President Donald Trump speaks from the Oval Office of the White House as he gives a prime time address about border security on Tuesday.Carlos Barria/Pool Photo via APPeople who correctly bet that President Donald Trump would tell more than 3.5 lies during his Oval Office address on Tuesday night will win part of a jackpot totalling $276,424, Buzzfeed News reports.
Betting website Bookmaker.eu offered users the chance to gamble on how many lies Trump would tell during his speech. The site used The Washington Post's fact-checking live blog as the judge on the president's truthfulness.
According to The Post's live blog, fact checkers corrected six of Trump's statements about immigration and the border during his speech.Bookmaker.eu offered odds of 145 for more than 3.5 lies and +115 for fewer than 3.5 lies, which meant that if a person bet $145 on Trump telling more than four lies, they would win an additional $100.
The maximum wager online was set at $2,000, and the biggest bets on Trump lying were set at $25,000, $20,000, and $15,000, odds consultant John Lester told BuzzFeed News.
Lester said that 92% of the betters gambled on Trump lying a lot, and that Bookmaker.eu would have to pay out $276,424 to gamblers.
"It's a bad day for Truthiness and Bookmaker," he said. "We knew we were in trouble early with this one."
Among the fallacies in his speech, Trump declared that there was a new crisis at the US-Mexico border, wrongly accused Democrats of refusing to pay for border security, and wrongly described how drugs come into the United States.