Death Match - Diane Duane [48]
He leaned back in his chair. “I don’t want to get into too much detail right this moment,” Winters said. “Among other reasons, I don’t want to take a chance of prejudicing your own ideas, or pushing your judgment in one direction or another. But the indications of interference with spatball have been mounting up over recent months…and now South Florida is going to cause some of the forces involved in that interference to start showing their hands. We’ve been waiting for this for a while.”
“I want to get something clear here. You mean,” Catie said, “that these ‘forces’ are involved in actively fixing games.”
Winters nodded. “There are always people who gamble,” he said. “And the other side of that coin is that there are always people who want to control the gambling, or try to, to make a profit from it. In some cases, like casino gambling, the control is fairly benign. You go in to play mathematical games of chance, with easily predictable odds. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and the house rakes off its ten percent as part of the normal state of affairs. But when gambling starts to try to affect less mathematically predictable games, and affect them a lot more robustly—games with a lot of variables…”
“Like sports,” Catie said.
“Like sports—then matters can get out of hand. Now, people will always bet. It just seems to be part of human nature, something that can’t be wiped out…which is why most governments around the world have legitimized at least certain kinds of sports gambling. From the government’s point of view, if you can’t stamp something out, tax it and attempt to regulate it. But there are always elements that chafe at that control, and who feel that what the government is taxing, they should have a piece of, too. They lay their own bets—sometimes through big syndicates, as a means of spreading the profit around so that it’s not too obvious—and then they influence the sports they’re betting on in any way they dare, to get as close as they can to the results they want.”
“I suppose,” Catie said, “that it would annoy these syndicates if there were sports they couldn’t influence….”
“That’s part of what’s going on in this particular case, we think,” Winters said. “They see it as lost revenue. But also, when they get used to running a racket or a betting pattern in a specific way, and something comes in to upset that pattern, that can annoy the syndicates, too…and occasionally they get annoyed enough to stand up on their hind legs and try to do something about it.”
Winters got up and began to pace. “At the moment, there are at least two syndicates that we suspect have been interfering, or trying to interfere, with spatball over the last couple of years. They’ve kept their interventions small-scale, until now. Co-opting a few players, trying to get them to throw games, or to get their teammates to help them do it…that kind of thing. It wasn’t that successful, as far as we can tell. But even when this didn’t work, the syndicates were making enough money from betting on spatball that it wasn’t worth making a big stink when things went wrong.”
“But then South Florida came along,” Catie said, “and changed the pattern.”
“That’s right. Now, by and large, the syndicates aren’t going to go broke just because of South Florida. They don’t bet on just one team to win. They use the normal bookmakers’ ‘spread’ to cover their losses. But South Florida is disturbing the syndicates