Your one-stop shop for novelty betting

While the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI in the United Kingdom today has caused derision, offense and much apparent “atheist extremism” among the local population, at least a few people are thrilled at the Pontiff’s merry jaunt through Britain: Those who invested in a long-term proposition bet 18 months ago.

Said bet – a full market, really, with four prop bets offered under the general header “Pope’s Second Coming specials” – was based on the early 2009 announcement from the Vatican that British Cardinal John Henry Newman would be elevated to sainthood. Read more...

How about a literary bet? This year’s field for the Man Booker literature prize looks to be a hard-fought one, indeed, and shockingly enough mostly features books with a sense of humor. In fact, with Howard Jacobson’s longshot (8/1 to win at bet365 online bookmaker) straight-up comedy novel “The Finkler Question” leading the trend, five of the six books can be unblinkingly described as “humorous.”

Damon Galgut’s “In a Strange Room” is the sole purely dramatic entry; essentially an on-the-road story, it’s described by the official Booker website as “A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion.” Sorry, Damon, but your odds of 7/2 are artificially high in a year that’s just not yours.

Also nominated for the big prize but seemingly unlikely to win is “The Long Song” (13/2) by Andrea Levy. Levy’s last book, “Small Island,” took the Orange Prize, Whitbread Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize – but no Booker. “Song” tells a biographical fiction about a Jamaican woman coming of age as slavery ends in North America. Read more...

LiveBetsDirect hasn’t had a look at this proposition bet in some time – over a year in fact – but with “Obama’s Katrina” slowly getting cleaned up, the healthcare plan settled for now, and those troops in Afghanistan … well, still there, it’s time to reconsider some of bet365’s “U.S. Presidential Election 2012” props.

LBD’ll surely rant about the line on Barack Obama’s better-than-even-money odds to repeat at a near-future date, but the odds under discussion today, those of the “Republican Candidate in 2012” proposition bet – may be considered as in direct relation to the sitting president anyway. Read more...

LiveBetsDirect recently checked out the ESPN “30 for 30” Documentary on the old United States Football League (or, as we so fondly referred to it back in the 1980s, the USFL). We children of the 80s of course remember the USFL ultimately as being dominated by and eventually inadvertently (?) snookered by one Donald Trump. Read more...

Faithful Live Bets Direct readers may recall those halcyon days of April 2009 when tabloid headlines where bogged down with pictures of Mel Gibson and Russian pianist Oksana Grigorieva, followed by very public announcement of separation between Mad Max and his wife of 28 years, Robyn Denise Moore.

This, of course, harkened back to an April 2006 incident in which Gibson was busted by police officers (one of which he rather informally addressed as “Sugar Tits”) in which he ranted about the general wickedness of the Jews, not at all legitimizing claims that Gibson’s o-so-bloody Passion of the Christ was indeed anti-Semitic tripe. Gibson’s little drunken driving mishap and subsequent racist tirade in turn recalled his rants in the late 1990s in Playboy decrying homosexuals. Read more...

On a Fourth of July sports weekend that featured Wimbledon tennis, a UFC unification bout, MLB baseball action and a little tournament called the FIFA World Cup, an eating contest stole the sportspage headlines: The latest “athlete” to be busted in public fashion is former Major League Eating superstar Takeru Kobayashi.

After a much publicized regulations issue, Major League Eating officials disallowed Kobayashi from participating in the 2010 edition of the traditional Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Live Bets Direct readers may recall that Bet365’s proposition bet on the competition bore the caveat that both Kobayashi and now four-time defending champ Joey “Jaws” Chestnut had to compete for wagers to be valid.” Read more...

As we near July 4th, it’s time for LiveBetsDirect to address wagering on a great American tradition that always goes down on the holiday. No, we’re not talking about the Major League Baseball slate here, but rather the great “Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.” And, oh yeah, bet365’s got your wagering opportunities. Read more...

“So You Think You Can Dance,” that wacky combination of “American Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars,” is smack dab in the middle of season seven with the first head of the season ready to roll in less than four days.

Does LiveBetsDirect have a SYTYCD proposition bet for you? Sure! Check out bet365’s speak-for-itself “To Win Outright” prop. The table goes like so: Read more...

Here at LiveBetsDirect, the emphasis is on non-sports betting, but who can ignore the overbearing presence of the 2010 FIBA World Cup and the warping effect it’s surely having at bookmakers all over the globe? (Indeed, this event is expected to be the largest wagered-upon event in the history of humanity with over £1 billion in formal, legal betting alone predicted.)

Just as naturally, there’s still plenty of weirdness to be had within bet365’s World Cup proposition lines. Go extreme in considering some of the following props… Read more...

One of LiveBetsDirect’s favorite websites out there on the interwebs? Why, Rotten Tomatoes, of course!

While the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and such are nice (especially to wager on), the awards given at these celebrated events are more about Hollywood’s and film critic land’s, respectively, acceptance of the movies in question. These decisions don’t always sit well with the public, however, unless you’ve got the box office champ also becoming the big Oscar-sweeper. (Hello, Titanic…)

RottenTomatoes.com, by contrast, stands alone among high-profile cinema worshipers in its unique approach to rating movies. By simply compiling hundreds of opinions from professional film reviewers across the fame spectrum, the Tomatometer essentially seeks to derive an objective answer to the once-purely subjective question “Does [movie X] suck? And if so, how much?”

The Tomatometer happily also makes doable that sentiment heretofore only employed in trash-talking: “Wanna bet this movie’s gonna suck?” Read more...