Betting on sport has always been popular, even when illegal, but after the last disastrous Gambling Act it is time to treat the issue in a more mature waySuper Bowl XXIX in January 1995 between the San Francisco 49ers and the San Diego Chargers looked like a lopsided mismatch beforehand and the reality was even worse. From the moment the 49ers scored what was, at the time, the fastest opening touchdown in Super Bowl history, it felt like the longest WWF bout in history, only without the round where they pretend the bad guy is winning.The only thing that took anyone by surprise was the TV ratings. It was not the headline figure of 83.4m viewers which was impressive because...
The rise of Betfair’s wisdom-of-crowds online gambling model has put canny sports fans in the driving seatSir Tim Rice found a moment during the gripping final hours of the third Ashes Test at Headingley last weekend to tweet about the latest betting on the outcome. “Just phoned my bookie (a rare occurrence of course),” he said, “to see what odds they were offering against an England win. They quoted 6-1! Ludicrous. Should be 500-1. At 100-1 I might have invested a fiver. Having said that I am still rooting for England. Nothing is impossible.”My first reaction on reading his complaint was a wave of nostalgia. A quarter of a century after the internet turned gambling, and so much else, into...
Racing professionals’ links to bookmakers have increased dramatically in the past three years but the BHA says it regularly monitors arrangementsThe number of trainers and jockeys signing up to links with betting firms has trebled in three years. A British Horseracing Authority register lists the names of 19 trainers and 24 jockeys as having commercial arrangements with bookmakers. The authority said on Thursday that in 2016 the register had six trainers and eight jockeys.Some of the links on the list are with long-established bookies, such as Frankie Dettori’s arrangement with Ladbrokes, Paul Nicholls’s with Betfair or Colin Tizzard’s stable with Coral, but most involve newer firms striving to build market share in the lucrative British and Irish betting markets. Flat...
With a payout in excess of the jockey’s Magnificent Seven on the cards at the Royal meeting, the big firms did no one a favour by refusing multiplesThere were some memorable and historic achievements at Royal Ascot last week, including Hayley Turner’s win on Thanks Be in the Sandringham, the first at the meeting for a female jockey since 1987, and Blue Point’s Group One double in the week’s big sprints.But everything else pales into insignificance when set against Frankie Dettori’s remarkable afternoon on Thursday, when he won the first four races including the Gold Cup and left the bookies staring at a potential payout for a Dettori six-timer which would have far exceeded the £30m for his “Magnificent Seven”...
Football data shows that chance plays a significant, possibly decisive, role in one match in sixBack in the late 1990s a bookmaking firm came up with an interesting new game to keep the customers in its betting shops amused while they were waiting for the racing to start. It ran computer simulations of entire seasons in football’s top flight, several times each morning and squeezed into just a few minutes, complete with “pre‑season odds” to attract fivers and tenners from fans of the big-name teams. It was a little like Wembley, the 1970s board game which did something similar for the FA Cup, and the virtual, highly accelerated Football League proved quite a hit with the regulars.That was until the...