I’ve long been a fan of Robert B Parker’s Spenser (and other series) novels, and he covered this topic once, in sufficient detail to convince an actual basketball coach, in his _Playmates_, a story of a college basketball player who was being blackmailed to shave points from the spread on games, and just how devilishly hard it was to spot if you weren’t absolutely *searching* for it.

It’s interesting in another way as well, tangentially, in that Parker’s fictional oeuvre is one of the many examples in both series fiction and series television where the fans do a better job of continuity than the creators do… not that the creators typically care what we think or say…