Who's the winner?

For some reason political betting is becoming more mainstream and a lot more money is being placed. For example someone from around the London area bet £400,000 that the Scots would vote "no" in the referendum. That person made a £100,000 profit. Not bad.

There are several blog sites that keep tabs on all the betting speculation and odds. The main one being politicalbetting.com run by Mike Smithson. It is one of the largest political blogs in the UK and gets millions of page views.



Their are plenty of other sites. The oldest seat predicter site is the electoralcalculus.co.uk site which was set up by a then Cambridge maths don, Martin Baxter, in the mid 1990s and which he has maintained ever since.

Here are the current predictions -


Political betting is a mine field it seems. For example at present the betting punters seem to have completely different expectations than the pollsters. At the last election the punters were well beaten and the pollsters didn't do brilliantly. It was the bookies that nailed it.

Under our first past the post voting system, general elections are decided by 650 separate constituencies, rather than simply national vote share. Predicting this tally is the key successfully betting on the result but which seat converter should we trust? See here for Mike Smithsons view.