Archive for July, 2010

A gift from PaddyPower

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

Those whacky Irish bookmakers, Paddypower, always come up with weird and wonderful bets. Usually these are just to generate headlines and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. However, once in a while, there is a bet that’s worth taking.

Paddypower are taking bets on which British TV channel will get the highest peak viewing figures for the world cup final on Sunday. There are two choices, BBC and ITV. Both are being shown on their respective HD channels too. All things being equal you’d expect slightly less than evens for either channel to get the most viewers. However things aren’t equal.

Both channels are showing the exact same game but will have different commentators for the game and different pundits during the build up. Will people prefer Gary Linker and co or Adrian Chiles and his team? Well, I think this is where Paddypower’s odds setters got a bit confused. If that was the only criteria, then the opening odds of 1/5 for the BBC and 3/1 for ITV maybe right.
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