Categories
BETFAIR, THE US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, AND THE GAMBLING COMMISSION – politicalbetting.com
BETFAIR, THE US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, AND THE GAMBLING COMMISSION – politicalbetting.com
Let me begin with an apology to the Gambling Commission. I have often badmouthed them, here and elsewhere, but a long conversation recently with one of their staff has caused me to revise my views. The subject was principally Betfair’s long delay in settling various markets in connection with the recent US Presidential Elections. The Commission cannot intervene in individual disputes but it does hold a brief to ‘regulate commercial gambling in Great Britain in partnership with licensing authorities’ and is therefore always interested in the activities of betting organisations, especially where the is any suggestion of misconduct or inappropriate behaviour in relation to settlement.
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Nite all.
Current Betfair prices:-
Biden 1.03
Democrats 1.03
Biden PV 1.02
Biden PV 49-51.9% 1.03
Trump PV 46-48.9% 1.03
Trump ECV 210-239 1.06
Biden ECV 300-329 1.05
Biden ECV Hcap -48.5 1.04
Biden ECV Hcap -63.5 1.04
Trump ECV Hcap +81.5 no offers
AZ Dem 1.04
GA Dem 1.04
MI Dem 1.03
NV Dem 1.03
PA Dem 1.04
WI Dem 1.04
Trump to leave before end of term NO 1.14
Trump exit date 2021 1.08
https://twitter.com/bnodesk/status/1334352972663418880?s=21
I did complain a couple of weeks ago about them not settling my 300-329 ECV Biden win using the 'escalation' email address and lo and behold the next day they settled my bet. But I'm aware this is not the case still on many other markets, nor for many punters.
Some on here will say, 'it's market forces' but some regulation is always required or greedy businesses will take advantage. Betfair is one.
Extra measures 'to ensure fair exams next summer'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-55160374
None of those will ensure fair exams. They will not make up for people missing over half of the curriculum, for example, or explain how we manage if one-third of students are isolating (despite the lie to the contrary) nor will it actually address the fact that GCSEs in particular are now a crock of horse shit anyway.
I do hope someone sues them over this. Would be funny as fuck to watch them lose and their bafflement as they came to terms with their uselessness.
https://www.ft.com/content/91843856-ff9a-4d52-b3a9-285387fe129d
Simply because it weakens the case of a delay down to a frustration and annoyance, nothing more serious than that.
To his credit, Boris didn't gasp the 'opportunity'.
Please can you double-check this.
The ECV Biden market with BF Exchange is still trading and currently at 1.05 -1.07.
I cannot see how it is possible that BF have settled your bet. At what? Are you sure you didn`t "cash out"?
For them to have settled your bet they would have to have arbitrarily given you 1.00 on a market that is still running.
But imagine a scenario where officials spell out to the clown various risks, then offer him the chance to be the first in the world to start vaccinating people. How much consideration do any of us seriously think Bozo would give before giving the go ahead?
We just have to take the apparently excellent news on trust, for now.
Twenty years ago all except those under dispute were settled.
Twenty years later all except those under dispute have been settled.
The dispute this year is pathetic, but blame frivolous pathetic lawsuits from Trump for that. The Courts will have to settle them before the Electoral College votes just as they did twenty years ago.
Or did the MRHA simply take the line that with several thousand dying every week plus a significant number of long term impaired health, is even a couple of weeks gathering and analysing further data too much cost?
A risk, but a risk worth taking, is a reasonable position. Vaccine complications are rare, but on the other hand quite damaging to confidence. Not an easy decision.
I'm out of the loop now, so have no idea whether any other work on registration has been done these past few weeks. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the EMA approving within a few days, although if neither they nor the FDA do I'd be a bit concerned.
At yesterday's Pfizer/BioNTech press conference when asked why they thought the MHRA was faster than the EMA they said that the difference was when they sent an email to the MHRA they would get a reply ten minutes later.
If you're asking for the same information but it's not sat in someone's inbox for 24 hours between replies it's possible to get through the same work faster.
Bottom line: Biden didn't do much better on average than Dem candidates for House and Senate.
Sometimes in life you have to act on incomplete evidence, and this may well be one of those cases.
