by Declan Hill
McAllister – who, I want to be clear, does not fix matches – is one of the few who consistently makes enough money off sports gambling to live a dream lifestyle. When I visited his offices, I was hoping for something dramatic. I was hoping for a cross between Santa’s workshop and a mad genius’s laboratory. I imagined that the whole place would be almost dark. Through the gloom I would see rows of men wearing striped shirts, eye-shades, and smoking cigars while they muttered down the phones to sources in hundreds of different stadiums around the world.
Actually, McAllister has the pale, unshaven, math-geek look of the truly successful gambler. He worked for a few years in the financial district but then found his niche in predicting sports results. “I was always good at statistics and it came naturally to me,” he told me while showing me around his offices. They look like a little boy’s dream: there are TV screens showing live soccer matches, fridges stocked with pop and beer, and the walls have life-sized soccer posters on them. I met a number of other professional gamblers and odds compilers. They all have the same look: a nerd at loose in a man’s world. Don’t be fooled. They have nerves of steel and are willing to bet sums of money on their own intuition and intelligence that would make most people faint. McAllister not only places bets worth millions, but has also become so successful that he heads his own betting syndicate, all of whom work extraordinarily long hours to beat the bookies. He taught me some of his methods.
There are no drugs stronger than naturally produced ones. Many addictive drugs – like cocaine, heroin, or amphetamines – work not only by adding something to the bloodstream, but also in combination with the body’s own endocrine system, helping secrete huge amounts of adrenalin or endorphins. Drug addicts effectively pump themselves full of natural drugs by taking artificial drugs. Others of us do the same by creating or allowing circumstances in our lives to pump us full of natural drugs: the man who drives too fast or fights with everyone, the woman who argues or dramatizes her way through life.
It is like that with most serious gamblers. The thrill with gambling is not just winning, although that is obviously better. Even losing produces great waves of natural drugs for gamblers. Even when they totally screw up their lives, lose their savings and their families, the natural wave of adrenalin is still pumping through their bodies, making them feel very, very alive. The game, be it the roll of dice, the turn of numbers, or twenty-two soccer players running up and down the pitch, is simply their way of producing a natural high in their own bodies. Big Sal Miciotta claims that the drug was so strong in some addicted gamblers that they liked getting beaten up: “I swear some of those guys would actually like it. They would want to get beaten.”
John McAllister’s recipe for successful betting is the exact opposite of the testosterone and emotional cocktail of the ordinary gambler. McAllister told me that the best traders – his word, like the Asian bookies and their agents – control their emotions and are pessimists. When he bets, he follows a strict regime:
I do the opposite of most gamblers: when I am losing I taper down. I do not chase my loses. I think that is what may have happened to Wayne Rooney [a famous soccer player, who allegedly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling], why he lost so much money. I have a set amount of money: 1.5 per cent of my betting bank a day; no more. I do not bet any more of that in one day.
McAllister was very wary about talking about his methods. At one point, he switched off a computer as I peered at some of his data. “It’s the way I make my money,” he said defensively. But in general there are two methods that successful gamblers use to beat the bookmakers: statistics and information. Statistics come from variations of probability theory or carefully produced computer databases with thousands of variables that churn out predictions. Information comes from inside sources: a star player has an unannounced injury, the referee is going through a divorce, the wind coming off the lake in Chicago makes baseball pitchers throw wild. The pros use both. No intuition. No feelings. No hunches. Just day after day of hard research and statistical computations. It works. McAllister has a large house. A second home in Switzerland. And the big, legal bookmakers hate him. In fact, when they can, they refuse to take large amounts of his money. It is, according to the American gambling expert Michael Konick, the same in Las Vegas casinos or Costa Rican Internet sites. Lose money? Sure! You’re welcome. Become a smart, savvy punter who wins money over the long-term? You will have a real problem getting your bets on. It is the same for Joe Saumarez-Smith. He was a successful gambler for years, yet he too faced problems getting his bets on in England:
The U.K. gambling market has no balls. No odds-making. They won’t take your business if you are a winning punter. The big companies are notorious for only catering to small punters. I go to pick up my winnings and I am told, “Oh, our shop had an off day. Sorry, but you’ll have to come back tomorrow when we have had a chance to go to the bank …” I find it difficult enough to get £100 on a game, let alone £200,000, or the amount you need to make it worth your while. I can’t place a big bet in my own name anywhere in London.
So McAllister and others in the professional gambling circuit use the illegal Asian gambling syndicates. They claim that they do so partly because their faith in the Asian bookmakers is higher than with many legal European gambling companies, even though the Asian operations are illegal. It is easier to get the bets on, the payout is quicker, and the administration fee (the vig, as Big Sal would say) is lower. But while the industry itself may be honest, the fixers who work inside it have devastated sports across the entire continent.
7
THE COLLAPSE OF THE BETTING LINE
We lost nearly an entire generation of players, but if you are going to say that there is no corruption now, I wouldn’t believe you…. We had circumstances where the entire team, including substitutes, were in on the fix.
