Courtsiding and Data Latency - Is Getting Information Faster Than the Market Still Possible?

[oli_sussex]

Courtsiding is the practice of being physically present at a sporting event and transmitting what you've just witnessed to someone outside the venue who places bets on an exchange before the official data feed updates the market.

A point won in tennis. The person in the stadium sees it happen in real time. The broadcast has a delay. The official data provider has a delay on top of that. The exchange price reflects the previous point for several seconds after the new point has actually happened.

Someone at courtside who can transmit "point won" faster than the broadcast and data feed combined: they're betting on a result that has already happened while the market still prices it as undetermined.

This isn't analysis. It's not even information asymmetry in the sense we usually discuss it. It's knowing the outcome before the market has any chance to reflect it.

There was a well-publicised arrest at Wimbledon in 2014 involving exactly this. Tournament organisers and exchanges have spent the years since closing the gap.

The question: how much of the gap is actually closed, and does any version of "being faster than the market" remain available to anyone, legally or otherwise.

 

[SharpEddie47]

The American stadium equivalent doesn't have the same notoriety but the underlying mechanism exists.

NFL games: the TV broadcast has a production delay. Stadium attendees see plays happen in real time. The broadcast delay used to be several seconds.

In-play NFL markets weren't as developed when this gap was at its largest. By the time in-play NFL betting became significant, broadcast delays had shortened and data feeds had become near-instantaneous from in-stadium tracking systems.

The "fast hands" exchange trader: someone whose entire job is reacting to the broadcast feed faster than other participants. This is legal. This is just being good at your job.

The distinction between the fast hands trader and the courtsider: the fast hands trader is reacting to the same broadcast everyone else has access to, just faster. The courtsider has access to information nobody else watching has access to at all.

Same underlying goal. Completely different category of activity.

 

[ThePuntingProf]

Before any of this was formalised there was a period in the 1990s when simply being at a racecourse gave you information advantages that nobody had thought to regulate because nobody had thought about it.

You could see which horses looked unsettled in the parade ring. You could see the going conditions firsthand rather than reading a report. You could hear things said between trainers and jockeys that never made it into any published information.

None of this was illegal. None of it was even considered remarkable. It was simply what being present meant.

The mobile phone changed this completely and quickly. By the early 2000s racecourses had rules about phone use specifically because the gap between "what someone present knows" and "what the betting ring knows" had become transmittable in real time in a way it hadn't been when the only way to convey information was to physically run somewhere.

Courtsiding in tennis is the same underlying phenomenon as what I did legally and unremarkably at racecourses thirty years ago, except formalised, criminalised, and with a name.

The line between "an attentive person noticing things" and "a criminal information transmission operation" was drawn somewhere specific, and where it was drawn matters more than whether the underlying activity changed.