Courtsiding and Manual Data Collection

**Courtsiding** is the practice of transmitting real-time sports data from a venue to a betting party faster than official broadcasts or bookmaker feeds, enabling **latency arbitrage** (betting on events that have already occurred). Historically evolving from hand signals to sophisticated custom hardware, courtsiding forced the betting industry to industrialize manual data collection. Major aggregators like **Sportradar** and **Genius Sports** now employ official scouts to minimize the latency gap. While generally not criminal (as seen in the collapse of the **Daniel Dobson** case), courtsiding is combated through "Terms of Entry" contract enforcement and technological buffers like bet-acceptance delays. The reliance on manual data entry has also created vulnerabilities, such as "Ghost Games," where fake match data is fed to bookmakers.