It was supposed to be a slow night at the Singapore Pools. The multimillion-dollar organization that is Singapore’s attempt to curb some of the interest in the country’s illegal gambling market. It’s a government-run sports lottery where grandmothers can feel safe betting their money. On April 12, 2006, Kevin Kim (*) was on duty. It is his job to watch the bets as they come in and then adjust the betting line accordingly. Kim is an odds compiler. The phrase odds compiler has a ring to it, just down from bookmaker, bookie, or pro gambler, of danger, of living on the wrong side of the law. It speaks of tough, unshaven, macho men who wear eye shades, chew toothpicks, cigars, and unwary bettors for breakfast. From the odds compilers that I have met, this is the wrong impression. They are like the professional gamblers who try consistently to take their money; gentle, nerdy types that have the paleness that suggests too much time in front of a computer screen.
That night, Kim was a little like an all-night radar operator or a weather watcher, checking the sweep for any bombers flying into his airspace or storms coming to threaten the security of his kingdom. However, that night there was a perfect storm brewing in the gambling world, and Kim and the rest of Singapore Pools had no idea it was coming.
A quarter-final FA Cup match between Singapore and the Malaysian team Sarawak was scheduled for that night. There is a great deal of tension between Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore was part of Malaysia until 1965, when a teary Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore came on national television to say the country was splitting up: “For me, it is a moment of anguish. All my life, my whole adult life, I believed in merger and unity of the two territories. We are connected by geography, economics, and ties of kinship … it broke everything we stood for …”
Now, there is the animosity that comes from a national divorce. Singaporeans, who tend to have to be ordered to enjoy themselves (“We have to pursue this subject of fun very seriously,” a cabinet minister said once), often regard Malaysians as hopelessly lazy country cousins who simply sit around drinking and sunning themselves. Malaysians, on the other hand, tend to regard Singaporeans as their big-city cousins, impossibly ambitio
us, pushy, and unable to enjoy themselves without a prime ministerial decree. There is a famous cartoon that I saw hanging on a number of Malaysian soccer officials’ walls. It shows two Malaysians looking at the stands of a soccer stadium before a Malaysia versus Singapore match. One section is covered in signs: “no spitting,” “no talking,” “no cellphones,” “no loud shouting,” “no chewing gum.” “Ahh,” says one Malaysian to the other, “it’s for the Singapore fans.”
In short, they hate losing to one another. So even a soccer match between a rural province such as Sarawak and Singapore should have been a tough, well-fought match.
A betting line is a reflection of all the bets on a particular game added together. It is a little like a share price. In the same way that an investor can buy a share of General Motors for $100 at nine in the morning and then see that share be worth $80 at noon when the sales result from the North American market is announced, so too can a betting line on a game shift. The star forward on one of the teams breaks his leg and the betting line moves up as more bettors place their bets against the team with the injured star. The other team announces its World Cup–winning goalkeeper is coming back from an injury and the betting line may move still higher.
However, in reality, huge shifts in the lines are very rare. When the odds compilers sit down to make up the odds on the games, they do it with a commendable nerdy energy. They have to, their very living depends not only on accurately assessing the probabilities, but also accurately predicting how the fans will think the game will end. So they pore over the injury lists. They pore over one another’s odds in case a rival has some information they do not. They have long lists of statistics – which team is stronger on home ground, which team is better in the rain, which team is better early in the season – that they check with the same fervour that Southern Baptists check the Old Testament to make sure God didn’t make any mistakes.
In Asia, a soccer match has several “lines” to watch. The first is the actual result of the game: who will win. It is expressed as three options: home win, away win, and draw. The most common bet in this part of the world is the Asian Handicap, which is roughly the same as the point spread of the North American sports betting market.
However, two bet types that are particularly intriguing for some match-fixers are the ones for “correct score” and the “total goals.” Guess which team will win and a bettor might get odds of 2 to 1 or less. But if a gambler can predict that the total number of goals scored in a game will be over seven, they can get 30 to 1 odds or higher.
Two hours before the start of the match, Kim noticed the betting line began to move wildly. It began to move on a particular score. Not just that one team would win, but that the match would have at least nine goals. This result is very unusual (most soccer matches have total scores of two or three goals) and as such had odds of roughly 30 to 1. In the next two hours, so many people placed bets on total goals of nine or above that the betting line crashed. It went from 30 to 1 down to 1.5 to 1 – meaning that if a bettor had placed a bet two hours before the game that the two teams would score nine goals between them, for every $1 wagered, the bettor would have won $30 back. By the start of the game, the same bet would only have won $1.50.
Such a big change in the betting line is virtually unprecedented in the gambling market, where an odds shift of $4 or $5 over the course of a week is considered a significant odds movement. A change of $28 is equivalent to Black Thursday – October 24, 1929 – when the New York stock market crashed. The team management heard about the run on the gambling market, and one of the players claims that they came storming into the dressing room demanding the fix be stopped. The players, all of them, agreed and wondered who could possibly be fixing the game? They all promised to go out and play their hardest.
