GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 36 - October 2016

Buttons image by Carsten Reisinger/Shutterstock, Brexit image by RRA79/Shutterstock W W W . G P W A T I M E S . O R G 31 “The polls were wrong by 70%,” said Krishnamurty, who added there was a similar situation in the 2012 U.S. General Election, when the pollsters were calling for a close race and the betting markets consistently had incumbent Obama a clear favorite over Republican nominee Mitt Romney. “Opinion polls are restricted by the fact that they’re scien- tific. They have to accurately report a snapshot of public opinion at a given moment of time, whereas the political markets are based on a deeper, wider, long-term perspective of serious gamblers. “They’re just not as restrictive, especially when you consider that telephone polls are having a harder and harder time reaching people because a lot of people don’t have landlines anymore.” To be fair, the betting markets aren’t always dead on. Jeremy Corbyn won the 2015 British Labour Party leadership in a landslide after being listed as a 200-to-1 shot. And Trump was a colossal 150-to-1 longshot to win the General Election when he launched his candidacy last year. After theU.S. Presidential Election, Krishnamurty saidhe’ll be keeping a close eye onwhether or not Brexit will result in the next U.K. Gen- eral Election being held in 2017, three years sooner than scheduled. “Because of the worldwide attention the Brexit vote got this year, and since we’ll be on the heels of the U.S. General Election, that could be a huge, huge market,” he said. “But nothing may top what we’ll see in November. It’s going to be enormous.” “We’ve seen enough anecdotal reports from established bookmakers to be convinced that political betting is growing in a big way . . . Our belief is the massive amount of Brexit betting was more of an indicator that there is already a big market for political betting.” Gary Trask is a Boston native with more than 20 years of experience as a writer and editor. He is the managing edi- tor at GPWA and Casino City Press and has been covering the gaming industry since 2007.