Betting on the New Year Address — The Perfect Mix of Data & Traditions

For as long as I can remember, I have watched the Queen of Denmark sit in front of the Danish people and give her New Year address. Watching her speech is by many considered a tradition on new years eve. It provides a great opportunity to gather friends and reminisce on the year that passed with a glass of champagne in your hand. In this article, I’m going to talk about my own new year tradition of betting on the speech and I’m going to provide my best betting recommendations to you.

A Story of Data

In recent years, various bookmakers have started to offer betting possibilities on the speech. This provided me with a chance to make the speech a little more exciting. The bookmakers all offer bets on whether a specific word is mentioned in the speech.

After quickly assessing the available bets, I determined it was difficult to figure out whether a bet had any significant value to it. Together with a friend, I decided to catalog every single speech publicly available. This involved finding all the speeches, creating a word counter and subsequently creating an Excel sheet designed to hold the data and bets from various bookmakers.

This data has evolved every year and we now have detailed data for over 100 words mentioned in the speeches. The data includes the number of times a word is mentioned in every speech, the total number of times a word has been mentioned and more general data on the speeches. Although the first collection of data was time consuming, it now only requires a small update after every speech.

We have created a simple set of key numbers to show the development of the speech length every year.

Descriptive Statistics of the speeches

Excerpt of the data (the number of times a word is mentioned every year)

The Best Bets — 2017

Now to the really important part. What bets do we recommend?

Usually we favor bets with a higher return since the value is higher. We have located bets with low return but it does not provide the same amount of bet value.

The first recommendation

The first bet is one of our favorite bets this year. It differs a little bit from the other recommendation as the bet value for this one only relies on the past 5 years. If we look at the total number of years, it does not hold much bet value. However, with a limited time frame, it seems to be a great bet. You can see the key arguments below.

The Second Recommendation

The Queen has certain ways of referring to people within the royal family. The second bet is her son (the prince), which is often mentioned by name in the speech. You can see the key arguments for a bet in the boxes below.

With these recommendations, I have given my take on solid bets in the new year address. There are multiple other bets with a reasonable bet value but we chose these ones as they have a higher return.

Be aware that these recommendations are solely my opinion and that the value may change frequently as the New Year Address closes in. Furthermore, the analysis is primarily based on statistics. Events that occurred throughout the year have not been taken into account.

You can find all speeches from the royal family of Denmark on their website and create your own analysis: http://kongehuset.dk/taler

You can find the bets available on different websites. The direct link to the bets on Bet365 is here: https://goo.gl/Eu43Hh

If it doesn’t take you directly to the bets, go to the specials category and look under Denmark.

Feel free to reach out if you need additional information. I’ll gladly see if I can find a nice bet for you.

Good luck and happy new year!