Betting On Great White Sharks Now Being Offered, But No Attack Odds

Call it the “Great White Wager.”

Or “Every Week Is Shark Week.”

An offshore sportsbook has decided to post odds on the migratory patterns of nine geotagged Great White sharks, providing a summer diversion for sports fans and wagering afficionados who may or may not have an affinity for sustainable fishing.

In a partnership with OCEARCH, MyBookie.com is offering a variety of odds.

The sportsbook will utilize the tracking technology used by OCEARCH, a non-profit organization that has the most well-known and widely used tracking tool available. It provides a detailed tracking history of individual sharks’ travel patterns that people can monitor in real-time for free via an online app.

Gamblers will be able to wager on an assortment of odds and props pertaining to the specific migration patterns of individual great white sharks. The ones pictured above is known as “Unamaki.”

“I have no illusions of grandeur that we are going to make millions of dollars off of this. It’s a fun thing and hopefully it catches on,” said David Strauss of MyBookie.

Strauss, who lives in Montreal, is a bit of a shark pundit. He got the idea from remembering how a now-defunct Web site tracked the migratory patterns of turtles that traveled from Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands nearly a decade and a half ago.

“That always stuck in my mind, and the OCERACH site is perfectly set up to do this. All we had to do was come up with the odds. We were lucky that I knew about sharks and how they migrate,” Strauss said.

Great white sharks are a highly migratory species. They have been known to migrate up to 2,500 miles (one female great white shark migrated 12,400 miles in 2005) in the open ocean. Just how far – and in which direction they travel – largely depends on a handful of factors including water temperature and seasonal changes, reproduction, and food sources. (OCEARCH uses the food source data to monitor fish stocks.)

After being tagged with a tracker, sharks ping on OCEARCH when they come to the surface. Based on these pings, MyBookie will offer gamblers a variety of ways to place bets, such as how far a shark will travel between pings, whether a shark will enter a certain body of water, and what date a shark will ping next. For great whites that ping less frequently, wagers will be able to be placed on if it will resurface by a certain date and what country’s waters the shark will be in when it resurfaces. Statistics will be updated in real-time, allowing users to closely monitor their bets.

The odds on Unamaki include 4-1 on it being the first shark to emit a ping after June 18; 9/2 odds on the days of the week that Unamaki pings next after June 18, among others.

Odds are also posted on where each of the nine sharks will ping, based upon previous migratory patterns that have been chronicled by OCEARCH, an organization devoted to tracking sharks in order to facilitate sustainable fishing.

According to USA Today, there were only 2 fatal shark attacks in 2019, and 64 unprovoked shark attacks were reported around the globe last year, which was down from the average of 82.

There are no odds on whether one of the Great Whites will attack a human.

“I wanted to do it, but I also wanted to shine a negative light on fishing, so that is a negative side that is really not something we wanted,” Strauss said.