9th October, 2015
Five people in Oslo, all appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and all sworn to secrecy, already know who is winning the Nobel Peace Prize, to be announced on Friday.
For everyone else, the winner’s identity is unknown. To many, it is an irresistible topic of speculation — and gambling.
International bookmaking sites, which take bets on just about any unknown, including the winner of the Republican presidential nomination in the United States and who will play the next James Bond, are accepting bets on the Peace Prize.
Betting on events in which the outcome is known — like the Academy Awards or the Nobel Peace Prize — is illegal in the United States, but internationally, and in Britain in particular, bookmakers are free to accept such bets.
Across Britain’s largest gambling sites, bettors have in recent days spent tens of thousands of dollars placing bets on the Nobel prizes for Peace and Literature, a pittance compared with the hundreds of millions gambled on large sporting events like the World Cup.
Nevertheless, betting on the Nobel prizes is “an annual fixture in the betting calendar,” said Rory Scott, a spokesman for Paddy Power, a gambling site that operates in Britain and Ireland.
Paddy Power has tallied around 10,000 pounds, about $15,300, on Peace Prize bets alone, since it opened betting several days ago.
“The big mover is Angela Merkel,” Mr. Scott said of the German chancellor, who is the site’s odds-on favorite to win. “Before she made the announcement on housing 800,000 refugees, she was at 66 to 1; after the announcement she was at 25 to 1. She is now down to 2 to 1.”
Mr. Scott said bettors, or “punters” as they are called in Britain, have placed the most bets for Ms. Merkel at Paddy Power. But at another British site, Ladbrokes, most gamblers are putting their money behind Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynaecological surgeon who has campaigned to end the use of mass rape as a weapon of war.
Dr. Mukwege, who founded a hospital in Bukavu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is currently running 5 to 1 on Ladbrokes.
Pope Francis is also a contender, bookmakers said.
“A good bit of money has been bet post his meeting with Obama and banging heads of the Americans and Cubans,” said Mr. Scott, referring to the pope’s role in a diplomatic breakthrough between the two nations. Bookies were surprised in 2013 when Pope Francis was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
Matthew Shaddick, a spokesman for Ladbrokes, said: “We got stung when he won and lost a bit of money on that. He was an outsider who became the favorite.”
While many people were surprised on Thursday to learn that Svetlana Alexievich, an author from Belarus, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, oddsmakers had her as the favorite all along.
Ms. Alexievich had 3 to 1 odds at Ladbrokes, and several thousand dollars’ worth of bets had been placed on her to win.
Despite the uniqueness of the Peace Prize, Mr. Shaddick said, the Literature Prize typically attracts the most bets. The gambling sites do not typically take bets for the science prizes, he said.
Like the work involved in winning the prizes for Medicine or Physiology, Physics and Chemistry, creating a list of possible contenders would “take a lot of research,” Mr. Shaddick said.
Anyone can be suggested for a Nobel Peace Prize, but only a select group is allowed to formally submit nominations. That group includes members of national legislatures and international courts, professors, previous prize winners and current or former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
The deadline for submissions was in February, and the nominees’ names are kept secret.
Other contenders for the Peace Prize, according to bookmakers, include Secretary of State John Kerry and the Iranian officials who brokered a nuclear deal, and Mussie Zerai, an Eritrean priest who helps refugees fleeing war zones.
But for bettors really looking to win big, the odds that the pop singer Taylor Swift will take home the Peace Prize are 500 to 1.
—Culled from The New York Times