All these upsets..
Hello summoners! As the long time e-sports enthusiast I am, the hype is real this worlds as the western teams are performing out of their minds! I mean, we have the possibility of a final with two western team for the first time ever!
Considering all these upsets, I cant help wondering about the possibility of match fixing. Before you completely disregard my post and consider me a hater wearing a tinfoil hat, just think about it for a second or two. I will provide my thoughts and an article from The Guardian in an effort to make my point as clear as possible. While I´m not aware of the level of The Guardians credibility, it still confirms my own thoughts.
Match fixing in short means that a 3rd party is pressuring the players to lose intentionally during games by either bribing or threatening the player/players in question, or the player/players by own initiative chooses to lose a game he or her has placed a bet upon. the most common ways to detect match fixing is by either analyze betting patterns before or during games, or notice something within the games that seems unusual. The latter is obviously harder to detect.
At this moment I am watching Fnatic vs. EDG, the last quarterfinals. Every single analyst had both KT and RNG as HEAVY favorites to advance to the semifinals. As you all know, they were both knocked out by G2 and IG. Furthermore a lot of analysts, while not at the same level of consensus regarding which team that would advance, had Afreeca as favorites vs. C9. C9 later secured semifinals with a 3-0 vs. Afreeca.
This equals 3 relatively huge upsets out of 3. Historically we all know that the western teams fall short when facing asian teams and even though there is evidence of the gap between the regions is closing, noone actually expected this to happen. We have had all korean finals the last 5 years (correct me if I´m wrong) and now they suddenly "lost track of the meta".
If EDG wins against Fnatic, that suddenly makes it 4/4 upsets, which I find too weird to be coincidence. Of course there is the possibility of having all the stars aligning this worlds for the western teams, but I cant help thinking about the possibility of match fixing. Match fixing is a huge problem in traditional sports (The Guardian, 2018) and I do not see why e-sports would be spared of that.
So my questions to all fellow summoners is the following: Is there any way for one to gain information about betting patterns before or during the games at Worlds 2018?
