A growing trend among the friends and coworkers of expectant mothers is to bet on the day a baby will be born.
Termed “baby pools,” family and friends pick out days around the expected due date of the mother and place monetary bets on the actual day the baby will be born.
The rules for these pools range from just choosing the day to picking the time of day, gender, height, weight and length of labor.
There are even websites like Expectnet.com that are set up similarly to fantasy football, where participants can enter their guesses for each category and the website will award points based off of how correct the guess is. The person with the most points is the winner.
The creator of Expectnet.com, Phil Partain, said his site gets about 35,000 visitors a month.
“It’s great to see so many people using it, and it’s still really cool to see a game set up by someone in another country or even someone I don’t know in my own hometown,” Partain said.
The winner of the bet can either keep the money or award it to the parents as a gift to help them with their newborn child.
ASU graduate Joshua Davis-Welty set up a baby pool for one of his coworkers in order to make light of the situation.
“I started it as more of a joke rather than being something serious, but a lot of people got involved,” he said.
A total of 30 people, both friends and coworkers, participated in Davis-Welty’s pool. Each participant put down $5 and bet both on day of birth and weight. He said they played “Price is Right style,” with the prize awarded to the person who had the closest guess without going past that actual day and weight.
Baby pools aren’t limited to just friends and family. If people don’t know any expecting mothers, they can go online and bet on the due dates of celebrity couples like Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who announced that they were expecting on Oct. 13.
Though it might seem strange to an expectant mother that people are taking bets on her unborn child, many mothers enjoy that other people are anticipating the birth of their baby.
Maggie Cunningham, an elementary education and special education junior who gave birth to her son last year, enjoyed having her coworkers set up a baby pool for her pregnancy.
“I thought it was fun, and I liked that other people were looking forward to the birth,” Cunnigham said.
Reach the reporter at danielle.legler@asu.edu
