politicalbetting.com

What happened when a political market went wrong? One of the biggest challenges running a betting market on events in the news is finding a mechanism that defines how the bet will be settled. With elections that is easy but with other markets problems can emerge as a big row involving the Dublin-based betting exchange, Tradesports, has shown. For at the start of July, until it was overshadowed by the tragic events in the Middle East, the main international story…

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Can Ségo stay silent to beat Sarkozy Just six months back, you could scoop up Ségolène Royal, the dark horse of the French left, at 12/1 when the May 2007 presidential election was sure to be a slugfest between two conservatives, Dominique de Villepin and Nicolas Sarkozy. Now, after Villepin’s spectacular implosion over a trivial change to labour law and now a Watergate-like spying scandal, Royal (at 11/4) looks like the only thing standing in the way of Sarkozy as…

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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…

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Will Berlusconi have more time to entertain Tony? Italian electoral law forbids the publishing of opinion polls up to a fortnight in advance of polling day, which has effect from last Saturday. This means that we can only speculate as to how events since then have affected the standing of the parties.’Parties will try to spin the figures of their own internal polling, but naturally only the positive ones. Thanks to a strong start of the campaign, Berlusconi managed to…

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Is Blair’s holiday host set to lose his job? While all the UK focus has been on whether Tessa Jowell will survive and what impact her departure would have on the Blair premiership the affair is hardly getting any coverage in Italy itself even though the core allegation is that the Prime Minster paid a bribe to Jowell’s now estranged husband, David Mills. For the big issue in Italy is whether the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi will hold onto…

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It’s 2/1 that there will be an air-strike within 18 months With Tony Blair renewing his tough comments on Iran there’s now a betting market from the US-focused Dublin betting exchange, Tradesports, on whether there will be US and/or Israeli air-strikes against Iran. There are three options and the opening prices are:- 9.1-14.8 that there will be an ” an overt Air Strike against Iran by 30 June 06″. 12.6-24.5 that there will be “an overt Air Strike against Iran…

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