The house doesn’t have to fix a game. The point is to set the odds so that the betting is balanced on both sides; the losing bets pay off the winning bets, and the house takes their percentage. I suppose he could raise the odds on Butch losing by knockout in the fifth (but not too low, or the betters would get suspicious) to encourage more betting on other outcomes, then collect the money from all those losing bets. A typical gambling operation makes money without having to take risks like that.
Criminals often do things to make money, that they could have mad as much or more money by staying legit.
In the Lethal Weapon movies, Riggs’s pet is a Shetland Sheepdog. In #3, he comes face to face with a menacing Rottie, the guard dog for a chop shop. He tells Renee Russo that can’t shoot a dog. People, yes, but not dogs.
So he crouches down low, starts whimpering, and offers the dog a biscuit. Immediately the dog is on his back, waiting for a belly rub
Well, the bad guys end up chasing out of the chop shop, and Riggs jumps into the back of the getaway truck, driven by Renee Russo. Then he tells her to wait up. . . The Rottie wants to come along! And so he he jumps into the back of the truck.
And in Lethal Weapon #4, Riggs now has a Sheltie and a Rottie, presumably the one from #3.
At most levels, pro boxing is like WWW (wrestling). In a fair fight, the promotors and the fighters know who is going to win.
100 years ago, wrestling in Melbourne was a gambling sport operated by organized crime. Eventually the gambling was banned, as were pony races. The races and the matches were fixed. Gambling on the ponies or the wrestling was more like a lottery, although it wasn’t promoted as such.
This is not true, except in a few staged bouts.
OK, perhaps WWW was the wrong analogy. Pro boxing fights aren’t staged, and the hits aren’t rehearsed.
Nor is the result known ahead of time- unless in a few staged bouts (e.g. a celebrity vs a pro for charity). You are alleging massive cheating in a pro sport without any evidence.
I’m sorry that you misunderstood me in that way. What I said was
To try to explain it to you: if you go up against Carlos Alcaraz (current #1 seed) in a tennis match, the promoters know who is going to win.
So underdogs never win? There is never an even boxing match that both sides are evenly matched? Bullshit. I give you Buster Douglas vs Mike Tyson, Ali vs Forman (1974), Holyfield vs Tyson, Schmelling vs Louis and many many more. Sure, if some no-one is going against the champ, bets are on the champ, but that is true in many sports.
However, this is somewhat relevant, sure, but best taken to its own thread.
And I thing an important point is that we were talking about betting on professional boxing.
In a match where one boxer is seen as having a better chance of winning, the odds will be adjusted to motivate people to bet on the underdog as well.
I’ve watched the original Ghostbusters over 100 times. I just recently noticed that after the ghostbusters capture Slimer, Egon uses hand signals to tell Venkman how much they should charge the hotel manager.
Well, in boxing, yeah a lot the bouts they already know who’s gonna win, not because it’s fixed, but because of the choice of opponents. Boxers that are perceived to have potential have to be groomed to compete at the higher level, and the goal for the manager is to try to get to 20-0 by setting them up against jobbers at first, then maybe some more experienced fighters that are on the down slope, but have some name recognition.
Okay, we all know The Flintstones was inspired by The Honeymooners. But when Fred pounds on the door and bellows, “WILLLLLLLMAAAAAA!” Is that possibly a callback to Stanley Kowalski bellowing “STELLLLLLAAAAAAAA!”?
Boxing has its own term for “jobbers”: Tomato Can.
I love that movie for all those little details. I started watching it when I was a young child and so much went over my head, and every time I see it again I notice something new.
If the background image on the Roku home screen counts as a creative work…
That background image is a cityscape, which includes a clock tower among the other buildings. And I just noticed the other day that the clock on that clock tower is displaying the correct current time. The Roku shows the current time in digital format in the upper right corner of the screen, but the clock tower in the background image also shows the current time in analog format. I’d never paid that much attention to it before and just assumed it was a static image with the clock hands showing some random time, but it actually shows the current time, and updates along with the digital time in the corner.
I think I’ve posted this before. It took me a while to realize why Venkman was zapping the dude. He was deliberately getting rid of him so he could hit on Jennifer Runyon.
Not just getting rid of him, but by making the guy look worse, he conned her into thinking she was psychic, because he didn’t shock her at all, and used that to hit on her.
The really sad part? After all that shocking, the guy finally did get one right, which suggests that the underlying concept - that negative reinforcement could improve psychic powers - might have some validity. But he chose to toss away that potentially positive result in favor of hitting on the girl.
He really was quite a bad scientist.
Or this little thing called “random chance”.
Well, yes, that too. But that was the whole point of the experiment, and he just blew it off, without even trying to see if the results were significant or not.