Don't Bet on It: Match Fixing and Point Shaving

Spectators are not the only people who bet on sports. Unfortunately, athletes, coaches and other people involved in the sports themselves like to do it as well. It is corrupt sportspeople like these who create "match fixing." Match fixing is manipulating a sports match to predetermine its outcome.

One example of match fixing is "point shaving." Point shaving is deliberately scoring fewer points in the game/match so that the team will have a lower score at the end of the game. It may take only one player in the game to do this, depending on how much they normally score. To explain how point shaving works and why it is done, we need to look at "spread betting" first.

Spread betting was invented to prevent lop-sided bets in team sports. If Red Team is the favorite and Blue Team is the underdog, the tendency of most gamblers is to bet on the former. To achieve a balance in their books, the bookmakers (folks who take your bets for a living) put a scoring handicap on the favorite, shown as a minus sign followed by a number, say 5. This is the "point spread" that the favorite must cover. It means the favorite must lead by more 5 points for their bettors to win; if they lose, or if they win by less than 5 points, their backers will lose even if they actually win the game. And if they lead by exactly 5, it is a draw between the backers of both teams. Everyone gets their money back.

That is where point shaving comes in. If a corrupt player in the favorite team connives with a gambler to bet on the underdog using the point spread, they will score fewer points (by missing goals) on purpose so that their team won't be able to make to cover the point spread. Their team may still win, but the corrupt player and the bettor win thanks to the point shaving.

Of course, the point shaving player will have to be a significant contributor to the team's total score for their match fixing to work. The higher they score on average, the more they can influence the game they intend fix. It's possible to influence the score through steals, rebounds, etc. but points are the most direct. Say a player scores 15 points on average and the point spread is 7. They can easily miss a couple of goals, cause one turnover, and/or lose a rebound late in the game. The result is their team may safely win by 6 points, and not the 8 points required by the spread.

Note that match fixing can be done, not just by one player, but by a whole team, both teams, and referees. Referees can make calls that favor one team; coaches can relieve a high-scoring player at a crucial stage in the game. All those present in a ball game can influence it to a lesser or grater extent, and there have been many examples of this throughout sports history. Baseball, basketball and soccer, as well as non-team sports like horse racing have all had their share of match fixing scandals.

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