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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: Top tennis matches have been fixed, we have the evidence.

Importance:

1. This is from BuzzFeed News ("""BuzzFeed News began its investigation after devising an algorithm to analyse gambling on professional tennis matches over the past seven years.""")

This is a tiny marker of the emergence of the new promised data-led journalism. And its coming from a new kind of news outlet that has separated its journalism from its business model (its not about click-bait headlines for ads, its about providing marketing data or something?)

Who knew. Good for BuzzFeed

2. Good grief! If Tennis is dirty, then we can happily say that all major sports are dirty. Cycling and Atheltics has dopers, football is just wrecked, I think we shall see all major sports get hit soon. F1 crashes anyone?

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I played a lot of sports when I was a kid, but the last few years have taught me to hate the phrase, "Sports builds character." I can only hope I can pass on a love for sport to my child, while avoiding the adoration of sports celebrities (major or minor, we all have our local heroes) that led to my eventual disenchantment[0], contributing to my sedentary lifestyle that I hope he never has.

[0] 15 years and 40 lbs ago, I was a semipro martial artist. It's hard to get into any school when you have a prejudice against martial arts school owners of a certain extremely common type of school. Ethics isn't a strong point for most people.

I suspect professional sport actually discourages amateur participation. At the least there is wide spread confusion between sports fans and sports participants.

We have some evidence of this in the UK in - participation in the wake of the 2012 London Olympics dropped significantly across the board, this despite the UK public being peddled an ‘olympic legacy’ [1]

Obviously sat watching sport equals not participating.

(I swim daily and enjoy it. I don’t recall ever watching a swimming race on TV or being able to name any current professional swimmers.)

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2015/jul/05/olympic...

It's sad to hear about your disenchantment. I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but... why don't you do some sport that's more independent? I enjoy kettlebell training, running and playing tennis. For the first two sports, it's entirely on me: I don't need anyone else, and it's all about the joy of the movement. In tennis you need an opponent, but that can just be one other person whom you regularly play with.

I guess there must be a feeling of sunk costs, in that you reached a high level in your martial art(s) of choice. But surely it would be better to do any kind of exercise, just for health and happiness, than to be thwarted by your ego? (When I say your ego is thwarting you, I mean to say that you control your reaction. The groups you mentioned are contemptible, but it is your choice whether you stop exercise entirely because of their malfeasance.)

If you can ever figure out a single solution to "why don't people 'just' start exercising", you'll probably solve the global obesity epidemic.

I have not provided all of the details, because they aren't really that pertinent to the topic (hence why I had tossed it in a footnote), but it really is about choices, as you have said. And one of my choices was that I would spend a lot of time on my projects. That has come at the expense of other things--not just exercise, but playing games, or learning a musical instrument, or traveling the world.

You don't "just" choose to exercise. It necessarily must come with a choice to stop doing something else. What that something else is, and how much to curtail it, those are the reasons people persist in not exercising.

That choice for me is probably "stop commenting on HN". So you can probably see the problem.

> If you can ever figure out a single solution to "why don't people 'just' start exercising", you'll probably solve the global obesity epidemic.

I've seen this at my workplace. There is a gym that is available to all employees. Like, a nice gym. Fantastic assortment of weights, free classes from legitimately knowledgeable people at all sorts of times, free consultations for further instruction...

Very few people use it. It's right there, damn it!

I think that your reason is spot-on. Going to the gym takes a sacrifice elsewhere, whether it's shortening your lunch break or watching Netflix / TV for an hour less per day. And, well, it's not enough of a priority for people to make that sacrifice.

>Sports builds character. >Ethics isn't a strong point for most people.

If you want ethics, professional sports really may not be the best place to find them.

The reality is that many sports are closely linked to large-scale betting rings which buy results, and a few have much closer links to organised crime.

We always have climbing.

> If Tennis is dirty, then we can happily say that all major sports are dirty.

Definitely the ones that involve large amounts of money for the players and the betting companies. You'd probably see a lot less corruption if you remove the legality of betting or the exorbitant amounts of money being spent on teams, players, and advertising.

F1 would be a lot more difficult to 'fix', since there's a lot of teams and players; the fixers could only target individual racers to not win, and even then there's chance of accidents and such. Tennis and other two-player sports seem a lot easier.

A path of less resistance would be to offer officially sanctioned betting that benefited players. Legalizing and institutionalizing the flow of betting money into players' pockets would price the mafia out of that market, and attract bettors away from illegal bookies. Every legitimate participant gets a better outcome and it drains the money swamp in which the mafia is the apex predator.

Cricket has long been known to be dirty.

As a fan of the sport, I don't even care anymore. If I ever watch it, I treat the results the same way I would treat WWE matches.

Is there a good way to separate Buzzfeed's long form journalism, which can be excellent, from the vast outflow of septic tank discharge which is their website?

I've occasionally seen some really good articles from them, but the links have always been passed round by samizdat because they're completely unfindable...

You can go to http://www.buzzfeed.com/bigstories or http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform

Interestingly, they're the same page (the Long Form URL redirects to the Big Stories one).

Thanks --- unfortunately it's not searchable, and looking at the headlines makes me want to throw up...

> looking at the headlines makes me want to throw up...

This man found the best single way to purge after a big meal. Bulimics hate him.

Follow the journalists doing investigative journalism on twitter (thats how I found this article yesterday).

Was just about to ask the same.

I have enjoyed their longform 'legitimate' journalism, but want to not lay eyes on all the click-bait toxic sludge they publish.

I heard this story being announced on the BBC this morning. When they said it was a joint investigation with "Buzzfeed News" I nearly choked on my toothbrush.

Talking about F1 crashes there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Formula_One_crash_cont...

Gambling on F1 is extremely difficult to do profitably, far far far harder than football or tennis. Simply because the rules change all the bloody time and there's only ever a handful of matches to train your models on in any given season. At least with soccer there's thousands of very high quality, highly competitive matches every season in the top european leagues.

> F1 crashes anyone?

There is basically no conceivable way of interpreting F1 as something other than a circus for some automotive OEMs.

> football is just wrecked

Association football or American football? In the US, it's pretty much open knowledge that all NFL players are doping, but there isn't really anything dirty going on.

Now, college football, on the other hand...

Or it's a bet to gain some legitimacy even though most of their things are click bait.

If it's all chaff and no wheat, fewer people would read it.

I'd love to think that's the case, but Buzzfeed got to the place they're in now off the back of all that chaff which huge numbers of people love.

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