavior for any other match at this Australian Open" (N.Y. TIMES, 1/24).
