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Notes -
Having worked in the industry and known of a bunch of athlete-bettors (some of whom did turn fixers) this is a very common story, also people running up outrageous nightclub tabs whilst blacked out and somebody from the local underworld having a cunning idea to dig them out.
Professional athletes tend to be very very good clients for Sportsbooks since they've got a combination of self-belief due to being a professional athlete, belief in their own ball knowledge (which is frequently actively counterproductive), a lot of idle time since nobody is training hard for 80 hours a week, a lot of liquidity compared to most other millionaires and generally a lower average IQ than other types. Generally books are very happy to turn a blind eye to their activities but will only intercede if something that looks like matchfixing or illicit knowledge comes down the pipe. Also based on a kinda-friend who deals with these matters, matchfixing is increasingly impractical since there are very few actual siloed sportsbooks (it's all largely serviced by a few huge aggregators), liquidity (Maybe $500k even on major sports and you're gonna get stiffed a lot) versus player pay going to the moon and generally increased professionalization. Most successful fixes these days tend to be of the type where a top 50 Tennis player gets seeded in a major or a decent-level ATP match against somebody in the top 3 and then just guarantees a loss since 'nobody player gets absolutely paddled' doesn't really raise eyebrows and bets on Jannik Sinner to absolutely pummel a random don't flag in the same way that other things do. Also lower-tier guys way more practical to influence for $100k whilst a top tier guy would literally wipe his ass with that money
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