Betting on Love?

The world of betting and gambling is an extremely colorful one, and people are increasingly looking for new and more interesting ways to bet as well as things to bet on. This, coupled with the propensity of tabloid newspapers to regularly boost their circulation with news scoops on the latest celebrity extra-marital affairs, has spawned a new wave of betting on the topic with Irish bookmakers Paddy Power offering regular so-called “celebrity cheat odds” in order for punters to place their bets on just which profession the next tabloid cheat will come from.

Among the more recent celebrities to have adorned the red-tops in this way are Tiger Woods, Mark Wen and John Terry, all of whom have provided the tabloids with regular and much welcomed advertising scoops and column inches with their cheating behavior. As a result, their personal lives have been regularly splattered across the tabloid newspapers over the course of the last year.

When looking at the comparative odds among the possible professions to provide the next celebrity love rate, the way is led, perhaps unsurprisingly, by soccer, with odds of 2/5. In fact when you examine the various stats this is very understandable, as soccer players are extremely high profile and are very easy targets for both the media and public alike. Among the soccer players to have been recently felled by such odds is Ashley Cole, who has learned just how his celebrity status despite bringing enormous wealth and a pop-star wife has also resulted in his private life being fodder for the press and much speculation for gamblers looking to make a bundle.

There is little doubt that the British love to knock the so-called ‘great and the good’, and this is particularly true when applied to over-paid sports stars and their inflated egos. Among other sporting professions to be analyzed, it appears that boxing is the least likely of professions to throw up a love cheat, with odds standing at 50/1. Perhaps this is due to the harsh discipline involved in getting to the very top of this brutal sport, the fact that boxers often abstain as part of their pre-fight build up, or even that the bouts themselves offer a power outlet for their testosterone. 

Whatever the case may be, many will perhaps be surprised to find that politicians are only rated in fifth place on the table with odds of 14/1. Paddy Power believes that we are unlikely to see a parliamentary love cheat exposed, despite the recent expenses scandal and the dirty tricks that are so often in operation during a general election campaign.