Punting on the Punters

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I like betting on horses, and the Eurovision song contest, and I used to bet on Big Brother too – until I got sick of having to watch it. Don’t worry that I’m wasting my baby milk and nappy money, I have an online betting account that lets me place teensy 10p bets. Although I sometimes bet 25p if I’m feeling adventurous! It’s obviously not about making (or losing) money for me, it’s a challenge, a game, and I’m enjoying learning about odds, and form, and speed ratings and all that.

I much prefer betting on evening racing when the kids are out of the way. We’ll pack them off to bed and then get out our ‘His n’ Hers’ laptops and study the race cards on the Racing Post.com. It’s a shame that most races finish around 9pm so we never have long to play! There is televised racing every evening from the US, but we’ve searched and Googled but can’t find much in the way of free form guides to those American horses. Betting on horses without any information is no fun at all. I’m not much of a racing expert but I do like to think about my bets, and pretend I know which horse has a chance.

So, my second invention-a-day (for May) invention is an online 24 hour a day betting opportunity, so you can use skill and judgement to bet whenever you want to. I love the intricacies of horse racing, and admire the innovation of sites like Betfair, but I’d love it if there was a blend of the two to make a  purpose built online sports betting opportunity. My inspiration is the idea that you can bet on anything, even raindrops rolling down a window pane. So what’s the online equivalent of those raindrops?

When I’m not a full time mum I work at PokerStars online poker site. I know that to help generate their random numbers they work on the mouse movements of the tens of thousands of players who are online at any one time. So that got me thinking… What other random factors could you use? What if you could bet on the next word typed into Google? Nah, not enough skill or stats to analyse. I want a virtual raindrop with a history and complexity to give me something to think about. What about betting on the new online ’sports’ – shooter/clan games like Counter-Strike? Hmm, but perhaps it’s too easy for players to fix the results.

I had lots more ideas… I thought of worm racing where users breed and race virtual worms. I thought of poetry battles where poets have a minute or two to create something and then a public vote on the best. I thought of a gambling themed ‘Second Life’ style world, a Gambletopia…

But my favourite idea is the simplest. I’d like to bet on the bettors.

I don’t know much about US horse racing, or soccer betting, or Wimbledon tennis, but I’m sure there are many tipsters who do. So what if there was a website where I could log on and see the predictions of half a dozen tipsters and bet on who would do best? Imagine they’ve made their predictions for the days racing at a US track like Turf Paradise, or a Saturday afternoons soccer. I could look at those tipsters previous results. I could see their ‘form’ and history… I would look at the odds on each and choose which I think will make the most profit.

Ideally there’d be ‘in running’ betting with the odds changing as the events went on. The site would update the tipsters progress as the races are run. I could follow the picks on the TV, and maybe the site could even have online chat from the betting subjects, a commentry with the tipsters bantering about each others selections and  odds. They could talk up their chances in the next race and it would be interesting to see how that chat effected the betting market. Knowing the way a tipster ‘talked’ a race could give you as much of an edge as knowing how a horse ran in training.

It’s all pie in the sky of course. I’ll have to back a million to 1 horse to ever have the cash to develop this idea, but I lie pie in the sky dreaming. And maybe online pie throwing could even be another gambling invention?

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Tags: betting, google, inventions, pie, racing, tipsters