The World of Snooker on The Rocks

There are few scandals that have rocked a sport more than the John Higgins betting scandal in Snooker. In Cricket I can remember the big Hansie Cronje scandal a few years ago and the ex-Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar was caught taking bribes a few years back. Then we had Ferdy Murphy in the world of Horse Racing. But betting has moved on and the type of cheating has moved on.

These days with in play markets and live betting then there is simply no need to throw entire matches by losing them or fixing match scores. These days there is so much in play action that simply throwing one single frame can mean huge swings in profit or loss for bookmakers. In play betting now is very big business and probably will only get bigger. But there is simply no way that you can ever prove this type of cheating in actual play.

If a top player wanted to throw a frame of Snooker at a key moment then it would be ridiculously easy to do so. The standard of Snooker is so high now that any slight error would lead to at least a break of between 40-70 and these are often frame winning scores. It simply isn’t possible to detect that a player missed a ball on purpose. The thing is that at the start of the frame, the player does not put himself into the situation where he has to miss a simple shot.

But then again you don’t even have to miss a ball for a break to come to an end. Simply losing position on the next shot could be all it takes but if a player is looking to throw a frame then there is every chance that his opponent might just win that frame on merit and this means that his opponent didn’t even have to do anything at all to win that frame. The closer it gets to the end of the match then the more violent will be the fluctuations with regards to the price movements in play.

We are now entering a whole new world of cheating and when WPBSA chairman Barry Hearn stated that he had every intention of wiping out this “disease” then I really do wish him the best of luck because he is going to need it. There is literally no chance that he could ever hope to eliminate all forms of cheating. Players even have the opportunity to lay themselves in play with the use of an accomplice at key stages of matches without even getting a third party like a bookmaker involved at all.

So the chances of finding every single cheating player are simply too high to contemplate. It is simply not possible to keep the world of gambling and bookmaking and the actual playing of the sport or game apart indefinitely. This is the way of the world and it is here to stay and the advancement of the online betting world has made this so. As a stop press, I cannot wait for the Champions League final and my money is certainly on Inter Milan and Champions League football betting will probably not be as high this season with regards to English people seeing as there is no British interest in the final for the first time since 2004…….But Mourinho should provide some interest.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson