Spot-Fixing

Spot-fixing is an illegal practice in sport in which a specific, isolated aspect of a game, one unconnected to the final result but with its own betting market, is prearranged to produce a certain outcome, such as the timing of a no-ball or wide delivery in cricket or of a throw-in in football. It differs from match fixing, which manipulates a game's overall result, and from point shaving, which manipulates the margin of victory, because spot-fixing can be carried out by a single player acting alone without needing any other player or official to cooperate. The practice became prominent from the 2000s onward, driven by the growth of internet gambling and of diversified betting markets such as spread betting and first-scorer wagers, which gave bookmakers the largest financial exposure and pushed them to invest heavily in detecting irregular betting patterns on these narrower proposition bets. The best-known example is the Pakistan cricket spot-fixing scandal of August 2010, in which three members of Pakistan's national cricket team were convicted of taking bribes from a bookmaker to deliberately bowl no-balls at prearranged moments during a Test match against England at Lord's. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/