Bookies on Brexit: 'This vote worked out very well for us'

It's not just the pollsters who got the EU referendum result wrong (in their case, again).

Britain's bookmakers were offering odds that implied a win for the Remain camp was 90 per cent likely as the polls closed yesterday evening, The Guardian notes. Even this was only an extension of the majority chance they had placed on a vote for the status quo all along.

Do they have questions to answer? Not really – in fact in terms of their obligation to their shareholders, the shock result last night is a major boon.

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In a candid statement, Ladbrokes's head of political betting, Matthew Shaddick, said: "The truth is that bookies do not offer markets on political events to help people forecast the results. We do it to turn a profit – or at least not lose too much – and in that respect, this vote worked out very well for us.

"Nobody at Ladbrokes's HQ will be criticising the predictive powers of our odds, they'll be looking at the money we made."

Bookies are effectively winners in most cases when the favourite in any given betting event – that is the entity or side that attracts the most money – does not win. Even if the odds are shorter – in the case of Remain it was odds on – paying out winnings and returning stakes on much larger sums can be costly.

Remain was the favourite to win because it attracted the largest betting total, especially after a later surge in response to a boost in late-campaign polling. More than £40m was ultimately placed on the referendum outcome, making it the most gambled-on political event in British history.

There will, however, be many individual punters who have done well from the Leave win – not least those who made their flutter when it was languishing at 16/1.

Hjalmar Kvam, the head of pre-match sports at William Hill, told The Independent on polling day that while 75 per cent of the money placed had gone on Remain, the opposite was true in terms of number of bets where three quarters of punters were backing a vote to leave the EU.

He admitted at the time: "At the back of my mind, there is the possibility that the high percentage of individual bets on Leave could be an indicator that we got it wrong."