Fixed Matches

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In organized sports, match fixing is the act of playing or officiating a match with the intention of achieving a pre-determined result, violating the rules of the game and often the law. There are many reasons why match fixing might take place, including receiving bribes from bookmakers or sports bettors, and blackmail. Competitors may also intentionally perform poorly to gain a future advantage, such as a better draft pick or to face an easier opponent in a later round of competition. A player might also play poorly to rig a handicap system.

Match fixing, when motivated by gambling, requires contacts (and normally money transfers) between gamblers, players, team officials, and/or referees. These contacts and transfers can sometimes be discovered, and lead to prosecution by the law or the sports league(s). In contrast, losing for future advantage is internal to the team and very difficult to prove. Often, substitutions made by a coach designed to deliberately increase the team’s chances of losing (such as having key players sit out, using minimal or phantom injuries as an excuse), rather than ordering the players actually on the field to intentionally underperform, are cited as the main factor in cases where this has been alleged.

Match fixing includes point shaving and spot-fixing, which center on smaller events within a match that can be wagered upon, but which are unlikely to prove decisive in determining the final result of the game. According to Sportradar, a company that monitors the integrity of sports events on behalf of sports federations, as many as one percent of the matches they monitor show suspicious betting patterns that may be indicative of match fixing

Other names for match fixing include “game fixing”, “race fixing”, or more generally “sports fixing”. Games that are deliberately lost are sometimes called “thrown games”, especially when a team has nothing to play for (either having already qualified for the next stage of competition or in the process of being eliminated.) In contrast, when a team intentionally loses a game, or does not score as high as it can, to obtain a perceived future competitive advantage, the team is often said to have “tanked” the game instead of having thrown it. In sports where a handicap or ranking system exists and is capable of being abused (including sports such as racing, grappling and golf), tanking is known as “sandbagging”. Hustling, where a player disguises his abilities until he can play for large amounts of money, is a common practice in many cue sports, such as nine-ball pool.