Plenty of players, punters and personal meetings make betting business tough to crack.

Though heat and dust is kicked up every now and then on illegal betting and related match fixing scandals in cricket, the ongoing IPL tournament, and especially the Sunday finals, have the betting arena all gung ho and several youth are hooked onto the betting game – to make a quick buck, as quick as the 20-20 matches get over, within three hours.

In Coimbatore too, the youth are particularly drawn to the betting arenas as there is money to be made – but what they do not know is that the house always wins. But that has not stopped the young from flocking to the punters, and the authorities can do little or nothing to stop it.

Ahead of the finals in Bengaluru on Sunday night, small time bookies approach young people playing cricket in grounds like VOC Park, Coddissia, Burial Ground in R.S. Puram, Pachapalayam and other similar places and ask them to place bets on the two teams, RCB and Hyderabad Sunrisers.

“We usually bet on teams and rarely on players. But there are persons who place ball to ball bets and that too in thousands,” said one of the youths who had placed a Rs. 5000 bet on Royal Challengers Bengaluru.

Usually, these youth place bets ranging from Rs. 1000 to as close to Rs. 10000. Since hundreds of people are involved in the betting game, the total money involved could be running into hundreds of thousands. Rough estimates from these few parks puts the figures at Rs 500000.

The betting season never is over, as cricket is being played all thorough the year, in one form or the other. If there is no IPL there is test matches, one day cricket, even Ranji matches. But it is the IPL that is boom time for the betting business.

“People do not necessarily bet on other countries to beat India. But IPL is a different scenario and you have your favourite players splitting into other teams, which makes it easy for us to place our bets without any worries,” added another youth.

The business is big and even the players plenty, which makes it difficult for the authorities to crack this wide open.

“We do not see the middleman often. The transactions are made on live meetings in public places and mostly grounds. So, there are not too many phone calls or online chatting and that is how this has been a secret till now,” said the youth.

When they attempt to deal over phone calls, they keep it very short and stick to code words. Yet, some youths just are bold in their approach.

“There is no worry here. The amount that is placed for a bet is little. So there are no troubles. The authorities are not aware,” he added.

The IPL has always been surrounded by match fixing and betting scandals and the traditional betting had certainly made the IPL a more interesting sport than the other forms of cricket.