Reality TV Betting

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A dose of Reality

Bet Exchange News - September 2004

By Tom Millard

My phone chirped at about 1.30am.

"Kerry's walking," rasped a voice at the other end, "she's walking."

Having nodded off for the third time while ITV2 played in the background, I realised I must have missed another McFadden tantrum. The Betfair odds confirmed my fears - she's slipped out to 1.8 amid crowing of her layers on the chatroom.

Amid the blood, sweat and tears of that night of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here , a forumite from Oldham called 'roughyed' metaphorically clasped my hand and mopped my brow as the blubbering wreck paced up and down the jungle set becoming more emotionally unstable by the minute. Eventually, after a couple of days of prolonged agony, the wailing finally subsided and the baby-faced bouncy blonde provided me with the lovely bundle of joy I thought had slipped through my grasp.

Reality TV betting has the same stigma attached to it as does Reality TV, in that people think it's crap. In some respects that's true - the above incident was one of only a handful of moments of genuine excitement from this year's crop of productions.

Most football matches have several heart-in-your-mouth moments which can send any big player into a Kerry-style sanity lapse, but for those who are in it for the potential returns and not just a short-term buzz, there are few betting events to compare with shows such as I'm A Celebrity ... and Big Brother (let's forget about the woeful Back to Reality in this context shall we?).

In a high-profile football game, if the three outcomes are priced at even money for the home team, 9/4 for the draw and 4/1 for the away team, you can be fairly sure that if the match was played 100 times, ceteris paribus , the home team will win roughly 50 per cent of the time, the away team 20 per cent and the draw would occur about 30 times in the 100. Few experienced compilers would argue that one of the outcomes should be significantly shorter than the 'market' price for most big games; the trick is to predict which team will play better on the day, taking into account variables such as team news, tactics, incentive to win etc etc. In football, as with many sports, the better team - whether in general or on the day - does not always win, as we saw many times during Euro 2004. Matches are decided by the cumulative effects of hundreds of individual events - the bounce of a ball, a mislaid pass, the blow of a Swiss referee's whistle.

With Big Brother and similar shows, the equilibrium price is just the result of backers and layers guessing the probabilities of each contestant winning, and the market is rarely a true reflection of each individual's chances. Also, the variables which combine to produce an eventual winner can be predicted with much more accuracy than most other betting events, meaning a shrewd judge of the market can manoeuvre themselves into a no-lose position if they read the developing situations correctly. While in a game of football one can only guess at how the market will look in five minutes' time, a desperately sad E4 viewer can estimate the extent to which on-screen shenanigans will affect the voting public's perception of individuals and pre-empt a market move based on this.

To be successful on any market determined by public voting, it is essential to distance onesself from any personal opinions or prejudices and get into the minds of the majority of viewers - just because I felt eventual winner Nadia was more irritating than a drunken hyena it doesn't mean the voting public won't empathise with her. The most reassuring messages on the Betfair chatroom over the last few weeks were those in upper-case predicting that the public would never vote for a 'she-man' who looked like the product of a distasteful encounter between Diego Maradona and a warthog.

It's fair to say that the typical Betfair gambler is a very different character to the average Big Brother voter. Naturally we are far too sophisticated to lower ourselves to wasting 50p on recording our appreciation for one of a bunch of social inadequates, but we tune in because 'the missus makes me watch it'. The gamble on Victor which began about four weeks from home was a case in point.

Because the man with headgear stolen from a teapot was a controversial character, occasionally self-deprecating and the only housemate with a sense of humour, a large proportion of those who could identify with him backed him. This forced down the odds to a level which were simply not reflective of his chances of winning given that a large proportion of the voters found him arrogant and his attitude distasteful. Every winner of the show in the past has been one that the public at large can identify or empathise with, and while the likes of Michelle, Jade ( BB3 ) and Jordan ( I'm A Celebrity ...) will always rack up plenty of positive votes, they are always unlikely to last the distance.

Nevertheless, Victor may well have come second if not for an incident which exposed the darker side of his character and sealed his fate. The survivor of that eviction, Jason, went on to come second despite being the least popular housemate for a great deal of the show. Once again, he had already dug his grave early on in the show but his odds were pushed down to artificially low levels in the final week. It seems the best way to deal with these moves is to take into account the demographic of the people forming the market and use this as a trading opportunity.

This year more than ever before it seems that gamblers have relied on internet polls as a barometer of public opinion. I cannot have been the only forumite to be subjected to AOL's bizarre and frustrating interface after subscribing purely for the poll that appears on their dedicated Big Brother site. It's fair to say that, despite allegations of rigging, the poll proved spot-on once again in the final week.

Betfair 's decision to pull their eviction markets after problems caused by ambiguous wording on the rules of the second eviction market was also a huge disappointment. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that particular settlement, the company did itself no favours by refusing to offer clients a market with incontestable rules. Fortunately Sporting Options took up the baton but liquidity there was limited.

Despite the furore surrounding the eviction markets, the banter was as good as ever on the Betfair chatroom and it seems most of the familiar faces jumped on the Nadia bandwagon while she was still at tasty prices. Just as last year with Cameron, as the momentum started building with about four weeks left, the price was still far too high and shrewdies and poll watchers were able to back her at odds approaching 5/1 despite her having a clear lead in most respected polls. Presumably at that stage the layers believed that the woman the Sun dubbed a 'Portugeezer' was just a flash in the pan and would not last the trip - I have to say I was sceptical myself despite my encouraging position - but as her popularity grew it became clear that she should be an overwhelming favourite. It actually took until the final half-hour of the show for her true odds to be even vaguely represented in the market; the crowd shot of a sea of Nadia banners followed by loud boos when Jason appeared on the live feed was probably the final straw.

Although pleased with my healthy win on the series, I have to say I'm glad it's over and I'm not particularly looking forward to next year's show, or indeed the plethora of other Reality TV productions to which we will be subjected before BB6. I would not have watched a single minute of the ten weeks of TV if I had not been able to trade on Betfair 's outright market. But I'm more than happy to spend two months every year watching trash television when the rewards are potentially so great. I realised after the fourth series of Big Brother that the show is the biggest and best betting event of the year, and this series merely reinforced my opinion.

Tom Millard

tom@tdmillard.freeserve.co.uk

As well as writing for Bet Exchange News Tom also writes motorsports betting previews for www.bettingzone.co.uk , the betting section of sportinglife.com. He has also written for Racing and Football Outlook, as well as being a motorsports odds consultant to a national bookmaker. Anyone wishing to profit from Tom's expertise can subscribe to the Sporting Life Premium Service for which he contributes tips for Formula One and football.”