People say that the syndicates will ensure ultimate victory for Alex because the odds on him to win in the first week were 50/1.

But surely the bookies could not have been stupid enough to give FIXED odds, could they? Especially on something that can be so easily influenced by the punters themselves!

Please correct me if I'm wrong!

Well nobody's corrected me .... so Imust be right

Or we don't know...



jack

Never thought of that

How do you mean by 'fixed odds'? If you place a bet with certain odds, you win on those odds, whether they go up or down in the meantime, don't you?

For eg, I bet on Jonny at 8/1, dont know what he is now, but if he wins, they will pay out on those odds.

The odds stand at the time of your bet. So if they put money on him during week one, at 50:1 , then their bet stands, and if he wins, they get 50x their bet. Simple as that.

No not at all - that is why you have "starting prices" at the beginning of a race.

Hyacinth is right. Peter is wrong. The bookie will pay out at the 8/1 you got at the time of the bet.

The flaw in the betting syndicate argument is, quite simply, that the volume (both of votes and of wagers) is just not large enough to indicate a sting.

Well I could be wrong .... but in a horse race u dont get fixed odds do u?

But i guess the runners and riders dont get eliminated before the start .. so maybe it's different ....

The goat is wrong - you fix the odds when you make the bet.

The bookie may then offer different odds to someone hence, but your bet stands at the original odds.

On horse racing, I believe your stake is refunded if the horse doesn't start. But I could be wrong, I don't bet on the gee-gees. I do bet on Big Brother though!

You do get fixed odds on a horse..

Say you bet at 3-1, and the horse ends up at evens before the race starts... if it wins, you still get £3 for each £1 you bet..

No Santo, you don't - you have to pay a lot to get fixed odds on a horse - trust me

i bet on the horses quite a bit and you can either take the fixed price at the time or take the SP. You can take the fixed odds no matter how much you stake. don't quote me if i'm wrong though....

My grandfather used to be a course bookmaker, so I've spent a lot of time at the racecourses, and both my grandfather and father are very familar with the way betting works. If somebody offers you 5-1 on a horse, you bet £1, you win £5.. it's that simple.

Another example, I had 5-1 on South Korea to beat Italy. When Korea drew level, the odds were cut to 2-1. Korea advanced, and I won £10 (on a bet of £2).

Every bet I've made, the odds when I bet are the odds I've been paid.. upto tonight when I got 1.32/1 (William Hill like these weird odds) on the Angels to beat the Brewers

www.betfair.com also has interesting odds (and a great concept).

Good scope for arbitrage there.

Masked Lady you are correct, petergoat you are wrong.

When you place a bet on the horses, you will be presented with the current price (eg: 5/1) and the SP (Starting Price).

You CHOOSE which one you want to take, you may feel that the odds will decrase before the start of the race, because you expect a lot of bets to be taken, in that case you would want to take the current price of 5/1.

On the other hand you may feel that the odds will increase, before the start of the race, in which case you would want to take the SP.

If you bet on Alex when he was 50/1, you WILL be payed out at 50/1 and not the odds when he wins, which are obviously going to be a lot less if he makes the last 3.

Santo, those are decimal odds, and you say them simply as 1.32, not 1.32/1. You can easily switch back to traditional odds @ willhill.

I've got some pathetic non-gambler questions about the betting scams.


1)
Last week, Jonny v. Lee.
Big odds for Jonny to stay.
The allegation is that the 'popular' people were stung ie. Alison and Spencer. Why, if this happened, didn't the syndicates get Jonny out for what would have been great returns?

Is it because the syndicates can only do this when the popularity /projected voting is not as wide as 85/15 split? ie they need it to be close because they can only make a 10-15 % difference for practical reasons?

2)
If Spencer was scammed last week, why did the radio, online and RI:SE polls show the same percentages (+/- 5-10%) across the board. I mean, wouldn't they diverge from the ' fixed ' result? or did they also scam the non-gambling polls? and why if they did?

I guess I'm trying to find out if the so-called ' fixed ' eviction poll really was so untrue to popular opinion, as is claimed by some people, and if what ended up a 10% difference would be very different without the syndicates' influence.

mickeyfinn: Ah, thanks... just went back and saw the traditional/decimal option... no idea why I hadn't noticed that before. I don't generally use WH, but they're the only one I found with odds on baseball money lines and run lines..

Cheers.

As for this part, people got odds of 16-1 before the nominations were confirmed. News got leaked and people guessed his nomination, so 16-1 were good odds and they didn't need to rig it against Jonny.

The answer to your second part is tougher... the polls I know of were biased. This site's polls showed about a 5% difference, and the people here were biased overall in favour of Alex... I guess because Spencer's fan group weren't the sort of people to hang around DS... you might have found them on the C4 site if anywhere.

RI:SE showed about a 4% difference when Spencer's fans were at school, the change at Channel 4's site appears to have been a mass-vote by net-savvy people - if you look at how the vote totals increased very fast in a short time, I'd guess somebody had a script to vote repeatedly.

Hope this helps!

Ta, Santo.

Yeah, I got 28/1 on Lee the day before the nominations, 36 hours later he was 1/9!

I think the word 'Sting' is somtimes misinterpreted(sp), when the bookies refer to a sting, they simply mean they have been 'stung'.

This dosn't nesercerly mean foul play has been invloved, it may just mean that the bookies priced him up wrong & they are going to lose a lot of money.

No betting syndicate, no matter how big would have been able to alter the Lee eviction results, so that one at least was the bookies own mistake.

The bookies will also refer to a 'sting' in other betting events where the punters cannot (legally) change the outcome.

Example:

Take a horse race for example, a group of 10 punters may get a red hot tip on a horse at odds of 20/1. Those punters might then go to 10 different bookies and all at exactly the same time bet £10,000 pounds on the horse @ 20/1.

The bookies will then cotten on to the fact that they know somthing & adjust their odds accordinly. 5 minutes later you may see the horse at odds of 5/1.

Then if the horse won, those punters would have got paid out at 20/1 and the bookies would have been 'stung'.

Hope this helps.

I'm learning lots from this forum
And it makes a change to the "so-and-so is a backstabber/player" threads that there seem to be so many of.

I expect to become an expert gambler by the end of BB!

Jack
2/1 favourite.

jack glad that you are getting something extra out of forum. hope you don't intend to use this info to start your own sting operation. but if so -

i've about £1 going a begging but i propose we change the pattern so far and arrange for jade to win. perhaps with your religious influence perhaps we could perform a miracle. 20% to charity and it could be a deal.

p.s. does all this interest mean your now taking the rigging seriously?

Deerd