Rain Betting

In south-east Asia, there is a place called Taiping located at Perak state of Peninsular Malaysia. Taiping is a town nothing difference from others with population approximately of 200,000. The sources of income mainly come from plantation and businesses, especially in oil palm.

This town is in a valley with whole year receiving high volume of rain water. The daily few hours’ raining may continuously until two to three weeks and sometime may up to a month long. Can be said the wettest town in whole Malaysia. Because of raining regularly, certain people in the town start to predict weather, whether is raining day or not and the time of raining. Slowly this weather prediction become famous and turns up to be a game. They started the game in Centre Market in middle of the town. There you can see several people are always looking at the sky. If you are outsider you will wonder what these people are looking for. Is that a UFO in the sky? No, they are actually looking at the clouds and base on the experience they have and predict or forecast a raining time. That is funny. But I can tell you the true, what these people forecast are more accurate than our National Weather Forecasting Center. The center only informs whether raining or not and never in detail.  Here, they will tell you exactly the time of raining without any sophisticated equipment.

Every game has rules and regulations including this game. After forecasting, an official raining time will be set (For example 3.00 pm is the official time) and each official time is referring to a small clock hanging on the wall of the market. Then they start betting between each others whether the rain will fall before or after the official time. If one party bets raining is before the official time then the other must bets oppositely. After all the bets done and agreed with the betting amount, and the following step is waiting. Wait for raining and at the same time wait for the result. Once rain starts falling cannot consider as a result, sometime the whole ground already saturated with water still no result yet.  The final result must be waited until the first drop of rain water falling from a small portion of the market’s roofing which has been fixed. If water fall after the official time that is 3.00 pm onward then the participants whom bet on that will be the winners and vice-versa. Sometime the water drop from the roof just a few seconds from the official time and every participant will feel thrilling in this situation. This shows that the accuracy of the forecasting is amazing.
  

Until today, this game has been played for three decades. But the quantities of the participants are going less day by day. Most of the older participants no longer there and the younger do not   interest in this type of game. They prefer more on soccer betting, online betting and horse racing which can be played in any place.