William Hill's odds favour over 51 seats for the SNP

There are some that say "the money men always know best" and then entreat their listeners to "follow the money". James Kelly of the excellent SCOT goes POP! political blog often cautions his readership that that adage isn't always true, for example results may be skewed by those gamblers outside of Scotland who don't follow Scottish politics closely but bet on the result anyway or by people who get emotionally carried away by a particular cause and bet on it winning regardless of the real situation.

But even with those cautions, it can be difficult not to look at what the apocryphal "money men" think. Here is a screen shot from William Hill, taken today, showing the odds for the total number of seats the SNP will win in Westminster at the May 7th general election (note, you have to type SNP into their search box to even find the SNP bets, which surprised me).

Reading from left to right, we see the predicted number of seats won increase but the odds against that happening decrease. The odds shown are digital odds, which I find much easier to read and understand. For example, if the digital odds are 6.5 then your return for a £1 bet is simply the two numbers multiplied together, i.e. you'd receive back £6.50. The higher the digital odds number, the less likely people believe that outcome will occur.

At one extreme, William Hill is offering odds of 101 for the SNP winning 5 or less seats which drops to odds of 3 for the SNP winning at least 51 seats. Using Excel to graph this, the odds look like this:

One can't help but wonder that if Scotland had more than 59 seats at Westminster, then the odds would continue to drop even further until we reached a point where it was guaranteed that the SNP would win every seat.

For me, after the emotional roller-coaster of the referendum, I can scarcely bring myself to believe that we'll win more than 51 seats at Westminster. But back then, I was told by friends to "follow the money" and accept that YES would lose the referendum.

I lost quite a bit of money backing YES to win - on the night before the referendum, my emotions got the better of me and I just couldn't see us losing. So I went button-click mad and blew £500 - ouch! That was money I couldn't really afford to lose.

What now?

Is it worth betting on the SNP winning more than 51 seats?

I'm still hurting from the referendum. I'm still worried about aggressive NO voters ganging up together to tactically vote the SNP out (some of my friends are aggressive NO voters and they've left me in no doubt about how their hatred of the SNP will drive them to vote tactically to kill off any SNP surge).

At the moment, I'm keeping my money in my pocket. I just hope someone keeps me away from my computer the night before polling day...