- The punter is drawn from the worlds of business, finance or Bollywood. He has access to large sums of money, and is a habitué of the party circuit, where movies and cricket collide. And he has easy, unquestioned entrée into the hotels and dressing rooms of the cricketers
Per legend
and lore, as crafted in the media and given further heft by Bollywood (Think Emraan
Hashmi in the film Jannat), this mythical figure is an end-to-end gambling
solution. And so, we who love stories clean and unambiguous have over time
created an archetype: the super fixer.
He scripts
every detail of cricket matches. Beginning with toss, incorporating the ebbs
and flows of the game and ‘taking it right down the wire’. He bribes, coaxes,
cajoles and threatens the cricketers into following the script. With his
granular knowledge of what is going to happen, he then fixes the odds to favor
to suck the gullible punter into betting on what he has already ensured will
not happen. In doing all this, he manages to pull off two mutually
contradictory requirements: On one hand, he rubs shoulders with top cricket
stars and on the other hand, he remains a will-o-the-wisp, invisible to the
authority. This combination of fixer and bookie died little over ten years ago
and gave way to the era of the super-punter
as fulcrum in the world of illicit gambling on cricket.
Typically,
the punter is drawn from the worlds
of business, finance or Bollywood. He has access to large sums of money, and is
a habitué of the party circuit, where movies and cricket collide. And he has
easy, unquestioned entrée into the hotels and dressing rooms of the cricketers.
His presence
at the dinner with a cricketer is unremarkable and goes unremarked. And the
cricketer-young and mostly naïve, drawn from the backwaters with his eyes
blinded by glitz-revels in the friendship he has struck with this very
important person who can get him into big parties, and put him next to
Bollywood starlets and models who show a willingness, to ignore the cricketers
gaucherie and join him for public fun and private pleasure.
So when his
new-found friend asks him in the course of casual dinner-table conversation-
what the team composition for the big game is, what the team makes of the pitch
and atmospherics, what changes if any there will be in the batting order or who
will open the bowling, which batsman is fit and which one is struggling with
physical or mental niggles-innocent questions of the kind fans pose to cricketers
everywhere-the player thinks nothing of sharing these details with his obliging
influential friend!
In gambling,
just like any area of business, knowledge is money. And the punter armed with this
inside knowledge places his bets on certain outcomes he is able to predict with
fair degree of certainty.
He wins, and
shares a slice of his winning with his friend- the cricketer. It is all very
jolly, all done with a nudge, a wink, a chuckle. The cycle repeats a couple of
times until it is taken for granted by both parties. From then on, it is not
even necessary for the punter to meet the cricketer in person-a late phone call
before a big game, to ask relevant questions and gain actionable information,
becomes routine, as does the post-game ‘gift’-in gratification.
Almost
without knowing it, the cricketer goes beyond merely answering questions, and
begins to volunteer information-anything he thinks will give his friend an edge
in the betting market. Technically, this process is called ‘grooming’.
And then one
day, the ‘routine’ phone call comes with an unexpected twist. “Can you bowl a
shoddy over in your first spell; manage to give away say 15 runs?” “Can you get
out before crossing the 20s?”
By now,
“What the hell, where is the harm?” works like an anesthetic on the cricketer’s
conscience. The threat lies in the fact that the cricketer has inadvertently
helped a gambler and have profited therefrom; to say no now might result in his
outing and resultant disgrace. And so he bowls that short one outside off or he
backs away from his stumps to cut, misses the line and is bowled.
What does a
bad over, an indiscreet shot matter if there is a party, a willing scarlet, an
SUV or a foreign holiday waiting on the other side of it?
And who
would ever suspect? The bookie, operating deep within the underworld, is a
‘person of interest’ to law enforcement agencies. His movements are watched and
his phone is tapped. He has no easy access to team hotels and dressing rooms.
And the cricketer is aware of the risk he runs if he takes a call from a bookie
or meets him. The punter, however, is not readily identifiable as such. The
punter, too, is a celebrity himself of whatever wattage, and is perfectly at
home in the restaurants and lobbies of the star hotels that house the
cricketers on tour. And thus the risk of association is nullified.
With the
arrival of the super-punter, the bookie realized he no longer needs to run the
risk of fixing matches. All he has to do is to follow the money. The world of
bookie is structured like a classical pyramid. At the top, sits the kingpin. At
the next level are a string of ‘Tier A’ bookies that form a loose
confederation, each building up his own select clientele. Below them are ‘Tier
B’ bookies, operating on small or medium scale. Thousands of Tier B bookies are
affiliated to each ‘Tier A’bookie. The punter and the bookies work together.
They make a guess about the quality of insider information underlying the bet
itself, thus deriving the benefits of the ‘fix’, without the risk of exposure.
The Meiyappans and Dara Singhs of
this world are super-punters; their position in the worlds of celebrity and/or
team management allows them- to acquire information on events, even to
manipulate said events. This in turn allows them to do what in financial
circles would be insider trading which in turn feeds into the activities of the
book-making syndicate!
And all this
is criminal.
#Courtesy : THE TIMES OF INDIA
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