What Happens to Offshore Bets if the President Election Is Overturned?

What will happen if the presidential election is overturned and Trump wins? Biden winners have been paid. Trump losers will probably have tossed their tickets.

[Editor's Note: This answer is provided by Blair Rodman, author of our upcoming book All About Sports Betting.]

Betting on U.S. elections is huge around the world. One popular England-based sports book said its handle on the 2020 U.S. presidential election far surpassed the Super Bowl.

The problem for us Americans, even though sports betting is now legal in many states, is that no U.S. legal books are allowed by law to offer betting on elections, although that may change as the industry matures in the U.S. (One site where exchange-type betting is allowed in the U.S. is on the New Zealand-based prediction market predictit.org.) As far as bettors throwing away tickets with bets on Trump, while I can’t speak for non-U.S. live sports books that do write physical tickets, no Americans can have this problem.

For those Americans who bet on the presidential election at offshore books, at most books the final determination of the winner has yet to be determined. As in most things Trump, norms don’t apply. While the vast majority of states have certified the results of the election, giving Joe Biden the requisite number of electoral-college votes, in other times Biden would be officially declared President-elect and bets would have been settled. But Trump’s barrage of lawsuits and the possibility, however far-fetched, of states refusing to certify their electors based on vote totals and turning to state legislators to appoint electors have left the country, as well as bettors, in limbo. Although it’s an extreme long shot that Trump prevails and retains the presidency, most sports books that featured betting on the election are waiting to see what happens before finalizing the grading of the bets. Some books continued to offer odds even after the election, with Trump upwards of a 20-1 dog!

As to the original question, if Trump somehow prevails, the books that waited for the final determination wouldn’t have any problems, other than some pissed-off losers. However, I do have an offshore credit book that paid my Biden bet weeks ago. Frankly, I have no idea what they might do if it’s reversed.

As for the issue of lost or discarded tickets in general, I deal with it in-depth in my upcoming book. The simple caveat is to use a player’s card and take a picture of all of your tickets on your phone right after you make the bets and you shouldn’t have any problems. Go to your book and explain the issue and you should get paid after going through the process -- unless someone has already found and cashed your lost ticket, in which case you’re out of luck.

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CLIFFORD Dec-14-2020

What?

A QUESTION...

Emmanuel Asprakis Dec-14-2020

Can we move the F on

Got paid over a month ago on my Presidential bet in BC.

Jeff Dec-14-2020

Hey gamblers: Let's bet on Civil War breaking out or not. Fun, right?

If the presidential election is overturned and Trump wins, the issues of Biden tickets that were paid and/or Trump tickets that were discarded will be the least of our problems.

[email protected] Dec-14-2020

Last Paragraph

The advice in the last paragraph is good, but does raise and interesting issue.  I never had a phone with a camera until a few months ago, so I'm sure there are plenty of other people who don't have one to this day.  What would you recommend they do?  Would a photocopy work as well?  Thanks!

Dave Dec-14-2020

Photo

I don’t know about a photo, but a photocopy, or a life size print of the photo will work fine. 

Often, when people post photos of tickets on social media, they get reminded to edit the photo to eliminate the ticket number and bar code. Otherwise, it’s whoever tries to cash it first...

Dec-14-2020

Interesting

One of my sites graded some individual state bets I had, but not the election itself. I guess they figure it might be possible to overturn the election without changing the electoral count?

Dec-14-2020

Margin of victory

There was never any doubt in my mind that Biden would win.  I thought that Trump did everything he could do to ensure that he would NOT win.  So I thought that the only doubtful thing to bet on was the amount or percentage by which Biden would win.  I thought Trump was the worst candidate in ages, maybe forever.  I figured Biden would win the popular vote with at least 60% of it, maybe even 70%.  So I was shocked when the margin of victory in the popular vote (not the Electoral College) was more like only 2%.  Un-be-live-a-ble.  Just what were those voters for Trump thinking?  He wasn't a respectable candidate by any stretch of the imagination, not from any angle.  Trump was so odious and offensive in so many ways, with negative attitudes toward women, Hispanics, LGBT, and that should've alienated him from voters significantly.  How could any woman vote for him?  I can only think of one answer:  They simply voted along party lines.  Shame on them.  Charles Percy?  Yes.  Trump?  No.

Jeff Dec-14-2020

Dangers of posting photos of docs

Dave wrote, "Often, when people post photos of tickets on social media, they get reminded to edit the photo to eliminate the ticket number and bar code."

There are hidden dangers in posting those photos.

Depending on how the photo editing is done, it can sometimes be possible for a tech-savvy crook or merely tech-savvy nosy person to remove the layers that blacked out identifying numbers, exposing the underlying text.

There can be metadata (text you can see if you look at the source code, i.e. under the hood) of a photo that can include the date, location, name of the owner, and other personal info that one doesn't want others to see.

The online world is a treacherous world for the non-tech-savvy.

Question of the Day - 14 December 2020

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