Great read, two things I found interesting:

1. The whole mental gymnastics of tournaments’ attempts to depict courtsiding as illegal, it feels reminiscent of many moral outrage arguments these days. It’s not enough to say that a certain behavior is wrong, we now need to broadly paint everyone who doesn’t follow our rules as bad people. I see this everywhere nowadays and I don’t like it, nuance and mutual understanding is the only way any adversarial situation ever achieves resolution.

2. You’d think that it’d be very easy with today’s technologies to remain undetected while transmitting these simple pieces of information. I'm curious how these spotters actually find courtsiders, especially those with no history in the industry.

> A Wimbledon spokeswoman said in a statement that the All-England Lawn Tennis Club is “committed to achieving the ‘gold standard’ of measures to protect the integrity of The Championships,” including courtsiders.

Of course, courtsiders are simply transmitting factual information: they aren't harming the integrity of the games at all.

The integrity of those involved in catching, apprehending, and banning courtsiders for life, on the other hand, is certainly in question.

I don't understand why the tennis organisers care so much about cracking down on this. Their incentives are mainly aligned with the courtsiders: they pay for seats and facilitate gambling which encourages viewers. The data firms like Sportradar are the only ones with a financial incentive to stamp them out: their service is worth more if it's a monopoly. So they must be putting the squeeze on the tennis federations and threatening to cancel contracts.

It's clear that the Sportradar service isn't competitive for real-time gambling, but why don't they offer a service that is? Put a guy at each match entering the scores (and any other information) faster than the chair umpire and sell that data. If there's enough money to have multiple spotters and courtsiders (up to 50) at the event, Sportradar should be able to capture enough of that to employ one person to do data entry.

The most interesting thing to me is that it appears that most of these bets are really just head-to-head between sparring courtsider: trying to control the betting line through speed (and betting algorithms.) It's just a high-stakes game of SlapJack.

"Often, courtsider-led betting syndicates will match up against each other, putting both the fast fingers at the tournament and their respective algorithms to a head-to-head test. It’s common for courtsiders to recognize one another from across the court at a match. At bigger tournaments, they may spot a dozen or more such familiar faces in the crowd. Brad Hutchins estimated that there have been as many as 50 courtsiders working simultaneously inside the main stadium at a Grand Slam; another thought the number could be nearly twice as high."

HFTT, High Frequency Tennis Trading.

I'm looking forward to the day when people start using satellites to collect data on sporting events. Satellites can't trespass, and they aren't subject to TFRs. Too expensive right now, but won't be for long.

Of course, I guess the events can always be held indoors.

This is an interesting concept. I'm somewhat surprised the author didn't draw a connection between the stock market and insider trading, which is more analogous in my mind than card counting in black jack.