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How can bookies allow bets on the outcome of a Royal Rumble.
This is more of a curiosity post...I was having a look for the Grand national freeroll password and noticed wrestling, and that we could bet on the outcome of who won the royal rumble. This is a fixed sport and the outcome is known by the owners etc and the actors, so how can they offer betting on the outcome of the Royal rumble with the possibility of info being passed about the winner?
Comments
1) The outcome of a match is a very closely guarded secret backstage - It's usually only owner, writers and the wrestlers taking part in that match who know. The consequences if someone were to leak the result of a match would be losing your job and never getting another job within the industry. Even if that were to happen (which is highly unlikely for reasons given), there's then no guarantee that the match finishes with the planned result, because...
2) Storylines always have some kind of out should the writers need to change direction for whatever reason, and this can often happen at short notice - If the crowd clearly couldn't give a f*** about the buildup to a particular match but you had them booked to fight each other for the next six months, you might reconsider what you had planned at the last minute so you can shorten that storyline and go onto something else that might keep fans more interested.
A recent example of a short notice storyline change happened at Wrestlemania earlier this month - everyone expected Roman Reigns to take the WWE Championship off Brock Lesnar, as the 'smart' fans knew that Lesnar's contract was due to expire after the show finished, and it's standard within wrestling when you're a champion and you leave the company that you lose the title before you go.
Lesnar signs new contract, nobody is told because then you can surprise the smart fans who think they know what's going to happen that way, and the planned result gets flipped around at the last minute. Outcome: Most predictable result of the entire event ends up with the other guy winning.
3) Although fans can often tell who is likely to win based on the storyline, there's no certainty as to who is actually going to win because a storyline can take several different directions, and it's impossible to know what the writers have planned. Sometimes the writers have to throw in a curveball to make things slightly less predictable. Other times the multiple storyline options create enough unpredictability by themselves.
In the example you gave of a Royal Rumble style match, there's a large number of entrants so the writers will have a handful of guys in there who can reasonably be booked to win. Chances are that exactly zero people know who is going to win that match right now with any certainty.
4) Coming back to betting and betting sites - WWE betting is a novelty market. If you go into your betslip and either type in "999999" as your bet or hit the max bet button on sites that have such a feature, you'll be greeted with a message that says "Your max bet on this market is £21.73", or they'll fill in an absurdly small wager in the bet amount box when you click "Max bet".
FWIW - I'm allowed £10.42 on the 6/1 shot, £6.94 on the 9/1 shot and £5 max bet bar. We're not talking about sums of money where someone could find out the outcome in advance then whack a max bet on to win tens of thousands somehow.
I think you can usually bet on "Who kills X in Emmerdale/Eastenders/Corrie" too, and a
lot of the things above still apply. Similar betting restrictions too.