Tennis has once again dominated the suspicious betting patterns reported by ESSA members to the relevant authorities, making up nine of the 11 cases reported to the relevant authorities in the first quarter of 2016. The other two cases involved basketball and football. Five of the cases were identified in Asia, three in Europe, two in Africa and one in Latin America.

Tennis made up 73 of the 100 suspicious events reported by ESSA members to the authorities in 2015. ESSA’s members include 18 of the world’s largest regulated bookmakers. An alert reported by ESSA’s members doesn’t mean that a match has been fixed – just that unusual activity has taken place on the betting market.

‘A betting pattern is deemed unusual or suspicious when it involves unexpected activity with atypical bet sizes or volumes that continue – even after significant price corrections have been made in order to deter such activity in the market’, reads ESSA’s Q1 report for 2016 (PDF below). ‘A betting pattern is only confirmed as suspicious after ESSA has made detailed enquiries with all of its members to eliminate any prospect that the unusual patterns could be for legitimate reasons, such as pricing the market incorrectly’.