This week, Businessweek gives us a fascinating look inside a London-based sports bettting hedge fund. I highly recommend reading the entire article.

The Galileo Managed Sports Fund, which launched in April under the umbrella of the nine-year-old Centaur Group, is the world’s first sports-betting hedge fund. The idea has been knocking around for a while. Six years ago, Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the National Basketball Assn.’s Dallas Mavericks, proposed a similar fund, only to see his idea crash on the shoals of American prohibitionism. While the NBA forbids anyone involved with the league from betting on its games, there was a larger problem: Outside of Nevada, Delaware, and Oregon, betting on sports is largely illegal.

There are some interesting comments from a technical perspective over on Hacker News and there is a nice writeup of the financial dimensions at Hedge Fund Lounge.

Bloomberg posted an article yesterday about the rapid rise of “in running” sports betting in the online world. In running wagering allows for betting after a game has started – whether it be on an individual play, a quarter, or the remainder of a game. The growth of this form of sports betting has been remarkable and is projected to continue. Bloomberg writes:

For the bookies, in-running betting has become their biggest growth area. Five years ago it was considered a niche product, offered only by one or two bookies looking to differentiate themselves. Bookmakers now say in-running betting accounts for up to 30 percent of their revenue and that it is growing rapidly. Several predict it will account for half their business by 2010.

This new trend seems to fit the overall cultural trend of shrinking attention spans and increasing availability of “on demand” access to entertainment services. In a global society that demands instant gratification and a generation raised on 30 second youtube videos, the rise of in game betting should hardly come as a surprise.

The article also addresses the potential downsides of in running wagering including the problem of time delays in broadcasts and mentions the recent murder of a chinese couple involved in a plot to exploit this issue as covered previously by iBet.pro.

In running has brought its own issues for bookmakers, mainly because the televised feeds that they receive in their offices (and the ones you receive at home) are delayed from the live match. It is normally only about three seconds but, in some cases, it can be 10 seconds or longer.

This means that bettors can sit at racecourses, football grounds or even the Olympics with a laptop computer and a wireless connection and get bets on the match before the bookmaker sees it on TV. Most bookies now have a small delay in their bet acceptance procedures to help guard against this, but if the delay is big enough they will find themselves taking bets after something crucial has happened.

British police are currently investigating the deaths of a Chinese man and his girlfriend who allegedly employed spotters at British soccer matches to beat in running bookmakers in China and Southeast Asia, according to news reports. They are said to be investigating reports that Zhen Xing Yang had been murdered by either bookmakers upset at his scheme or by some of the spotters, who it is claimed he failed to pay for their work.

On an unrelated note, today is the first day of the 2008 NFL season – good luck to everyone placing a wager. You may want to read this article to remind you of how not to handle your betting.

In addition to sports betting, I occasionally like to play backgammon and blackjack online. Recently I noticed that more and more “celebrities” were appearing at the table – names such as Tom Cruise, Jon Stewart, and even Howard Stern. Looking for answers, I found this blackjack site that explained the phenomenon to me. Apparently people are registering these names as a form of online “vanity plates”. Using the names, the users are able to receive the VIP treatment at the virtual tables from both the site administrators and the fellow players. These names are called “Gold Usernames” and are frequently sold to the highest bidder through various aftermarket channels. In some countries this is considered a form of identity theft, even landing a Moroccan man a 3 year jail sentence for using the name of the prince of that country! The man was released after serving 43 days of his term due to pressure from petition signers and Human Rights groups around the world, but this case has raised awareness that in some instances, a username is not just a username. I can see this becoming an issue more and more in sports betting online as more and more “peer to peer” sites open up and folks are competing directly against other users rather than the house.