Wouldn’t it be nice to predict the future? Mike Smithson tries, which earns him an average of 70,000 unique visitors per week on his website Politicalbetting.com. In the last three months leading up to the October 31 Brexit deadline, traffic has doubled.
The three-year Brexit saga has been stressful for many. For everyone involved in the political betting landscape – from analysts and soothsayers such as Smithson to bookies and betting franchises – it has been an extended party. The reason: Brexit betting.
“Brexit betting began the morning of the Referendum result with bets on when a second In/Out EU Referendum would take place, and has been incredibly popular since. The more that has unravelled, the more we’ve had to react to the changes,” explained Amy Jones, who works in the PR department at Paddy Power.
Today, Jones reports that 90 per cent of Paddy Power’s political betting turnover can be attributed to Brexit, while the number of bets streaming in has exceeded those preceding the 2016 US presidential election. “It’s huge news for the bookies,” said Jones.
But betting is scarcely a simple matter. Aside from the mavericks of the world who thrive on taking shots in the dark, even sports betters like to be informed before parting with their cash. Looking at stats and current form is a classic strategy, as is examining odds. Some might even hear out a pundit to get a more instinctive picture. For political betters, Mike Smithson’s website is a one-stop shop for the above.
Politicalbetting.com began as a blog in 2004. Smithson is a Liberal Democrat politician turned election analyst, who has been running Politicalbetting.com since he set it up fifteen years ago. Much like Smithson himself, the site is old fashioned and simple in appearance, but has a lot to say. Scrolling down the main page reveals a mélange of polls, surveys, research, opinions, tweets and odds, all in an attempt to indicate the direction of political developments.
Advertising is the main source of revenues for the site. Smithson said: “The site generates enough money to support the two of us working on it, and to have a comfortable amount leftover.” With the deadline coming up, business is booming.
Gambling is a £14 billion industry in the UK, according to data published earlier this year by the UK Gambling Commission. Of the 24-million-strong betting population in the UK, more than half had bet on some political event or the other as of June this year. Drawing on Paddy Power’s numbers, a lot of this betting appears to be Brexit-related at present.
“As crunch time approaches, we’re seeing a marked increase in betting. This is usually people reacting to the news agenda, what is being discussed in parliament and their own predictions of what will happen,” said Jones from Paddy Power. As many as 23 “Brexit Special” betting markets can be counted on the Paddy Power website, ranging from relatively sober speculation on whether the government will announce food rationing in 2019, to the more unorthodox bet on whether The Queen will move to Ireland this year.
What Jones reports for Paddy Power, Callum Wilson at Oddschecker portrays for the entire political betting sector. As an odds aggregator for some of the largest betting sites in the UK, Oddschecker finds that its patrons – much like visitors to Politicalbetting.com – are looking for advice on where to put their money. Nearly 100 Oddschecker employees sit in a dynamic, open-plan office in Hammersmith, receiving and entering numbers by the minute. The result is a comprehensive overview of where many of the UK’s gamblers are betting their cash.
Wilson is the Senior Outreach Manager at Oddschecker, and has a monumental betting market at his fingertips. His laptop is a house of open tabs, each with a different chart or spreadsheet. With a pre-coded converter, he can calculate the probability of any given event by entering the odds and betting numbers. The predictions he draws from these numbers are frighteningly accurate.
“Odds are simply a reflection of where people are putting their money, which is often a close reflection of reality. In the week leading up to the 2016 US Presidential Election, opinion polls had Trump losing comprehensively. Our odds said that he would win,” said Wilson.
These seemingly psychic powers have made Wilson a popular man, particularly as Brexit approaches. Said Wilson: “Aggregating odds is a good way of anticipating where Brexit is going, and people know it. I’m dealing with Brexit-related calls on a daily basis, and journalists come to me all the time for stories. This morning, I had someone from the Financial Times get in touch.”
In a way, Oddschecker and Politicalbetting.com are separate means to the same end: Clarity on where to bet. But one look at the Oddschecker website shows that it’s all about the numbers, and not everyone is good with numbers. The desire to gain more personal insight generates enough traffic to spill over on to Smithson’s blog, sometimes more than he can manage.
“Our servers have crashed several times in the last four months, because visitors have easily doubled,” said Smithson. But traffic is not all that Smithson is worried about. He declares that his website is successful when he can spark a discussion, as it gives punters a good feel of overall sentiment.
“I often use comments as a metric for success. On average we get 1,000 comments per day per post. Recently, we’ve had between 2,000 and 3,000 comments per day per Brexit-related post,” explained Smithson. The next few weeks are likely to be fairly busy as well.
The recent agreement reached between UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the EU might be the beginning of the end to the world of Brexit betting. On the other hand, familiar resistance from the House of Commons might prolong affairs. The longer the better for Smithson, Wilson, Jones, and all others involved in political betting, who can revel in potentially guilty pleasure from the protracted limbo that has been Brexit.