You know the scene. Two characters (usually a somewhat harmless looking protagonist against a burly big tough guy) start to fight. A crowd forms around them.
“5 bucks on the big strong guy.”, says one person in the crowd.
“10 bucks on the obvious winner.”, another crowd member bets on the same.
“100 bucks the underdog main character wins.”, shouts a supporting character also in the crowd. The others look at him in disbelief.
Then the fight happens, underdog wins, and we cut to the supporting character with a wad of cash in hand being really smug.
What’s the logistics of that money exchange? Like, if there was a bookie keeping track of who bet how much on what, and doing the pay outs, that would obviously work. Or if people individually accepted each others bets. But these stories always just display people shouting, and then the winner with the money. Is this shouting style betting actually based in reality, or is it just a nice dramatization for entertainment purposes?
I can’t speak from real life experience, but one movie that actually handles this really well (as far as I can tell) is The Quiet Man, during a fight.
There’s an example of an impromptu, casual bet between two individuals who are understood to trust one another, where they actually set the odds and agree formally, and it all happens very smoothly and naturally so as not to be boring:
“Five to one on the big chap”
“Given or taken?”
“Given”
“Taken”
Handshake
IIRC, they don’t actually show them agreeing on the wager itself, but a later scene shows the outcome and lets you calculate it for yourself. These characters are established to know one another, so I figure they either have a known amount between them that they default to for casual bets, or they just determined that off camera.
There is also an example of the more chaotic, mass, unplanned betting, where a character who is already established to be a jack of all trades known to the community pulls out a notebook and takes on the role of bookie. I think they even show the odds being adjusted in real time as the fight progresses, but I don’t recall for sure.