This year’s Winter Olympics are being held in Pyeongchang, South Korea. With the Olympics comes a large amount of betting online through sportsbooks and casinos. Unfortunately, the betting chaos can sometimes encourage manipulation of events held at the Olympics. For this reason, the International Olympic Committee is teaming up with ESSA, an international betting security group, to prevent manipulative practices under the agreement.
ESSA has worked with the International Olympic Committee for years to snuff out event manipulation and rigged competition. Now that the Winter Olympics will be happening, the group plans to reinforce its efforts in networking and intelligence operations to maintain fair practices.
A primary focus of the ESSA will be to monitor the trends in betting related to the Winter Olympics as they unfold. The potential risks to events can be detected through constant monitoring of online channels. There will be a full-time operation by ESSA that is specifically dedicated to overseeing the betting patterns associated with the Winter Olympics.
Both the International Olympic Committee and the ESSA have a unified goal to get the corruption out of live sporting events and the betting that happens as a result. The ESSA was incredibly active in the year of 2017. The firm states it investigated 266 individual cases of questionable activity. Over a third of those cases occurred in the last quarter of the year.
Many online casinos also have a sportsbook section in which players can place bets on upcoming or live events. The most popular casinos offering this content are licensed and regulated, making them a safe destination for players who want to place bets. There are typically thousands of live events for which the gaming site will take wagers.
The popularity of online casinos shows the importance of a watchdog group for suspicious betting. Millions of dollars in currency is transferred between players and online casinos, contributing to a large and growing market. Rigged events and manipulation can lead to a potentially catastrophic scenario for players and their money.
When to Watch
The Winter Olympics will be starting on February 9th 2018 and the events will be completed on the 25th of February. This major multi-sport spectacle has already generated buzz in the news due to North Korea’s participation in the games. There will be 92 nations competing in the event with close to 3,000 individual athletes taking part. South Korea hosted the Olympics 30 years ago when the Summer Games took place in Seoul during 1988.
