Did anybody get money on Blunkett going?
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How real were the betting markets?
On the morning of December 1st we received an email from William Hill saying that the odds against David Blunkett not being Home Secretary on New Year’s Day were 7/2. We put this out on the site saying the price looked tempting but it did not appear to be online.
Throughout the next few days we repeatedly checked the Hill’s site wanting to put some money on but the market was not there. We also requested the odds search engine, Bestbetting, to notify us if a market appeared.
On December 7th we put out another article after William Hill sent us a release saying that lots of money was going on and they had cut the odds to 5/2 . It was noted that someone had bet £200 – lucky someone. Two days later David Kendrick posted this on his experiences as he tried to bet on Blunkett going:-
If you phoned them for a price quote shortly after it was on politicalbetting.com, you’d have to go through a reasonably lengthy process to open an account before they would quote you a price. Then they would tell you that the ‘price was suspended’. Could they tell you when the price was suspended? No, ‘the technology does not allow that’. What was the price when it was suspended? No, ‘that information is not available to me’. So they made me open an account before they’d even tell me that they were no longer taking bets on the market I wanted to know about. And then they declined to tell me anything about it. They’d struggle if they worked in a service industry….
There are two things we would like to find out:-
Today Hills have sent me a press release on a market on David Blunkett returning to the Cabinet following the General Election. We will only cover this on the site when it is online.
THIS WEEKEND ON POLITICALBETTING We are introducing our new dedicated server and there might be some down time. We’ll try to keep the site open as much as possible but you might, at times, find it hard to read comments or to post yourself. Bear with us. We are hoping for a big difference when it’s all working properly. Thanks to my son Robert for all he is doing & for paying!
Mike Smithson