BetFred rigged games: press coverage

Saturday, March 26, 2016

BetFred rigged games: press coverage

December 10th, 2013

There's now been some mainstream media coverage of the BetFred rigged games issue - see the recent Pittsburgh Tribune Review article U.S. gaming regulators can learn from recent online case in Europe.

The author expresses his opinion on how, in part, the US gambling industry has succeeded, and how this is not currently reflected by its online counterpart:

America's land-based casinos have flourished because strict government regulation give players confidence that luck and skill determine whether they win or lose - not loaded dice, a stacked deck or a rigged machine.

Online, unscrupulous operators can have games programmed to increase the house edge without players' knowledge. Adaptive software can recognize how a player bets and increase the chances of a loss.

In an email to the publication, commissioner Phill Brear had this to say about the relationship of trust between casinos and their host regulators:

We will not be able to maintain that trust if the disclosure of minor errors results in disproportionate or unwarranted public embarrassment for the operators; but, if that trust is breached, the outcome may be fatal to a (licensee).

For this reason, this episode warranted no more than the significant inconvenience the suppliers have been put through in dealing with my requests for material and explanations/meetings.

If a game returning fully four percent less than it should have been returning represents only a "minor error", one has to wonder what the Gibraltar authorities consider to be a major issue. There have been issues whose sheer magnitude certainly qualified them for heavy sanctions and wide exposure, such as the Full Tilt money laundering affair. But to dismiss issues of software malpractice, where legislative guidelines have actually been breached, as "minor errors" seems to radically misunderstand what the job of a regulator is.

Apropos this, Eliot Jacobson says:

(The report) exposes that the regulatory agencies for online gaming — at least the GRA, which is one of the biggest anywhere — are not only not regulating, but barely competent.

In his concluding remarks, the author has some recommendations for how the US authorities should tackle the issue of regulation if it's to be regarded as meaningful:

As states devise rules governing Internet play, they must ensure regulators avoid getting cozy with those they oversee and that casinos have protection against cheats.

Most importantly, casinos online or on land must be required to adhere to the toughest standards for fair play.

Incidentally, one of the biggest regulatory failures in the online gambling industry to date was the Kahnawake Gambling Commission's failure to take appropriate and meaningful action in the wake of the Absolute Bet superuser scandal. Here, the regulator was shown to be hopelessly compromised, and certainly failing "to adhere to the toughest standards for fair play", when it issued the most minimal sanctions against the cheating poker room.

The Kahnawake / Absolute Bet issue is several years old now, and it might have been optimistically reasonable to expect the industry to have moved on in the intervening years; it's apparent that the relationship between regulators and their casino clients (who pay to reside on their territory; let's not underestimate the potential relevance of this) hasn't changed much, if at all, when they are so demonstrably incompetent at the highest levels.

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