London playing host to the Olympic Games has boosted the British betting industry, with record-breaking results being reported.
Sporting Index has reported a record-breaking Olympics in terms of turnover at London 2012, with nine times as many bets placed with the firm than at Beijing in 2008.
The spread betting firm took nine times as many bets as at Beijing four years ago and 70 per cent of its customers who had been active betting with them over the past three weeks had at least one bet on the Olympics. One in three clients placed bets via hand-held devices.
In Beijing, Sporting Index took bets on 16 different sports, while in 2012 the firm saw action on all 36 sports and bets were placed on every one of the 302 medal events. The top betting sports were soccer and tennis, but swimming, basketball, athletics, boxing and cycling all proved very popular.
One of the most interesting markets was the total number of gold medals that Team GB would win. The initial quote was 24, but after a sluggish start many of Sporting Index’s big clients sold (bet lower) that figure, forcing the prediction down to 20.
Sporting Solutions, the B2B software and data services division of the Sporting Index Group, provided some of the world’s leading bookmakers with a fixed-odds pricing service and feedback from the industry was that turnover was much higher than expected. Initial estimates had suggested somewhere between £20-£40m would be bet in the UK, but the final figure appears to be nearer £80-100m.
Mark Maydon, commercial director at the Sporting Index Group, said that although the firm expected London 2012 to grab the attention of punters, it has surpassed expectations. “We made a conscious decision 18 months ago to invest heavily in our trading team, algorithms and modeling for the Olympics and we’ve been rewarded with unprecedented levels of interest.”
Figures relaesed to The Telegraph reported that Ladbrokes forecasts the industry will turn over almost £80m for the duration of the games, compared with £4m from the Beijing Games in 2008. While research from Coral shows that three million people planned to place their firts ever bet on the London Olympics. Betfair has seen the total number of customers making bets doubling to almost 100,000.
