Not sure if chess counts since gambling on it is rare, but prearranged draws and other “fixy” behavior is certainly not unheard of.
It’s obviously very easy for a top-level chess player to believably lose or draw if they are incentivized to.
I thought they were due!
Could the Washington Generals beat the best NCAA team?
Yes chess is a good example.
There’s even the term “grandmaster draw” that is well known and implies two top level players 1) not pushing very hard for a win and/or 2) agreeing to a draw at an early stage of the game, when a decisive result may still be quite likely.
In chess culture it’s not really thought of a fixing though, I guess because it often makes sense as a tournament strategy, and not because of the (likely pitiful) financial potential.
That’s a debatable tactic but certainly does happen often. In 2007 Tom Coughlin was going into the final game as a lock for the playoffs. A Giants win would do nothing to improve their placement. The Patriots were playing for an undefeated season. There was no reason for the Giants to play to win. Coughlin decided he did not want the team to back into the playoffs and he played all his starters. The Giants lost but played a great game and gave the Patriots their biggest scare of the regular season. The Giants built on that good performance and eventually met the Patriots in the Super Bowl and won.
As a sports fan that’s what I like to see.
Here is a video of the frame in question - if you jump to 15 minutes in, he misses a pink with the rest quite badly, then not long after that he pots the pink but in such a way he can’t pot the black - when there should have been no danger of that happening. Ironically, this frame happened to be against John Higgins:
However, as you say, almost anything in snooker (and indeed most sports) can be attributed to just making a bad shot, and/or not being in the right state of mind. Look at this example from Mark King - as far as I know, no-one has accused him of match-fixing, he just played a really bad shot:
In the case of the Stephen Lee frame above, he also had the ‘excuse’ of the (unusual in snooker) shot clock putting extra pressure on. But I believe that in this case (and indeed in most cases of match fixing), what caught the attention of the authorities first of all was unusual betting patterns on the match. So I think the answer to the OP is that in individual sports, you can throw games without being noticed, the hard part is the gamblers getting away with their winnings after placing unusually large bets. Nowadays I believe bookmakers are wise to this sort of thing and will potentially withhold payouts if they spot this happening in real time - obviously it’s very much in their interests to do so.
You might be thinking of Boston College in the 70s.
It’s a really minor sport, but jai alai has something like this. Most of the players are in the US on work visas. No work, no stay in the US. So other players will throw a match to a guy who’s on the bubble for getting fired to help him stay in the US.*
I suspect they probably also throw matches for gamblers occasionally since they (the players) apparently don’t get paid much. But there’s not a ton of money involved, so it shouldn’t happen too often.
* I learned this on my one and only trip to a fronton when the old guy next to me starting telling me (actually the woman I was with) who to bet on in certain matches based on this insider knowledge. We won a fair amount that night since they were all long-odds wins. He said the house didn’t care since pari-mutuel wagering means they get their cut regardless of who wins and long-odds wins are exciting and generate buzz. He said it was common knowledge amongst the long-time bettors.
And then there’s NASCAR.
Cheating by team members is notorious. There’s more to it to those winning burnouts with the nose of the car pushed up against the wall (to distort alignment that hide illegal vehicle changes). Outright manipulations to the rear spoiler (very little caught on tape).
Questionable yellow flags at opportune moments. Debris the on the track, like water bottles on the back stretch where there are no fan stands. Kyle Busch is known for tossing water bottles and piss bottles to force a yellow flag (and improve his chances winning a race).
And then there’s Jimmy Johnson’s unprecedented 80 wins and seven championships, with Chad Knauss as his crew chief. When that duo was broken up, Johnson’s victories dried up real fast. His last season last year was winless.
Most interesting part of that scandal is that Henry Hill, of Goodfellas fame, was instrumental in setting it up. It’s covered in depth in Wiseguy, the nonfiction book the film is based on, but Scorsese left it out of the movie.
As an addition to the OP, the 1919 White Sox were noticed. Sportswriters at the time noted suspicious plays and were able to identify some of the culprits.
The catcher who was not in on the fix (forget his name) almost got into fistfights in the locker room with Williams and Cicotte. The batter, the catcher, and the umpire will know if the pitcher is “grooving” pitches.
In a real world example, Hal Chase was a first baseman in the 1910s who was suspected of throwing games. He was known as a terrific fielder.
On some plays, the first baseman is off the bag and the person picking up the ball has to throw to first. They throw to the bag, expecting the first baseman to get to the bag in time.
Chase was accused of deliberately not getting to first in time. The ball would sail into the outfield, but it would be an error on the player who threw the ball.
Nothing was proven, but Chase was later banned from baseball for trying to bribe another player to throw a minor league game.
Back in the 50s, the big college basketball scandal was “point shaving.” You bribed players (who, of course, weren’t paid) to keep the team under the spread. It’s not hard to do – the star player deliberately misses a few shots when the team is leading, or turns over the ball. The team wins, but doesn’t beat the spread. I see that point shaving scandals have happened in college basketball as late as 1995.
Point shaving in basketball is probably the most straightforward. Many games will be well out of hand by the end of the 4th quarter. And you’d only bet big on game with a very lopsided spread. Therefore the better team is going to be in one of two positions; either they are way ahead with no risk of losing or the game will be close or they are down. If it’s the latter, the gambler has already won the bet and the players can play normally. If it’s the former the players simply short arm a couple shots, start killing the clock, bobble a couple passes into the bench or commit a few stupid fouls to keep the point differential from growing too large. At the end of the day they still win, they keep their position as an elite team, there aren’t any big new stories about a embarrassing loss, it’s just the difference between a 20 point win and a 12 point win.
In most other sports it’ll be a lot harder and there will be a lot more blowback. This is why almost all modern examples of this kind of thing are in college basketball. It’s not in the pros simply because the players earn too much money to make a payoff practical. The one example I know of in the pros was them bribing a referee who isn’t making big money.
A professional tennis player was just arrested for throwing a game. Apparently, in last year’s French Open, there was an unusual amount of betting on a particular game in a match. She double-faulted twice in that game. They arrested her when she came back to Paris for this year’s French Open.
Statistically speaking, since 2003 most Super Bowls have been won by Tom Brady.
If a forward were to just be the tiniest bit too slow in passing and shooting the result would be vastly less effective passes and shots, but no one would be able to tell it was on purpose.
I think Roger Clemens found that out pitching to nemesis Mike Piazza in an All Star Game. I think Piazza was tipping off the batters as to what was coming.
On my libertarian days (which are rarer and rarer), I wonder why point shaving is illegal. I can (mostly) see why the colleges don’t like it and the NCAA of course doesn’t want athletes to have income streams, but why does the government care?
I think it would be considered fraud.