Snooker Betting integrity took another hit after fresh allegations by the News of the World regarding an alleged phone call made to Ladbrokes by John Higgins who wanted to place a bet on Shaun Murphy to win the 2009 World Snooker Final during a break in play. John was allegedly refused the bet after the call centre operative correctly informed him that he was unable to place bets on events that he was participating in. In any form of sports betting you are not allowed to bet on sports you take part in. Footballers, for example, are not allowed to bet on matches and several players have been severely reprimanded and even banned for doing so.
John Higgins is currently under investigation for the various allegations he faces and is under suspension by World Snooker whilst these investigations take place. I have received a number of emails regarding the safety of online sports betting from people who follow my online betting tips, which have in the past involved snooker tips.
It is certainly a sad day for any snooker fan. Barry Hearn, the chairman of World Snooker, is fighting a battle to rid the “cancer” from the game as was described by Steve Davis, the six times World Champion. Despite all of the bad press I do believe that it is safe to bet on games of snooker using a bookmaker like bwin.com. I still believe that most results play out the way you would expect them to and with some knowledge of technique, momentum and snooker skills you can still spot a good bet. It would be a shame if the actions of one or two players tarnished this fun way to place sports bets.
I enjoy a bet on Snooker. I bet on a match between Liang Wenbo and Peter Ebdon where there were allegedly suspect betting patterns for a 5-0 win for Liang. I bet on the outright win for Liang because I knew that Ebdon had practised with Liang and that Liang would be comfortable playing against him with plenty of belief he could win this match. Ebdon had too much respect for this player; whilst Wenbo is immensely talented he was much further down the rankings than Peter. I think in this match Ebdon knew what Liang was capable of and knew he was good enough to win 5-0. There may or may not have been something going on in terms of cheating, but I still picked out the right result and won the bet. My belief is that other bettors had similar knowledge to me and this match was not a match that involved any wrongdoing.
Let’s assume for a moment that there is an inherent match-fixing problem in snooker. Would any player feel comfortable doing anything untoward at this point? Probably not as the risks are too high and everyone is watching for sports betting manipulation very closely. It is a big risk to take to cheat when the minimum ban by precedent is eight years. I continue to enjoy betting on snooker and sincerely hope that these allegations are limited to a small number of players who will quickly be dealt with. My bigger hope is that there was never any cheating, but there are too many allegations for everything to be legitimate. There is a lot of smoke for there to be no fire unfortunately.
Bwin.com offer snooker bets on all of the major championships with frame betting and other special betting like century breaks in a match and who will win the next frame. You can rely on bwin to carefully monitor betting patterns and if there are any suspicious matches you hear about simply do not bet on them. In truth these sorts of allegations are rare in terms of the thousands of matches played each season you can bet on. Unfortunately where money is concerned there is always the danger someone gets greedy.
I have faith that the majority of snooker matches can still be bet on safely and snooker betting can still be enjoyed by all. I am looking forward to the new season.
By Malcolm Clarke
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