The World Cup 2006 will be the biggest betting event in history, surpassing even the United States’s Super Bowl or National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament, according to online bookie PinnacleSports.com.
To international football fans, betting is an integral part of enjoying a tournament, raising another worry about South Africa’s ability to host the 2010 games.
Never mind the Gautrain not being ready in time. Where are our bookies?
There are historical reasons why sports betting is not the big business in South Africa it is in most countries. Though the pre-1994 laws that gave horse-racing a monopoly on gambling outside of Sol Kerzner’s bantustan casinos are gone, old habits die hard.
The National Gambling Board estimates sports betting accounts only for 16% of South Africa’s total gambling revenue. A spokesman for the board reckons nearly all of that 16% is horse-racing bets.
If people bet on a coming big match, they form an office pool. Bookies in the US and Europe have a huge amount of data available on teams to set the fixed-odds they offer. A lack of numbers to crunch in South Africa may be why sports betting here tends to be done by “totalisators” — which work similarly to an office pool — rather than via bookmakers.
While the laws limiting betting to horse-racing have been relaxed, bookmakers are still heavily regulated. They are not allowed to advertise, and each province sets a limit on the number of bookmakers it will license.
Chairman of the Gauteng Bookmakers’ Association, Michael O’Connor, says the number of bookies in South Africa is currently limited to about 200, most of which are one-person businesses.
Relaxation of the gambling laws has enabled him to move out of a tatersall into his own pub, The Bullring, in Northcliff Corner shopping centre. O’Connor blames a 6% punter’s tax for limiting the growth of local bookies.
“Anybody with a credit card and Internet access is a lost customer to local bookies because of that tax,” he says.
But international bookies don’t offer bets on local sports events. O’Connor says betting on local rugby matches is starting to get popular, but soccer betting is still marginal.
“This industry would blossom if we marketed betting on Kaizer Chiefs versus Pirates matches. Security is one problem — bookmakers are often hit by armed robbers. With shopping centres opening in places like Baragwanath, bookmakers are likely to open in areas where local soccer is big.”
If tourists ask where to find a bookie, it’s probably easiest to direct them to a website called www.oddschecker.com, which tabulates the World Cup 2006 odds of 24 online bookies.
The average odds of the six favourites are:
- Brazil 5/2
- England 7/1
- Germany 8/1
- Argentina 9/1
- Italy 10/1
- France 12/1
The long shots are:
- Angola 750/1
- Saudi Arabia 1 000/1
- Trinidad and Tobago 2 000/1
Besides letting punters bet on which team will win, the online bookies offer odds on a huge variety of events, ranging from which player will score the first goal to who will be shown a red or yellow card first (David Beckham is the English team’s favourite here).
Reuters reports that early betting on World Cup 2006 has shown a shift from traditional fixed-odds bookies to spread-betting.
Spread-betting offers a higher reward, but also a higher risk than traditional betting where the punter only stands to lose his initial wager.
The most popular spread-bet is the World Cup 100. Under this system, points are given for how far a team progresses in a tournament: 100 points for winning, 80 points for reaching the final, 60 points for third, 40 points for fourth and 30 points for reaching the quarter-finals, with this sliding scale continuing to the group stages.
The spread currently being offered on favourites Brazil stands at 56 points, while second-favourite England stands at 38 points. If a bet were laid at £10 and England won the World Cup then the return would be £620: £10 for every point up to the 100, minus the top end spread (in this case 100-38 = 62).
The flipside of this is that if England shoot themselves in the foot again, the spread- better loses £10 pounds for every point below the bottom end of the spread.
A huge variety of spread-bets are being offered like how many seconds to the fastest goal in World Cup 2006 and what the numbers on the jerseys of a team will add up to by the end of a game.
South African bookies are accepting bets on the World Cup but, given their low-key status, many will find it easier to take a flutter on the Web at one of the many online international bookies.
The National Gambling Board warns this probably contravenes South Africa’s byzantine foreign-exchange laws. But given that the UK online bookies accept bets for as little as 50p, foreign exchange regulations are only likely to become a problem if you win big.
They say you must never gamble unless you understand the rules, the stakes and the quitting time. I fail all three tests when it comes to the World Cup, but it still seems a more benign form of gambling than casinos or the Lotto.
An occasional fixed-odds bet on a sporting event doesn’t swallow money like a slot machine, and fans can bring their encyclopaedic knowledge to bear, whereas the Lotto is pure luck.
According to the National Gambling Board, the tight regulations limiting bookies to a handful of small businesses who are not permitted to advertise is needed to mitigate the social ills of gambling. But why doesn’t this also apply to casinos and the lottery?
Considering how sports crazy South Africans are — and how keen on casinos and the Lotto — it seems odd that sports betting hasn’t grown into the huge industry here that it is nearly everywhere else.