When I was a kid, I used to watch "The Hollywood Squares," and Peter Marshall would always refer to the tie-breaking round as "the rubber match." I'd sit there and think, "Huh?" In later years, I found out that it was a term relating to cards (bridge specifically?). But why rubber?

I don't want to be forced to repeat this answer, but: no one knows. Rubber meaning '(in various games) a series of three (or sometimes five) games', and hence 'a deciding game played in a contest the score is tied' first appears in the late sixteenth century referring to the game of bowls (that is, lawn bowling).

The word rubber meaning 'a highly elastic solid substance made from the milky juice of various plants' is a different story: it is formed from the verb to rub with the agentive suffix -er, with a few semantic twists before it gets to the current sense. The original meaning, from the mid-sixteenth century, is 'a tool used for rubbing in order to polish or make clean'. The more specific sense that concerns us is 'a piece of rubber used to erase pencil marks', which appears in the late eighteenth century.

Though it seems backward, rubber in the sense 'an elastic substance', which is first attested around 1800, actually derives from the use of this substance as an eraser. This is an impressive example of the process called generalization, where a word is generalized from a specific application. Other examples, not quite as striking, are pigeon, which originally meant 'a young dove', and then came to mean 'any bird, regardless of age, of the family Columbidae'; and virtue, which originally meant 'manly excellence; valor', and then came to mean 'moral excellence'.

This is all a long way of saying that the word rubber you're asking about is two hundred years older than the word rubber meaning 'an elastic substance'. The origin of the 'series of three games' sense is unknown; it could be related to the other word rubber (which, at the time, meant only 'a tool for rubbing'), but the connection, if any, is obscure.


I'm still just as clueless though :P