With over 10k a day deaths being recorded worldwide I do agree that cautious risk taking is appropriate but no doubt they will be watching the outcome of this first wave of vaccinations very carefully.
"A searchlight picking out an invisible enemy" or something on those lines. No amount of light can help see something truly invisible!
Like most of our politicians he has no understanding of science, he is a wordsmith and nothing more. Ignorance expressed in tortured wartime rhetoric.
I thought someone had established (maybe OGH) that Bf had committed to 14 December following a news release. Is this right?
It’s a good thing, don’t get me wrong, but fast efficient medical review should be a given
Overall, though, our vaccine strategy is one thing we have broadly got right.
(And I haven’t heard as many complaints about test & trace recently)
Bloody Democrats always causing trouble 😂
"If there is any material change to the established role or any ambiguity as to who occupies the position, then Betfair may determine, using its reasonable discretion, how to settle the market based on all the information available to it at the relevant time. Betfair reserves the right to wait for further official announcements before the market is settled."
There is no material change or ambiguity. If BF try to use this as an excuse they will be complicit in a conspiracy theory.
So I'm not sure why the EMA is taking longer, someone suggested losing the MRHA is part of the reason - in which case those of us in the rest of Europe would have yet another thing to blame Brexit for!
Exactly the same as Florida 2000 legally.
The merits of the lawsuit are different but that's for the courts to determine.
Apologies for both shouting and swearing
That is an unbelievable irresponsible approach to adopt and I hope to God it’s not LibDem strategy
The MHRA is an independent regulator. I was surprised how fast they moved, but it’s a good thing
The last thing we need is idiots trying to politicise vaccines
Before I complain to BF it would be useful to know whether their competitors have all settled.
This is an evolving situation and each day new data is coming out of the studies. Things get clearer with time, and are often very clear in retrospect years later. At what point do you act is a finely balanced decision, and to an extent a philosophical one.
I have done some medico legal work over the years, and one thing that I do see is experts with unlimited time picking over cold data years later. The reality of the medical coalface is the fog of war, and time pressured decision making by less experienced staff on an evolving situation.
The successes are unremarked, but the failures are picked over forensically. No doubt the same is true of much decision making at the sharp end of police and military. We have to learn lessons, but I don't think that the system copes well with this. It expects omniscience and the ability to see the future.
https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1334412847976226817
The EMA has said it’s in appropriate (it’s not an emergency?) and are using the conditional approval approach
In practice that means
MHRA approach says “based on the data you have, and the unmet medical need you’re good to go”. It focuses more on safety than efficacy
The EMA approach is “you don’t need to do all the trials before approval but we need to see a meaningful start on everything and a commitment to complete everything before we give full approval. Before that you can sell on a strictly limited basis”
https://twitter.com/PrivateEyeNews/status/1334045943700869121/photo/1
I have no trust that the government have worked out how to isolate the infectious. The difference now is that the extra restrictions in the tier system demonstrate that the government have acknowledged they don't know how to do that either - so we're left with varying degrees of isolating everyone until we're vaccinated.
At least it will only be for a matter of months now, instead of indefinitely.
There is a possibility a recount (throwing out hundreds of thousands of votes whose "signatures don't match") could make Trump projected winner, just as a recount could have made Gore projected winner.
Same rules, same courts, same policy being followed by Betfair - let the court settle it officially.
Same as Gore 2000.
Its not clear that Brexit has played a role, but I am sure that if the situation were reversed, remainers would be crowing about 'back of the queue'.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/incomplete-data-stalls-swiss-authorisation-of-covid-19-vaccines/46196598
But it is obvious that we will have more data each week. These were interim analyses of the trials, not the final results as the trials are ongoing still.
If the market had made clear that it would be settled on the certification of sufficient States to give Biden a majority in the EC or even the formal vote of the EC itself that would be fair enough, the latter at least has not occurred yet. But the market recognised US incompetence and sought to deal with it in a particular way. On that basis the market should have been settled.
Firstly, it's based on a subset of states only, since not all of them had concurrent elections.
Secondly, it's using the term "outperformance" to analyse the absolute difference in vote share between Presidential and Senate/House results. More meaningful would be the difference in SWING between last time and this time? Maybe (as we see in the UK) there's always a difference between how some people vote at different levels - this is particularly likely where there's a popular incumbent who draws support across the aisle, for example.
