An Online Gambling Site Took Bets For How Many "Untruths" Trump Would Tell Last Night... It Didn't Work Out Great For Them

(Vice) — Trump’s Oval Office address Tuesday was mostly a waste of time. He may not have declared a national emergency to secure funding for the border wall, but he did manage to rattle off a bunch of his usual false and misleading immigration lines, all in a bafflingly low-energy monotone. The only real takeaway from the entire thing is that Trump still can’t read off a teleprompter too well. But there were at least a few people out there who benefitted from the thing: namely, the gamblers who placed bets on how much he’d lie, BuzzFeed News reports. An online gambling house called BookMaker took bets on how many “false statements” Trump would make in his eight-minute speech, with the over-under set at 3.5. BookMaker’s odds consultant, John Lester, told the New York Daily News that the site intentionally avoided calling them “lies,” so it wouldn’t have to “prove that the President is intentionally misleading the public.” According to Lester, the site had pulled in “over $100,000 in action on this wager in the first twelve hours alone,” and it sounds like the people who bet on Trump’s, uh, tenuous relationship with the truth made some serious cash. The answer, according to the Washington Post, was a lot. Over the course of his short address, Trump reportedly dropped eleven untruths, from misrepresenting the new trade deal with Mexico to claiming that a wall will stop the flow of heroin across the border, even though 90 percent of drugs are smuggled through legal ports of entry. Now, BookMaker has to shell out a reported $276,424 in total wins. “It’s a bad day for Truthiness and Bookmaker,” Lester told BuzzFeed. “We knew we were in trouble early with this one.”

I’m not a gambler, as most now. I tried to get into it when I got to Barstool so I could be cool but it just never stuck so I remain a lowly normal. Largely, it all sounds like a foreign language to me and I suck at it. But if I had known this action was being taken then I probably would’ve taken a loan out, maybe even bet my pinky on the over. I mean 3.5? 3.5?! That was the line for number of “untruths” told by Trump during an unchecked address? This isn’t even a political thing, this is just numbers. If the Patriots were randomly +7 against the Bills then you put the everything you have on the Patriots because that line doesn’t make any goddamn sense and neither does 3.5 “untruths” from Trump during an address. Hell, I’d take the over for absolutely any politician alive, doubly so for Trump. All I hear from the gambling crowd is about how line setters are the best in the world at what they do and blah blah blah but this wasn’t even close. As the video above shows he was averaging one every 34 seconds during an 8 minute speech. I guess the BookMaker people officially gave 11. Either way just a TERRIBLE line. This was like a football game where they set the over/under at 56 and the final was 122. Might be time for those line setters to look for a new line of work because you’re never getting of whatever island you’re on and making it to Vegas with skills like that.

PS – “We knew we were in trouble early with this one” is a heck of a line from John Lester. Uhhh ya think?

PPS – This line may have been so low because they wanted to get blown out of the water so they could make news and everyone would write this story and they’d make way more in press than they lost. I am woke to that possibility, but it had to be mentioned nonetheless. Touche to the marketing team if that was the play.