E4: All Bets are Off

One of the main arguments for legalizing sports betting is that once the bets come out of the shadows, you can watch them.

And that watching has a special name.

Well, integrity monitoring is just the, how would I explain it?

This is PL.

He asked us to only use his initials because he used to work for one of the top companies responsible for integrity monitoring, and he still works in the industry.

PL wasn't personally involved in flagging the Porter bets, but he did agree to pull back the curtain on how this job really works.

It is a pretty convoluted process, but it's used with the rise in sports betting.

in North America?

Integrity monitoring is a big business in its own right.

It's dominated by three companies, Switzerland-based Sport Radar, London-based Genius Sports, and Nevada-based IC360.

Those companies are hired by sportsbooks and leagues to police gambling-related corruption.

So what they do is monitor a number of different lines from every different sport that happens around the world.

And they really look for just kind of outliers or things that are not normal.

A betting line essentially tells you what a sportsbook considers to be the likelihood of something happening, whether that's a team winning a game or a player accumulating certain statistics.

You can bet on either side of that line.

The less likely something is to happen, the more money you stand to win.

There are millions upon millions of betting lines adjusting all the time.

And most of that time, if money starts pouring in on one side of a line, there's a perfectly innocent explanation.

It could be as easy as there was a huge thunderstorm passing through.

Storms make it harder to score in an outdoor football game or soccer match, so sportsbooks will adjust the odds accordingly.

Any new piece of information that suddenly makes a lot of people want to place the same bet can change the odds.

Things like injuries, for example, or a trade.

But sometimes, a line moves for no obvious reason.

That's when integrity monitors step in.

I mean, a large amount of money going towards a specific game, when in fact this team was not supposed to be the favorites.