Gambling on cricket had been central to the game from at least the 1740s. By the early nineteenth century large sums changed hands on county and representative matches; the most famous gambling fixture — the 1810 Hambledon match — had involved wagers of thousands of pounds. Several early nineteenth-century scandals involved matches arranged specifically for betting purposes with predetermined results. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, Victorian moral opinion was turning against public gambling; the Betting and Loans Act of 1853 made certain forms of gambling illegal and created social pressure against its public display. The MCC, sensitive to its respectability, had discouraged wagering at Lord's from the 1830s onward. The rise of the professional touring sides under Clarke — where the commercial incentive was gate money, not gambling — shifted the financial logic of professional cricket away from betting. By 1860 cricket gambling had not disappeared, but it had become a matter for private clubs and private individuals rather than a public feature of the game. The match-fixing scandals would return in a different form — the 1900s and again in the 2000s — but the Victorian gambling era was effectively over by 1860.