[johnfn]

In theory the same thing is true with horse race betting; you can just assassinate the horse. Or the jockey. Or if you want to be more subtle about it, just slip something into the horse feed. But this doesn't really happen in practice.

[kibwen]

Match fixing happens regularly, so regularly that we have the term "match fixing" with a Wikipedia article dedicated to it. The presumption that match fixing doesn't happen in practice is unfounded.

Here, from two months ago: "Over 180 professional tennis players participated in a global match-fixing ring" https://www.npr.org/2023/09/10/1198675541/over-180-professio...

[johnfn]

OK, fair; a stronger argument is "it doesn't happen enough that we need to shut down horse racing". Or tennis betting, in your case.

[arcticbull]

It's a question of scale. A few horses aren't a big deal, and both sides (the horse racing, and the bet) are heavily constrained in scope. Both sides become far less constrained with prediction markets.

Maybe if we were objective, horse betting should be shut down -- but we kinda don't care.

[WalterBright]

Match-fixing likely has just become part of the game and the odds.

[kibwen]

Which comes back around to the original comment: the existence of a predictions market influences the outcome of the event being predicted, and in the worst case this effect is so large that it completely invalidates the purpose of attempting to predict the outcome in the first place; the tail wags the dog.

[nitwit005]

A quick Google search shows a number of accusations of poisoning horses: https://www.espn.com/moresports/news/2003/0709/1578661.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/21/dressage-poisoni...

Plus apparently a huge amount of drugs given to their own horses trying to cheat.

[johnfn]

OK, fair, but it doesn't happen near enough to the degree that we'd need to shut down horse race betting.

[paulpauper]

horse racing is one of those things that 'tech people' generally does not keep tabs on