Strange Bets: the Weird World of Gambling Odds
In 2011 European bookies were putting the odds of Queen Elizabeth II abdicating and replacing Bruce Forsyth as the host of the popular BBC dance competition Strictly Come Dancing at 50,000 to 1. source
To put that in context consider the odds of the following:
- Being struck by lightning in one’s lifetime: 1 in 12,000 source
- Dying in a plane crash: 1 in 7,178 source
- Dying in a car crash: 1 in 5,000 source
- Being elected President of the United States: 1 in 10 million source
- Being killed by a shark: 1 in 3,748,067 source
- A well-shuffled deck of cards returning to the same order twice: 1 in 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 source
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