More than £1,000,000 matched on Betfair market

It might have been the closeness of the result or the fact that both candidates for PM were relatively well known in the UK but the Italian general election has attracted a vast amount of interest and a lot of money has been staked.

Overnight alone on the Betfair market the total of matched bets chalked up has been over £700,000 taking the total to just on £1,100,000.

These totals have only been topped by the US presidential election in November 2004 and the UK General Election last May

PB.C has seen a level of overnight comments that was almost on par with what happened on the site last May 5/6th. At times the demand on our server was even greater as thousands of users sought to make sense of what was going on by repeatedly opening up and refreshing threads of 400 and more

Barely a week and a half ago I was exchanging emails with Andrea – the 23 year old Milan student who is a regular on the site and who I had asked to write a guest slot on the election. When he sent me the final version he wondered how long the discussion would stay on topic.
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Until now it has been true that the only European elections that attract much interest in the UK have been in France and to a lesser extent Germany. Well that seems to have changed which can only be a good thing

The main lesson from last night is not to over-rely on the polls. Both those that were published before the polling ban came into force two weeks ago and yesterday’s exit polls were showing much greater margins of victory for Romano Prodi than actually happened.

PB.C out-Googles Betfair A regular emails me to note that if you put the word “betting” into the Google UK search engine this site comes up in 7th place out of 16.8m matches. Betfair is eighth!

Mike Smithson