Wings Over Scotland | The value bet

To pass the time on (praise be to Jeebus) the last day of the Holyrood election campaign, we thought we’d do a summary of all the seat projections we could find from last month and this month. Here it is.

Now, as it happens we think the potential seat ranges are significantly wider. There are so many factors of uncertainty that while there’s no doubt who’s going to be the biggest party, we reckon SNP seats could potentially be anywhere from about 47 to about 67 (most likely the upper part of that range), with corresponding ramifications below.

But there’s one potentially interesting thing in that bottom half.

Polling’s been so all-over-the-place that there is no settled consensus about which orders the runners-up will finish in. Here’s a summary of the projections:

REFORM
8 x 2nd
4 x 3rd

LABOUR
2 x 2nd
8 x 3rd
1 x 4th
1 x 5th

GREENS
2 x 2nd
5 x 4th
3 x 5th
2 x 6th

LIB DEMS
5 x 4th
2 x 5th
5 x 6th

TORIES
3 x 4th
4 x 5th
5 x 6th

Reform look like favourites for the silver medal, and no projection has put them lower than 3rd. Labour have ranged from 2nd-5th, the Greens from 2nd-6th, with the Lib Dems and Tories not expected to do better than 4th.

Which makes these numbers rather startling.

The gulf in odds between Labour/Reform and the Greens is frankly astonishing. If you bet £100 on Reform to come second you’d make £50 profit. Put the same amount on Labour and if they took the silver you’d be £150 ahead. But stick it on the Greens and get lucky and you’d net yourself a tasty £12,500 windfall.

Extraordinarily, the Greens are at far longer odds to come second than the SNP, and there is NO chance of the SNP coming second.

(SkyBet’s odds of them winning are 1/200, meaning that if you staked your £100 on them to get the most seats, you’d make a whopping profit of 50p.)

Heck, the Greens coming second (125/1) is at almost the same odds as Alba winning the election (150/1), and Alba don’t even EXIST.

Readers, we don’t think the Greens will be runners-up at this election, and we certainly PRAY that they won’t. But the margins are so slim between all the non-SNP parties, and the polls so febrile, that it’s definitely not beyond the bounds of possibility, and at those absolutely doolally odds it might be worth popping a couple of quid on it just to cheer yourself up if it happens.