Anyone For Ukrainian Table Tennis? The Shady Sport That Feeds Online Gambling

“Do you ever get a feeling that something’s not quite right,” says the opening line of an email sent from a reader, who comes dangerously close to triggering my golden rule of deleting emails that start with cliffhanger clichés.

The reader has seen my earlier article on how bookmakers are pumping virtual sports to make up for the lack of actual sports during the pandemic and he’s spotted something else that’s troubling.

On British gambling sites, he’s noticed “curious table tennis tournaments” in which “the same players seem to play continuously around the clock without sleep, food or rest”. Tournaments that seemingly originate from the Ukraine and Russia “that never existed before Covid-19 and seem only to be orchestrated to give the bookies something to offer punters”. OK, now he’s got me.

And he’s right. Or, at least, mostly right. Many of Britain’s biggest bookmakers are offering odds on tournaments such as the Sekta Cup or the Russian Liga Pro – tournaments that aren’t officially recognized, have brutally punishing schedules, don’t have any notable history and barely seem to exist outside the orbit of bookmakers’ websites. Oh, and the rules of one of them insists disputes are settled with a lie-detector test. Something is definitely not quite right here.

The endless Sekta Cup

Let’s take a typical day’s action in the Sekta Cup. Most sports cup tournaments have a start and an end, run for a set period of time, at the end of which a winner is declared. Not so the Sekta Cup, odds for which are offered on many of Britain’s leading bookmarkers, including Bet365 and William Hill.

The schedule is relentless. On June 10, for example, the first Sekta Cup match took place at 6am at the last match of the day started at 10:50pm, and there can be as many as eight games per hour (according to the schedule at Flashscore.com). It was back to the grindstone on June 11, too, with matches starting again at 6am, followed by 6:05am, 6:10am, 6:15am, 6:30am and so on. It’s the same packed schedule, all day, every day. It’s a table tennis sweat shop.

Naturally, this puts something of a strain on the competitors. Let’s take one, Aliiev Anar, who according to his stats on the official Sekta Cup website has played in no fewer than 62 tournaments and 311 matches since last August. That’s roughly six tournaments per month, with all tournaments played over the space of a few hours. Wimbledon, it ain’t.

I’m no table tennis expert, but some of these players don’t look like sportsmen at the peak of their physical prowess. U.S. sports journalist, Jim Barnes, who’s also spotted these matches during the sport-starved crisis describes one such competitor as “carrying some extra weight, and he has some gray in his hair, plus a bald spot”.

But then one look at the tournament names in the Sekta Cup tells you all you need to know about the sporting purity of this competition. “2020-03-14 Men Morning Australia”, “2020-03-04 Men Evening Africa”, “2020-03-13 Men Evening Europe”. Competitors are not being flown all over the world to take part in prestigious table tennis tournaments – they are playing them all from the same spectator-free hall somewhere in the Ukraine. The tournaments are nakedly timed to meet betting peak times in various parts of the world.

No-win bets

It’s just gone 10am on a Thursday morning, and I’m watching Oleksandr Zhyrnov take on Yurii Kurishchenko in a best of five in the Sekta Cup. The match is apparently live streamed from the Ukraine, in a tiny, unexpandable window on the Bet365.com website.

The players are alone in the arena, save for an umpire sat behind a lectern with an electronic scoreboard that’s near impossible to read, even on my 27in computer screen. It’s hard to work out which player is which.

I can bet on almost anything in the game: the match winner, each individual point, the winning margin of each game, whether ‘extra points’ will be required. Everything, that is, except the outcome of the tournament itself, which is revealing. Imagine watching matches in the Super Bowl, the Premier League or the Australian Open but not being able to bet on the tournament winner? Wouldn’t that strike you as odd for a genuine sporting competition?

I’m scanning the odds in the Zhyrnov vs Kurishchenko tie, when the live stream comes to an abrupt end. No celebrations, no final scores, no post-match interviews with the players. Instead the stream switches to another table tennis game starring Ivan Pandur vs Nikolay Pashkov in an entirely different arena that looks no grander than a village sports hall. It’s not even clear which competition this new match is part of.

Matches ending suddenly with no clear result is seemingly a common occurrence. “I’ve brought questions to a good few online bookmakers inquiring why a ‘live’ game I had a stake on disappeared and why another time it took four hours to verify a result,” writes my email correspondent, who asked for his name to be withheld.

“There are strange and odd glitches and delays in cash-out times, that so far only seem to have benefited the bookmakers,” he adds. “They have brushed away most of my questions and probing and really dug their heels in to the point their protestations of Snow White innocence seem more damning than the quirks and irregularities I originally noticed.” 

Other gamblers have noticed such irregularities. A recent thread on Reddit finds many players who’ve stumbled across these strange table tennis markets. “In the desperate search for new markets I’ve noticed Russian Table tennis, i.e. ‘Moscow Liga Pro’, provides a steady stream of matches day in day out,” writes one gambler. “However, I haven’t been able to find a place to watch it, or really find too much information on rankings etc.”

Another bemused gambler chips in further down the thread: “My bookie put Dmitry Balakin as losing to Andrey Dontseko… I looked online and it looks like Balakin won? Can someone confirm this?”

“We need to find one of the three people on Earth who were at the match. Also might need a translator,” replies another.

Regulators? What regulators?

Surely a sport that mainstream bookmakers are offering odds on would have some form of regulation to guarantee the integrity of competition? Somewhere that concerned punters could take their grievances?

Seemingly not. A spokesperson for the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) told us that “these events are in no way linked to the ITTF,” and that “we don’t know too much about their activities, so we are not in a position to comment”.

Bookmakers 365.com and William Hill, both of whom offer markets on the Sekta Cup and Russian Liga Pro, have failed to reply to repeated requests for comment.

A spokesperson for the U.K.’s gambling regulator, the Gambling Commission, told me that: “All operators are required to ensure gambling is conducted fairly and openly. Consumers must have confidence and belief that when they place bets with G.B. licensed-operators they are doing so on markets that are fair and open. Where we find evidence to suggest otherwise, we will take action.”

Even the websites of the competitions themselves offer no clue as to regulators or even the identities of organizers of the competitions. However, the Sekta Cup website does publish a list of “terms and conditions”, including some frankly alarming terms for competitors who are suspected of foul play.

“Every player must be ready to undergo a lie detector test (polygraph) as for the compliance with Setka Cup tournament Rules,” the terms and conditions and state.

 A sport that straps its competitors to a lie detector? What could possibly be suspicious about that?