What I'd be interested to know is whether more people swung DEM at the 2020 Presidential compared to 2016, now having seen Trump's performance in office and during the campaign? This the analysis simply doesn't tell us - because it can't, the electoral cycles being out of sync.
Nevertheless the data in this article does suggest there was overperformance by Biden - look at the graph for the House Democrats, and by eye I'd put the average outperformance at 1% of the vote. For the Senate it's less clear, but there's a batch of Trump outperformances that are at fractions of a % almost on the line; there's probably a net 0.5% outperformance for Biden. And he is fortunate that he outperformed in some of the key states such as Michigan, Georgia, NC (delivering a near miss), Ohio, Minnesota. Trump chalked up his apparent larger overperformances mostly where it wasn't much use - Hawaii, California, Montana, New York, WV, RI, Alabama.
That extra 0.5% to 1.0% of the total vote, focused where it mattered, will have been important.
We do not have that officially yet. Just as we didn't in 2000. In 2000 the same rules applied and the same precedent was followed.
Besides the merit of the court cases there's no meaningful legal difference between 2000 and today. The precedent was set then. Everyone who bet did so able to know how Betfair dealt with the precedent last time this happened.
Also IANAL but as a more general question does a clause in a paragraph automatically become stand alone to that paragraph?
There is no doubt that the UK would not have been able to do thus if it had joined the EU procurement scheme
But we are not going to agree so I am leaving it.
There are two options really: BJ is extremely limited in his ability to express himself and the sub, sub Wooster persona is all he can manage, or he actually thinks that the Reach for the Sky, bandits at 12 o'clock bullshit is particularly resonant. Neither is very encouraging.
That applies to Betfair and Trump.
However, noneoftheabove does raise a good point if those rules effectively give them the right to depart from the original intention.
The government's own website says that the DHSC has been "working closely" with the MHRA on "supporting and authorising the development of vaccines". Suggesting there has been no government input to the process would be as naive as suggesting the decision sat solely with the PM.
No testing was done on children or pregnant women and they won't be given the vaccine.
Interestingly several women who were pregnant but didn't know so, will have been in the tests and they and their child will be monitored for several years.
What's the point of having the rules be on projected EC votes if Betfair will say that literally any legal challenge, no matter how ridiculous, will prevent payment? What if Trump continues to bring lawsuits after Dec 14th, or after Inauguration, trying to reverse the results?
It is Betfair's job to determine when the projected winner has become essentially certain, and it's quite reasonable for people to say we are at or well past that point.
Second, Florida 2000 was a case where 500 votes in one state decided the whole election, which is not the case today, and it was known what was disputed. This year, Trump seeks to disqualify millions of voters from at least two or three of six states on grounds that are unclear, unstated and unbacked by evidence (which is why he has already lost 40 cases).
I stand by what I posted at the start of the thread. Betfair panicked when Trump did not concede on 4th November, and now are trapped. If they settle according to their own rules, there is the question of how to deal with hundreds of millions of pounds worth of bets placed since the projection criteria were first met.
Starting from where Betfair is now, it should settle on 14th December (when the EC convenes) or, better, 8th December, the so-called safe harbour date.
Since for either date, settlement of the markets is probably closer than resolution of @Peter_the_Punter's complaint, I am not 100 per cent convinced it is worth pursuing but perhaps Betfair will surprise on the upside.
https://twitter.com/rachaelvenables/status/1334409024889040896?s=20
Johnson the writer, like Johnson the statesman seems to be another over hyped product for his self-salesmanship portfolio.
He is better at politics than he is a writer/journalist!
P.S. Very informative header from PtP.
You only have to see the spats between HYUFD and Philip to see the conundrums that might lead to.
And I'm just wondering about some of the self opinionated twaddle I may have posted over the years.
There is a swing against the Dems for the HoR from 2018, but a swing to Dems compared to the combined 2016 elections. Obviously only the 2016 can be used for POTUS. As such a modest swing to the Dems from 2016 for both seems correct.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2020/12/what-denmark-s-mink-cull-reveals-about-dangers-fur-farming