The Union Sports Minister, M.S.Gill denounced the SMS game introduced in IPL (fans can make ball by ball predictions for cash prizes) saying that it’s almost equivalent to betting/gambling.
“This is viewed as ‘openly encouraging gambling and betting’, which official bodies do not resort to, even in countries where betting is legal; all this ‘to make money and enlarge their TV viewership base’,
The actions of the BCCI are bound to impact the thinking in other sports sometime or the other. We have already had, sometime back, a match-fixing scandal in the game.” – source
Prediction games are a big craze these days and most of the sports websites have partnered with players in this domain to power sections of their fantasy games channel (for instance, ESPN has partnered with LordsofOdds).
At the core, prediction algorithm takes several factors into account – for instance, historical context, details like pitch condition, weather, toss, etc.
What’s your take on sports minister argument? How valid is it?
Going by this argument, there are stock analysts who too predict the performance of stocks based on certain parameters – so where do you draw the line between betting and prediction?
I dont think that this can be called as betting / gambling!
Its more like wheels of fortune! Just SMS based
And this adding to the revenues of the sponsors, so in turn, BCCI is cutting its revenue streams
Its not betting or gambling if noone is risking or losing anything..however, in sms ppl are getting charged for the sms, whereas on the net its free and the site owners are only making money through ads and noone is losing anything..that is the crucial difference..
Recently I spoke to a startup who is into prediction algo and jokingly asked him – so why do you not sell this to a bookie?
And he said – I’d really want to! I have enough confidence in the algo.
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So that’s the deal – these games can be used for different purpose – so companies need to realize that there is a lot more than what meets the eyes.