Translated material
Money - game - money
Newsweek's interlocutor introduced himself as Andrei Topalov, a manager at a car dealership. He said that he always lost to bookmakers. And now an informant is selling him information about dishonest hockey and football matches, and Topalov started winning. He created his own business: he resells his inside information on a special website at a price of 6,000 rubles per match. This is very beneficial, because if the information is incorrect, he still earns more on his site than he loses on the sweepstakes.
In the last two or three years, Russia has been covered by a betting boom. Together with him, the demand for the services of intermediaries like manager Topalov grew. It is unlikely that this is his real name - the business is illegal. Finding the results of upcoming fixed matches on the Internet is now not difficult. Some offer them for $15, others do not hesitate to take 10,000 rubles each. Such money is paid mainly by those who then bet at least 50,000–100,000 rubles in offices and double the amount if they win. Intermediaries evaluate the accuracy of their forecasts approximately the same - about 70%. Intermediaries cannot prove that matches are indeed fixed, and many people think that they are just guessing the result. But for clients, there doesn't seem to be a difference.
28-year-old Alexander became famous overnight: last fall, the Sport-Express newspaper wrote about his website, which also sold the results of contractual matches in the KHL. The lack of resonance greatly surprised him: none of the clubs listed as unscrupulous complained. In the KHL, this information was called nonsense, but Alexander himself only had more clients. “Not a bad profit,” he says. He already has more than a hundred people in his clients, and he takes from them at the highest rate - 10,000 rubles each.
The main thing for the mediator is to find an honest informant. He receives information directly in the club from one of the middle managers. The informer takes at a rate of 50,000 to 200,000 rubles per game. The manner of communicating with informants is copied from spy films: site owners say that they meet with them at a designated place a few hours before the game and transfer money in exchange for fresh data. Then the agents have about an hour to send the information to their customers by mail or SMS - they pay ahead of time, even a day or two before the proposed game.
Car dealer Andrey Topalov does not think such precautions are superfluous: it is better, he says, to play it safe than lose additional income. He has been looking for his informant for several years - and now he is afraid that one of his competitors will take him away. Topalov has become suspicious: he does not trust anyone, makes bets via the Internet, and sends two of his friends and his brother to bookmakers to win - each pays 5,000 rubles. “But I feel calm. And then I was robbed on the street several times,” explains Topalov. In addition to street thieves, he has someone to be afraid of - bookmakers, police.
He is also wary of new clients. “Not everyone can work with me. First, you need to be tested by various programs,” Topalov lets on mystery. What is the essence of the test, he does not disclose, but says that not everyone can handle it. As a result, he only has 12 clients. To find five more people, Topalov says, and the site can be closed: it will have enough customers.
Most often, the information offered on such sites is related to hockey or football. “There are many matches here - good and different,” laughs Igor, another entrepreneur working in this market. For him, sport, too, has long turned into only earnings - he was at the stadium only a few times, and even then in early childhood. Approximately the same applies to sports events and Andrey Topalov: “I rarely watch the games I bet on. I am such a person - it is not interesting to me.
The President of the National Association of Bookmakers (NAB) Oleg Zhuravsky is annoyed by such sites. "They're deceiving people, they should only be of interest to law enforcement," he tells Newsweek. According to him, if fixed matches exist in Russian sports, then not two or three games a week, but much less. Sites are not a problem for Zhuravsky - for bookmakers this is not the biggest money. But bigger players also make money on fixed matches, and bookmakers are very interested in exposing dishonest games. “We suffer a lot - after all, we lose our money,” he complains to Newsweek.
Zhuravsky signed a contract with a large international company Betradar, which helps bookmakers to correct the lines and deal with dishonest players. Recently, the NAB signed an agreement with the RFU on a joint fight against match-fixing and is already developing its own six-step program to protect the image of Russian football - so that there is not even talk about bought matches. The main know-how of this program is the early warning system: the data received by the bookmakers from their own informants is compared with the number of bets on the same match and gives an approximate picture: a fixed match or not.
Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, who simultaneously heads the RFU, was imbued with the bookmakers' new initiative right away - he has known about contractual matches for a long time, but has not yet learned how to deal with them. Therefore, he accepted the idea of Zhuravsky with a bang, especially since such a program, as he was told in the NAB, is already successfully operating in 86 countries of the world. For three months of joint work of the NAB and the RFU, however, not a single "strange" match in the Russian championship was found - although the sites regularly sold information about the results.
But the NAB has already received a lot of dividends: now, Zhuravsky rejoices, bookmakers are not only not evicted to special "gaming zones", but they are also allowed to accept bets directly at the stadiums - and their profits are steadily going up. The financial crisis only helps them: Sergey, a fan of the Triumph basketball team near Moscow, told Newsweek that after being laid off at work, he took the redundancy allowance to bookmakers - he wanted to win so that it would be enough for several months in advance. But he returned home with nothing and now borrows money from relatives. He is probably not the only one: the bookmakers say that now they are getting more money.
Oleg Zhuravsky warns that major Western consultants will soon enter the Russian sweepstakes market. They give predictions based on many parameters, from game statistics to weather conditions. Their predictions can be even more accurate than fixed game sites, and for intermediaries like Topalov, this will be a big blow.
Andrei Topalov, however, is not afraid of possible competition with Western analysts - his clients, he says, will not turn away anyway. He is upset by something else - he was left without one of his main sources of income. For example, last year, in his words, he knew in advance how the matches of the backup squad of one of the Premier League clubs would end. He had an informant in this club, and in seven months he and his comrades won all 14 games of the team. “They even “leaked” games at home,” he recalls fondly. But at the end of the season, this club was relegated from the Premier League and now will not play understudies in the championship. Will have to find a replacement for them.