Once the game goes live, the Falcons take an early lead 14-0, you come back and take the Eagles +7, and lock in your profit. This, they said, meant there should be fewer arbitrary decisions made by bookies playing it safe.īut Brian Chappell, founder of Justice for Punters, said he did not trust the industry to do right by its customers and feared unintended consequences.“Let’s say in our Eagles and Falcons example that you took the Falcons +3 before the game starts. In response, Paddy Power said its safer gambling checks would always override stake-factoring decisions.Īll of the sources who spoke to the Guardian said stake factoring was increasingly automated at the more tech-savvy companies. “He’s allowed to lose 40 times what anyone else was and it was astronomical what he was punting. The biggest stake factor Rory recalled a customer being allotted was 40. The flipside of factoring down winners is that losers have, over the years, been given more leeway to place ever bigger bets. “If they close all the bad customers, you go from 50,000 active users to 10,000,” he said. One former employee of Betfair believes this is about satisfying City investors, who see customer numbers as one measurement of success. Even arbers, seen as cheats in the industry, would be set at a factor of 0.01. Henry believes bookmakers shared data about him with other operators, via software that companies are permitted to use which is intended to prevent fraud but might also be used to shut down a smart better.Įveryone the Guardian spoke to said accounts were rarely closed completely, for good reason.Īccording to Paddy Power’s manual, “warm” customers are “of use to us as marks”, meaning they are worth monitoring to assess if your prices are wrong. He was still allowed to bet on casino products where the house never loses over time. It showed he had won just £38 over four years but had been prevented from placing sports bets after the bookie realised he had beaten their odds 73% of the time. One gambler, Bernard Henry, shared the results of a demand sent to Coral to see what data it held on him, known as a subject access request. “The guys in the trading room didn’t want to be answering on a Monday morning why they didn’t close an account that was winning.” “The people running these businesses are answering to shareholders,” said Connor, who works in the gambling industry. New customers were set at 1.0, the document said, unprofitable customers at 0.3, and “warm” customers at 0.1. One ex-Paddy Power employee showed the Guardian a menu of stake factors that suggest the company was more than happy to restrict people who were simply canny. “I’d say it’s probably 65%-70% of punters that get factored where it’s definitely the right decision.” “It tends to happen now that everyone that beats the price gets put under the ‘arber’ banner, which is unfair,” said Fintan, who has worked at multiple operators including Ladbrokes. However, some traders fear that bookies have become trigger-happy, targeting not just cheats but canny operators, known in the trade as “warm” or “shrewd” punters, or simply as “bad business”. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA Archive/PA Images You look up at the TV and he’s out that ball.”īetfair gambling during a live match. “You see a bet come through from a brand-new account on a certain cricketer to score less than 25 runs, and they’ve put on as much as they can. One former trader at William Hill explained how the firm would be targeted by “latency cheats”, people who exploit the small delay between events at a match and the bookies’ TV pictures, either by accessing a faster feed or attending the event. The guide also suggests traits that supposedly indicate someone is likely to be bad business, including “eastern European customers”, apparently based on concerns about locations in which past suspicious betting patterns have been identified.įor the bookies, stake factoring is seen as a legitimate way of levelling the pitch against punters who they argue are resorting to unfair methods. Those customers with a stake factor above 1 can wager more than 100% of the normal maximum figure. It advises staff to restrict customers who “look like bad business” and to increase stake factors for “all customers that are regularly hitting their max ”. “It’s particularly true of any account with a female name,” he said, explaining this was often someone who had had their stake factor reduced on their own account and was posing as a spouse, sister or friend.Ī manual, handed out to employees of Paddy Power within the past six years and seen by the Guardian, offers further insight. “We’d make judgments based on what job you do, who you’re friends with on Facebook,” said Steve, who works as an odds trader at a well-known betting website. Sometimes, such decisions are determined by other factors.
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