Royal baby: Bookies and betters play the name game
It's now officially May and there's still no royal baby, but the absence of a birth announcement hasn't people from placing bets on what Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, will name their second child.
As the #GreatKateWait continues, bookmakers have seen a new name surge past Alice as the odds-on frontrunner.
"In the last 48 hours, everyone is saying the name is more likely to be Charlotte than Alice," Rupert Adams of betting firm William Hill told the Associated Press on Friday. "We can't find a particularly good reason. But money talks, and when we see a rush of money like this, it's often as a result of people actually knowing what they're told."
Another betting firm, Paddy Power, currently has 9/4 odds on a baby girl named Charlotte, with 5/2 odds on Alice and 6/1 odds for Elizabeth. If it's a boy, potential contenders include James (21/1), Arthur (30/1), Philip and Henry (both 33/1).
As a Paddy Power spokesman told the U.K.'s Mirror, "Punters are seriously getting caught up in Charlotte's web and sending Alice back to Wonderland."
For whatever it's worth, betters had the right idea the first time we all came down with royal baby fever -- George was the frontrunner name ahead of his birth in 2013. So perhaps we should all be getting ready for a Princess Charlotte.
It's thought that Kate, 33, is at least several days overdue, so the little prince or princess -- whatever his or her name turns out to be -- should be arriving any day now.