RTSmunity: Let’s tackle match fixing in esports

As the esports market continues to expand, competitive gaming integrity is increasingly in the spotlight and under the microscope. 

The creation of the ESIC with Ian Smith as Integrity Commissioner, as well as Valve’s decision to finally speak out on the issue of skins betting are recent developments whilst match fixing remains another major issue. 

The question of how to tackle this issue is one which RTSmunity is investigating. 

RTSmunity is attempting to utilise its knowledge and experience with esports to offer two advanced methods to detect potential cases of fraud.

The first, a statistical ticket tracking method builds on cooperation with betting operators, which themselves provide the tickets. This fraud detection system is also used in traditional sports and is combined with the optimal team performance method, which is itself a pioneering new approach.

Pavol Krasnovsky, CEO of RTSmunity, said of the development of the system: “The biggest challenge is the complexity of esports. On the other hand, as we are getting more and more data, we have more information to analyse and therefore better chance to tackle fraud in the future.”

Over three years the team at RTSmunity has worked on a mathematical solution of quantification of optimal team performance. It has now become possible to measure the efficiency of the teams’ micro-decisions in real time and detect suspicious of under-average output, which could indicate a fixed match.

The following videos demonstrate RTSmunity’s unique algorithms to measure optimal team performance. The first video shows the Fnatic team outperforming the Strategy team, but also shows both teams performing within a reasonable range of optimality.

The second video shows a League of Legends match which was cancelled by its tournament organisers. RTSmunity’s methods could be used to identify similar situations in the future and help to tackle the issue of match fixing.

Both Ian Smith and Pavol Krasnovsky will be speaking at the Betting on Sports Conference 2016 (September 15th to 16th). Smith is on the protecting esports integrity panel, whilst Krasnovsky will be discussing live betting and data in esports.