The result? Exactly as the fall in the line predicted: one team won 7-2. There were nine goals scored. Singapore Pools lost several hundred thousand dollars and the game was widely assumed to have been fixed by a set of gambling corruptors who lost control of their information and thus began a “run on the market.” And the reputation of Asian soccer took yet another hammer blow.
It was a wet evening in Kuala Lumpur. The biggest team in Malaysia – Selangor – was playing the independent, oil-rich state of Brunei. Back in the heyday of the Malaysian league, a game against their wealthy cousins would have attracted a crowd of 30,000 to 40,000 people. The night that I sat and watched in the spring of 2005, there were barely enough people to fill in one stand out of four. The fans tried their best, but the noise they made barely came across the field. I was sitting in the VIP section, where a crowd of well-suited fat men sat around in nice chairs, discussed the game vaguely, chatted on their mobile phones, and ate a great supper at half-time. None of them stood and cheered. To be honest, there was not much to cheer about. The game was neither played at an interesting pace nor with too much skill. The best thing was that the players did not fall about and pretend to be injured, and generally, there was a gentlemanliness about them that was wholly admirable and is almost wholly missing in the European game. Even after the most atrocious tackles, they helped one another up and shook hands.
In the end, Selangor ran out easy winners by 3-0. The game mirrors the state of soccer in general on the Malay Peninsula. For the people used to watching games in the packed stadiums of the early 1990s, it is like finding a sick and dying old friend. The name is the same, but the appearance has so diminished and shrunk that it is almost too painful to see.
The national teams have also fallen in world rankings. In 1993, Malaysia was 75th in the world; it is now at 159th, just ahead of teams such as the Maldives, Grenada, and Tahiti. The situation in Singapore is almost as bad: they were at 73rd, and now they are ranked at 138th.
You don’t get many thank-you notes for exposing widespread corruption. Johnson Fernandez and Lazarus Rokk certainly didn’t. What Rokk got in the end was an onerous lawsuit, where his government sources refused to help him, and a bullet carved in chalk. The bullet was mailed to him with a note saying “The next time it’s for real.”
A few months later, their Brickfields underworld source was killed. It was, apparently, nothing to do with match-fixing. He simply got into an argument with a neighbouring Chinese gang at a pool hall. They waited for him outside and then twelve of them beat him to death with pool cues. According to Rokk, “He was a big, strong guy and fought them off, but it was just too many. And he didn’t have his gang with him or any weapons to defend himself. He was left to die in the alleyway.”
Fernandez and Rokk gave up. Unsupported by much of the Malaysian establishment, the story was simply too hot for them. Fernandez claims that he changed his route home every night while driving and that “I would have had to take out a big insurance [policy] for my family if I had continued. It just wasn’t worth it in the end. I am passionate about soccer. I sat there watching it disappear. But there was just too much danger for us.” They did their best to forget everything they once knew. They even took all their notes, including a letter that they claimed gave accurate predictions of the results of English Premier Leagues matches before they were played, and destroyed them.
Years later, when Fernandez and I met over coffee in downtown Kuala Lumpur, his gentle face became dark when he thinks of that time. He says that he is “totally disillusioned … There’s no best story coming out of this. We have all been losers here; the game has been the biggest loser. The game is losing because there is no support. There are not enough passionate people there who want to see the survival of the game. We are not going to see it in our lifetime, not even our children’s lifetime.”
The nightmare scenario that Mohamed bin Hammam, Peter Velappan, and all the other Asian soccer officials are facing is that enthusiasm for soccer has not actually died in their countries; if anything it has become larger. A few weeks after watching Selangor play Brunei, I watched another group of fans. It was May 26, 2005, the day after the Champions League final. The night before, t
he soccer world had watched one of those games. Every few years a sporting event occurs that transcends the mediocrity of most games; it becomes a lesson in not just sport but also life. For once the overblown hyperbole of the sports journalist – where almost every game is the “match of the century” filled with “drama” and “tension” – was justified. The game was in the Atatürk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul, pitting Liverpool – from the northwest of England, and previously great but now barely surviving among the top European teams – against the superb AC Milan, owned by the prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi. The first half, for those unfortunate enough not to see the game, was a triumph of Italian professionalism. AC Milan mixed ironclad defending with rapierlike attacks. At the end of the first forty-five minutes, they were up 3-0. Their defence was stocked with players whose names are synonymous, the way that Chubb or Pinkerton are linked to protection, with great defence: Maldini, Stam, Gattuso, and Nesta. Any reasonable person could see that there was no way back from such a score. The game was as good as over. The best thing for Liverpool and their fans to do was to slink out of the stadium in disgrace.
However, in a triumph of sheer bloody-minded courage, determination, and refusal to accept defeat, the Liverpool fans in the stadium did not accept that the game was over. There were 30,000 of them in and around the stadium and nobody could tell them the game was over; nobody could get them to stop their noise; and nobody could stop them from singing again and again the anthem of the great Liverpool teams of the past, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The sound echoed around the stadium; it floated down into the dressing room where their team heard it and took heart; and it was heard in an air-conditioned room 8,600 kilometres away in Singapore.