Australia Tennis Open Scandal: Gambling Cheating and Match-Fixing

(Newswire.net — January 28, 2016) Cherry Hill, NJ — Controversy has been swirling around the doubles matches at the Australia Open last Sunday. Pinnacle Sports suspended its betting for the match of Lara Arruabarrena and David Marrero against Andrea Hlavackova and Lukasz Kubot after large amounts of money poured in for Hlavackova and Kubot. This, states Marco Blume head of sportsbook at Pinnacle Sports, is an indication that the match might be fixed. Hlavackova and Kubot ended up winning, 6-0, 6-3, with the first set lasting only 20 minutes.

According to The New York Times, Marrero cited a knee injury in an explanation for his team’s poor performance. Blume has stated that about 13 hours before the match was set to begin, the Pinnacle’s traders suspended betting on it. The police were then notified in Victoria, Australia of any possible irregularities. “We saw a small number of people placing a large amount of money. In context, these matches are rather small. That means that any aggressive betting behavior is very easy to detect on our side,” said Blume.

The world of gambling is enveloped in a grey area. While some people can find the good in it, money is a sneaky sedutress.

In 1994, the Arizona State men’s basketball team had a similar experience.  One in which four college games were fixed. Players pocketed a few hundred thousand in cash and the main character ran off to collect millions from bets won on the fixed games.

His name is Joseph Gagliano

“I organized and financed the entire scandal when I was a naïve twenty-four-year-old, and to this day it remains one of the largest scandals in history,” explains Gagliano

In his best selling book, No Grey Areas, Gagliano never boasts about his life back then…quite the opposite. “I’m a guy who has made poor choices for the sake of greed and success. A guy who applied God-given talents to build wealth and success, and then managed to misapply those talents and got a very different end result. A guy who charted a path that took him into grey areas and then had to pay the price for those ill-fated choices. I am the guy with a story that can make a difference, a real difference in your life or the life of someone you know,” states Joseph N. Gagliano, author of No Grey Areas: The Inside Story of the Largest Point Shaving Scandal in History and the Consequences Thereafter, which details the “grey areas” of Joe’s life showing his scandal, greed, corruption, money, and business.

The grey areas are often hard to navigate around. While many try their best to avoid the pitfalls, many still get trapped, stuck in their poor decision making and have to reap the consequences. In Joe Gagliano’s true story, http://www.amazon.com/No-Grey-Areas-Consequences-Thereafter-ebook/dp/B01AS3SUJ6 he gives an honest, detailed telling of this life of infamy, history, and successes along with the consequences of his decisions. “I have both a story and lessons that need to be shared. By telling my story, I’m willing to painfully expose my life’s journeys with hopes of affecting others, to influence others, to warn others, and to share life lessons others may benefit from,” says Gagliano.

The grey areas in life are there to teach us lessons and to learn from our mistakes, as Gagliano shows us brilliantly in his novel.

###