Betfair is running a market on this. Seems a bit distasteful to bet on whether someone gets the death penalty or not.
Apparently, Paddy Power think he is not.
The Cheltenham Festival is the biggest event in the racing calendar. Only the Grand National can top it for prize money, and none can top the Gold Cup for prestige. Having spent the past four years in the gaming industry, it’s always a big week.
Most of the betting companies had a smooth week technical wise. Corals had some real problems with their website, and Bet Victor and Paddy Power had some big outages too – but everyone else came through it rather smoothly.
I made the mistake of following the tips from the racing team – and ended the week rather down. But it’s all in good fun, and I did manage three winners, just not particularly well priced ones.
Today marks the first anniversary of my 25th birthday. Thanks to the spread bet I placed, that means £100 in my pocket, and an additional £100 for each year after that I survive.
Last month, a report by the Commons Culture Committee concluded that our gambling legislation was “outdated” and “ill-equipped” to deal with globalisation.
I strongly agree. Having worked in the industry for years, I know first hand that our legislation is lagging behind.
For example, you can only have four FOBTs (fixed odds betting terminals) in a bookies. But over the last ten years, traditional betting has been almost entirely replaced by the use of FOBTs, and without them high street bookies would close. You could argue this is a good thing, but with millions out of work do we really want to go slashing many more jobs?
Secondly, we simply don’t have the legislation to deal with new technology. At Buzz, we developed a bespoke wireless terminal for our games. But what does this count as? A FOBT? It’s just a tablet computer in a case. Does that mean we can put them in pubs? Probably not. But if you took your own tablet into a pub, you could then gamble online. The Gambling Commission simply didn’t know what to do.
Thirdly, because of the online nature and high taxes in the UK, bookmakers can just move abroad – and most of them have. Running a website is the kind of thing you can do from Gibraltar, so they do. Not that it’s cheap – you have to pay staff a lot more money to go work out on some god-forsaken rock, but the tax difference is so great that is still works out cheaper. If we lowered taxes, we would bring that income back to the UK.
This is becoming more and more apparent, as services continue to move online. For example poker tournaments and live dealer casino games, once exclusively the preserve of the real world have now moved onto the internet. You can sit, at a table, with a live dealer, on the internet. When the technology is this good, we need to ensure that our legislation can keep pace with it, or we’re only hurting ourselves.
As some of you know, I write some of my blog posts in advance and publish them a few days or weeks later, depending on how many I’ve written recently. So sometimes I will write something and it won’t actually be published on my blog until a few days later.
This Saturday is the Grand National, the most valuable race in the racing calendar and one of the most prestigious after the Gold Cup. It’s also synonymous with real outsiders taking the crown. Whether this is a justified reputation or not I’m not entirely sure, but in 2009 it was won by Mon Mone – a 100 to 1 shot (which makes for a far more exciting headline than last year’s winner, Ballabriggs, 14 to 1 price).
Anyway, this year I’m tipping Neptune Collonges. Lets see how my prediction does in the race on Saturday – which totally coincidentally is about when this blog post would be published…