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**SNIP** What should’ve been the biggest story of the week — five Division I college basketball games being examined for highly suspicious or “irregular” betting patterns can’t compete with the latest speculation of free-agent linebackers of varied achievement. According to multiple reports and the schools’ acknowledgments, four of those games include Temple’s team and the other was played by Loyola (Md.). Both teams had rotten seasons. But the most conspicuously suspicious among the games in question was University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) at Temple on March 7, a barely contested 100-72 UAB win. As curious games go, this one...

43.4Trump (R) 27.0Biden (D) 9.5Obama (D) 7.0Newsom (D) 4.0Harris (D) 3.2Haley (R) 3.0Kennedy (I) 1.0Phillips (D) 0.0DeSantis (R)

Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs have made it to the Super Bowl - meaning Taylor Swift will make a mad dash from Tokyo to Las Vegas to watch her boyfriend battle for football's ultimate prize on February 11. America's most famous couple kissed on the field at the M&T Bank Stadium in the aftermath of a magnificent victory for the Chiefs And when he got on stage and took the mic, Kelce was euphoric - channeling the Beastie Boys by shouting: 'You've got to fight for your right to party!'. Swift plays four nights of her blockbuster Eras...

The Seminole Tribe of Florida could be free to offer statewide electronic sports betting in time for the fall resumption of college and professional football due to a ruling by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on June 30 approved Florida’s 30-year gambling compact with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, including language that allows statewide sports betting via cellphones and other electronic devices as long as the bets are channeled through servers on tribal land, an arrangement described as “hub and spoke.” The deal promises to return $2.5...

March Madness tips off this week and about one-quarter of all American adults are poised to collectively bet $15.5 billion on this year’s NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament, according to data from the American Gaming Association (AGA). The AGA conducted a survey that found 68 million American adults will place bets on March Madness this year, with the vast majority – 56.3 million – planning to participate in a bracket contest. About 31 million Americans will place a traditional wager online, with a retail sportsbook, or with a bookie, while another 21.5 million plan to bet casually with friends....

The debate between Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz on Tuesday night shifted the betting odds 20 points in favor of Oz, according to PredictIt betting market. Before the debate started, Oz was favored to win the Pennsylvania Senate seat by 53/100 cents. After the one-on-one, those odds dramatically changed. Wednesday morning odds showed Oz favored by 64/100 cents, an 11 point swing.

The betting market PredictIt shows bettors are shifting their attitudes for the first time since the mid-summer and now believe the Republican Party will likely take control of the U.S. Senate after the midterm elections, according to the most recent predictions. According to the betting odds, the GOP is favored to win by 56 cents on the dollar. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ chance of securing the Senate majority are 47 cents on the dollar.

Last month, New Jersey became the first state to take in more than $1 billion in sports betting in a single month, The Associated Press reported. Nine casinos and three racetracks in Atlantic City took in $1.01 billion worth of wagers on sports as football returned in September, according to figures from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement released on Monday. The previous national record for a single state was $966 million wagered on sports betting in December 2020, according to the AP.

Two Florida pari-mutuels filed a new motion in federal district court in Washington late Tuesday, asking a judge to block implementation of online sports betting under the Florida tribal gaming compact which is scheduled to begin later this year. The motion, filed by Magic City Casino and Bonita Springs Poker Room against U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, asks a court to enjoin the sports-betting portion of the state’s compact with the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The compact gives the tribe a monopoly over sports betting in the state by allowing wagers to go through an internet server on...

Paddy Power has drastically shortened the odds on a meeting between humans and extraterrestrials in the current decade. They say the chances of an alien discovery this year have risen dramatically. They are offering odds as short as 20/1 (in from 200/1 before the Pentagon announcement), while their presence could be confirmed before the month’s end (50/1 – in from 500/1 yesterday). They’re assuming that the people from the stars come in peace, although you can get odds of 500/1 for an all-out war between humans and aliens to take place by the year 2030. The company is nevertheless offering...

Biden Now an Overwhelming Favorite in the Betting Markets After a Night of Wild Odds Swings

Joe Biden 29.41% Donald Trump 70.92%

Back when Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden was rocketing past The Donald on the odds boards, we advised bettors to wait on putting their money on the challenger. The prime-time debates, we reckoned, would be the reckoning, where payouts on Basement Joe would skyrocket. But an interesting thing happened on the way to the debates: Joe’s lead has collapsed entirely. Trump is now tied with or leading the Democrat at every major Vegas election sportsbook: 2020 Presidential Election Odds Bovada: Donald Trump -110 Joe Biden -110 BetOnline: Donald Trump -120 Joe Biden +100 (EVEN) MyBookie: Donald Trump -140 Joe Biden...

Betting odds have shifted dramatically toward President Donald Trump, ...

More bettors at one British bookmaker are backing Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Party's 2020 nominee than they are any of the candidates actually running in the race, giving her better odds of winning than Senator Cory Booker and Beto O'Rourke, among others. Clinton, a former secretary of state and first lady, is not a candidate in the party's primaries and was the Democratic nominee in the 2016 election, which she lost to President Donald Trump. Despite winning the popular vote by almost 3 million, Clinton lost the Electoral College. At the bookmaker Ladbrokes, Clinton has seen enough backing...

Voters encountering Elizabeth Warren on the presidential campaign trail these days often seem surprised. After a packed gathering at an elementary school in Concord, N.H., in April, a 40-something woman told me she had expected Warren to be more like Hillary Clinton but found them miles apart. A college student who caught Warren’s speech in Hanover said he was perplexed to learn that a woman once described by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s political director as a “threat to free enterprise” in fact believes in entrepreneurship and markets. And at an event in a Portsmouth high school cafeteria, a retired...

Sportsbooks set the total for Monday night's matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Rams at an astronomical 64 -- and the two teams blew past that by 41 points. Michael Grodsky, spokesperson for William Hill, which has 108 sportsbooks in Nevada, told ESPN the game was a "healthy seven-figure loss" for the book, with 69 percent of customers betting the over. The game had opened and closed at 64, the highest over/under in an NFL game since at least 1986, according to ESPN Stats & Information research.

A big political gambler I met in Las Vegas in 2016 is in London betting that the Republican Party will keep control of the US Congress. Robert Barnes is essentially wagering that US pollsters haven’t fixed any of the problems that led them astray during the 2016 presidential campaign. Barnes, a trial lawyer, lives in Las Vegas, but he has to travel to the British Isles to wager on US politics since it’s not allowed in the US. The bookies know him as a high roller; the political betting team at Ladbrokes even tweeted his photo to mark his arrival...

We've been hearing about the inevitable "blue wave" handing control of the House of Representatives to Democrats since before President Trump was inaugurated.  Maxine Waters, for one, gained the sobriquet "Auntie Maxine" for offering the political equivalent of bedtime stories promising impeachment on the come, once voters corrected the obvious error they committed by electing Trump.  History, after all, dictates that the president's party loses support, and the GOP's margin in the House is smaller than the historic average. Polls continue to predict a blue wave, albeit one that might be too small for surfers.  But polls depend on constructing a model...

• Can Trump go from “fire and fury” to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize? • The President is currently among the favorites to receive the award, behind only Kim Jong-Un and Moon Jae-In • Is there value in picking Trump or the Korean leaders? Donald Trump was met with chants of “Nobel! Nobel! Nobel!” at one of his Michigan rallies back in April, and back then it seemed ridiculous that a man who once threatened to nuke North Korea could be in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet here we are. Donald Trump is now one of the...