The road to where we are today began in 1986, when Las Vegas oddsmakers started taking bets on whether the Chicago Bears’ defensive tackle William “The Refrigerator” Perry would score a touchdown in that year’s Super Bowl. “We were way ahead of the game on this,” Krishnamurty, now a gambling writer and consultant for two overseas betting sites, BetOnline and Betfair, told me. For some reason, you can even bet on the lottery. You can bet on whether McDonald’s will, at long last, restore onion nuggets to its menu. You can bet on which celebrity will start an OnlyFans account (money’s on Kim Kardashian) and which will be abducted first if aliens attack (money’s on Elon Musk). You can bet on the 2024 Republican vice-presidential nominee and the next James Bond. You can bet on whether the government will shut down and whether a natural disaster will strike San Francisco and whether Oppenheimer will win Best Adapted Screenplay. You can bet on flight delays and COVID variants and gas prices. These days, you can bet on pretty much anything. Some 40 years later, the bookies have finally caught up.

bookmakers at the time would offer the odd novelty bet-will it be a white Christmas? Will the royal baby be a boy or a girl?-but mostly they stuck with the standard fare: football, cricket, snooker.

Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.Īs a young boy growing up in East London, Paul Krishnamurty and his friends would bet on pretty much everything: what song would come on the radio next, what show would be on TV that night, which of the two people walking ahead of them would reach the top of the hill first.

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