I was listening to POTUS 2008 coverage on XM on my commute the other day and they were talking to the runner of a betting service in Ireland that paid out on Barack Obama winning the democratic nomination all told, the bookmaker, Paddy Power paid out 50,000 Euros(~75,000 USD).  Apprently the U.S. election is big in Ireland, with people talking about it in neighborhood pubs and following the race as closely(if not closer) than people do in the U.S. This betting on the U.S. election got me thinking, people will bet and speculate on just about anything. Paddy Power has a whole section dedicated to novelty betting. The site Betting Zone even has a whole section concerning novelty betting news.

This betting doesn’t just extend to elections, the website Long Bets is solely dedicated to keeping track of and facilitating bets between mostly well know figures. Long Bets, however, is not a traditional sports book, they are a non-profit company that donates the money from the long bets to the charity of choice of the winner. The company made headlines about a week and a few weeks ago for a bet between Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times. The bet was, “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.” Dave won as blogs ranked higher. The way Long Bets works is pretty interesting, people don’t have to necessarily have someone to bet against, if they don’t their ‘bet’ starts out as a prediction about the future, and those in and of themselves are pretty interesting to read.

Beyond betting, and perhaps where betting and so-called legitimate activity meet, is the future’s market. The futures market as most people know it involves commodities, people in effect bet on how valuable a given commodity will be in the future. Recently a new company has begun applying this concept to something a lot of people care about, American football, specifically the Super Bowl. The site is Yoonew and basically they use the odds of a team making the Super Bowl to price the future ticket accordingly, if your team makes the Super Bowl, you get a ticket(or three times the price you paid if they can’t secure a ticket according to TechCrunch), if your team doesn’t make it, you’re out the money you paid. Obviously the price fluctuates based on records and how many teams are left, but its a good way to get in for a low price.

The three times price issue is an interesting one, since there is an incentive if the tickets are very expensive to just give you three times the value. The reason there is a disincentive to do this is a consumer confidence one. People won’t keep going to the site if they don’t actually provide the tickets. Overall though if they are reputable, its certainly an interesting concept.

The last form of ‘betting’ that I’ll talk about is, dead polls. Dead polls have a sort of cult following, and have even been featured on TV(there’s an episode of CSI: Miami where the murder is suspected to involve a high priced dead pool and off shore betting on everything).  The premise of a dead pool is simple, participants pick a list of celebrities they think will die within whatever period of time the dead poll takes place(usually a year) and they get points if that person dies in that period of time(the points is different based on the pool). One of the most well known Dead Pools is the one run by Rotten.com, but others exist including one on LiveJournal. So if you’re morbid and interested check one out. A lot run yearly, January-December, so it may be too late for some of them, but the Rotten one is rolling so joinable at any time. Rotten’s isn’t for money, but its possible that some out there are.

So go ahead, bet on anything you like, you’re not alone.

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