The Indian Premier League (IPL) on Tuesday launched a controversial SMS game asking fans to predict the scores of a live match. The winners will get cash awards.

According to the rules of the game, the entrant will have to send the runs that will be scored off every ball of the next over (for example 3 2 4 2 6 6, like in a lottery ticket) and the people guessing six, five or four numbers in the sequence correctly will get a percentage of the kitty generated by the total number of people playing at that time. The minimum prize money for every over is Rs 10,000 and will increase after that, depending on the entries received, at Rs 5 per SMS.

While the early reaction from experts is that this is a form of online cricket betting, which is illegal in India, IPL commissioner Lalit Modi denied it. “It’s only about texting. Anyway, there is a lot of texting going back and forth, discussing the game. This is very similar to that, discussing the game amongst friends,” he said.

“The person in the stadium has no idea what the people are predicting. It’s very difficult to fix the outcome of an over. I think, maybe one in a million. We have checked it out and looked at it very carefully. If that was to happen, we would shut it out absolutely, without doubt.”

When contacted on Tuesday evening, an International Cricket Council (ICC) media officer said that the governing body had not heard about the game, but would anyway have no say in the matter because the ICC “has no direct involvement in the IPL”. The BCCI had, prior to the start of the tournament, refused to pay the $1.2m fees asked by the anti-corruption unit of the ICC, and the second edition of the IPL is not under the surveillance of the game’s governing body.

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