{"id":123,"date":"2005-11-03T22:16:15","date_gmt":"2005-11-03T12:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=123"},"modified":"2006-02-28T22:35:51","modified_gmt":"2006-02-28T11:35:51","slug":"being-fair-to-betfair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2005\/11\/03\/being-fair-to-betfair\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Fair to BetFair"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

BetFair<\/a> is in the news<\/a> today as it has made some deal with the Tasmanian goverment and PBL<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, there are, without doubt, various ethical issues with gambling. There are, without doubt, issues of corruption that need careful consideration.<\/p>\n

However, one issue that gets raised, again and again, about BetFair is the notion that, because you can bet against<\/em> a horse winning, it instantly leads to corruption and that it is “un-Australian” [Ref: an official from a jockey club interviewed on Lateline<\/a> tonight]<\/p>\n

\n

Aside: When someone suggests that something is un-Australian, it means that they don’t have a real argument to advance their cause, and also that they don’t have any notion of history. For the record, there is nothing un-Australian about corruption, murder, racism, or oppression, just to name a few acts. There is something very un-Australian about accusing other people of being un-Australian.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Betting Against = Lots of Betting For<\/h3>\n

Currently, you can’t directly bet against a particular horse on the various TABs.<\/p>\n

I’ll give you a simple lesson in gambling. It is really easy to indirectly<\/em> bet against a horse. You simple bet for<\/em> every other horse in the race.<\/p>\n

BetFair doesn’t introduce a new option here – they just simplify it.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h3>\n

You can decide for yourself whether gambling is evil.<\/p>\n

You can decide for yourself whether BetFair will divert gambling dollars to Tasmania at the expense of the other state governments.<\/p>\n

You can decide for yourself whether the biggest risk of corruption is due to deals amongst trainers and jockeys to lose a horse race, or due to deals amongst gambling organisations, media moguls and cash-poor state governments.<\/p>\n

But when you do decide, please ignore the nonsense about un-Australian acts and the ability in BetFair to (Shock! Horror!) bet against a horse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you form an opinion on BetFair, please ignore the nonsense about un-Australian acts and the ability in BetFair to (Shock! Horror!) bet against a horse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cathartic-rant","category-influencing-others"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}