From Wired U.K., October 19, 2021:
The Horse, the Drone and the Epic Fight for Gambling Success
AROUND LUNCHTIME ON April Fool’s Day, 2019, a white transit van pulled up on the roadside of Moulsham Hall Lane in Chelmsford. Inside were three men, Michael McCool, Simon Peters and Jason Bishop, who had made the journey from Melton Mowbray to this spot just beyond the boundary of Chelmsford City Racecourse, ahead of a day of horse racing.
With some time still to go before the first race, the trio unloaded a hard, black, plastic case from the van and dashed over to a nearby field. Here, they unpacked a DJI Matrice 200 drone and launched it, with Peters at the controls sending it flying near to the racecourse. First, they tested the drone, sending it 16 metres into the air for 30 seconds, then up again several more times, reaching heights of 113m. Bishop kept an eye on the quadcopter from the field below as a safety spotter, in case Peters lost sight of it.
Meanwhile, in the rear of the van, McCool watched a TV monitor beam live pictures from the drone’s on-board camera. He checked that its aerial vantage point offered them a view of every twist and turn of the course, before bringing the drone back down to the ground. At 1:32pm, the drone took flight again, hovering at 56m. From this height, the men watched a horse called Shorter Skirt, with odds of 7/2, beat highly-tipped favourite Fen Breeze in the opening race.
While following the drone footage from the back of the Ford Transit, the men began to place bets online while the races were underway. Using a programme called Betfair Betting Assistant, McCool divided his attention between the drone’s video stream and the screen of a MacBook Air, onto the bezel of which were written exhortations such as “Go were [sic] the jockeys are!”
But, while the trio of drone-enabled bettors were focused on the action, staff at Chelmsford City Racecourse had their eyes focused on the skies.
Brian Wakefield, the racecourse’s facilities manager, had been told that something strange was happening: a punter at the racecourse who had been laying bets kept seeing the odds change in the middle of the race, and suspected that someone, somewhere must have an edge. That “would suggest someone was betting off live footage,” Wakefield wrote later in a police statement. “I had a hunch this would be from a drone or something similar.”
Wakefield and a colleague set off from the racecourse, driving around the outside of the track until they came across the white van. They parked their car and confronted the drone operatives; McCool and his band of men kept flying, and the police were called.
Around 2:30pm, the first police officers arrived on scene. Five officers ended up visiting the site, including Essex Police’s drone manager. Wakefield told the officers he believed the drones were being used to give the people in the van an unfair advantage over ordinary bettors, and – according to one police officer’s statement at the time – “were filming live horse races and streaming them around the world.” (McCool, a fast-talking, stocky former soldier, denies this was the case.)
The drone was confiscated by the police, and charges laid against McCool and Peters for flying it over a congested area. On March 5, 2020, however, the charges were dropped. “The CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] had formed the view that there was not enough evidence […] to provide a realistic prospect of conviction,” a judge wrote, and had the CPS pay McCool and Peters £58,004 in legal fees. The judge also said the police had committed an “apparent misinterpretation of the law” by saying the trio were flying their drone dangerously.
McCool felt vindicated. But the horse racing establishment wasn't going to give up that easily.
HORSE RACING IS BIG business, with around £9 billion of wagers made every year, luring both professional gamblers and casual punters staking small bets every week.
While many people place bets ahead of a sporting fixture, online betting means that bettors can also wager on the outcome of races and games while an event is ongoing. “In-running” or “in-play” betting can include picking the winner of a horse race after the horses have set off, or gambling on the next football team to win a corner or a free kick mid-game, with dynamically changing odds. Most people take part in in-running betting by watching TV feeds of sporting events in betting shops or through bookmakers’ websites – but, depending on where the footage is coming from, latency can be between 0.5 and three seconds behind the real-time action.
Sending the signal from cameras to the on-site broadcast equipment builds in between half a second and a full second of delay; beaming that signal up to satellites and then down to screens in homes and betting shops worldwide adds roughly the same amount. That means people betting at home or in shops are acting on ever-so-slightly outdated information – and anyone who can reduce this latency may be able to eke out an advantage.
In professional horse racing, it takes a fraction of a second for a race to change course entirely, so if a bettor can spot that a horse in second place is making a late charge before anyone else, they can place a bet on it winning when the odds are more favourable.
The Gambling Commission, which oversees betting in the UK, last looked at in-play betting in September 2016, and found it could be used to gain an advantage, but that it wasn’t an institutional problem for the industry. “In-play betting does not appear to generate specific additional risks to the licensing objectives as long as betting customers are sufficiently aware of their position and the respective positions of other players and the betting operators,” the Commission explains on its website. “We do not consider it necessary to intervene to prevent some players using technology to gain an advantage in terms of speed of information, provided it is clear to all players that this can be done.”
The Gambling Commission also looked at the use of access to real-time data and footage, and what it called “courtsiding” – transmitting live information from spectators at sporting events about key moments in races or matches – and decided it wasn’t cheating. They did, however, clarify that “The practice may […] breach the entry terms and conditions of a tournament.”
Chelmsford wasn’t the first time McCool and his associates had attempted to use a drone to aid their in-running betting efforts. McCool hires people to get drone coverage at dozens of sporting events every week. By streaming footage from drone cameras with less than half a second of latency, they aim to gain a split-second advantage on bettors relying on traditional media. McCool’s associates are paid a share of 50 per cent of the winnings from any week; 30 per cent goes to him, Peters and a third business partner; and 20 per cent goes to fund the upkeep of the equipment and drones. McCool says he tends to invest around £30,000 a week on betting. The amount you make “varies day to day,” says Peters. “It’s probably around £200 a day, on average. It pays the bills, and I get to pick my own hours.”....
....MUCH MORE
