Tag: sports-betting

Bad Bookies

Bookie bashing has become a common theme of this blog. I do have other gambling stuff I’d like to talk about, but like a hack 1980’s comic talking about a stupid Irish mother-in-law eating bad plane food, I just can’t help myself.

The scumbaggery of the gambling industry is my personal low hanging fruit.

I apologise if it’s getting boring – I will change the subject soon. Just not today. So take my hand as we sink our teeth into another bitter but reachable peach.

The trouble with unripe stone fruits is that they’re just not that juicy. Which is apt, because neither is this blog’s subject matter. I’m just going to take a cursory dive (note to middle managers trying to sound important, not all dives are deep) into bad betting value.

I’ve picked out a couple of popular big name online brands and crunched the numbers on two different popular football markets, so that you can see how much commission they’re making.

I could’ve picked out household-name high street bookies, whose odds will be every bit as bad, but if you’re reading this then you probably gamble on the more contemporary sites, so I figured I’d cater to my audience.

But it’s worth noting that whether you go to work in a suit and bet on your phone whilst a-poop, or prefer to shuffle into an actual shop smelling rakishly lagerish, you are being ripped off. 

First up, PaddyPower’s outright odds for Euro 24. Bear in mind I grabbed these a few hours before the tournament kicked off, so they’re an accurate reflection of the market before any results came in. Here are the figures:

The ‘Odds’ are decimals as it makes calculations a little easier. The ‘Bet’ is how much you’d have to wager to get back £100 including your stake. I presume you can crack the ‘Team’ column for yourselves. 

Total outlay to ensure a three-figure win, is £117 (full disclosure, that’s rounding up a penny for effect). That means PP is keeping an average of 17% of everything you bet on that market.

EDIT: While the market is 17 percentage points above a completely fair book, it actually translates to a 14% house edge. My thanks to a reader for pointing out the lazy maths in the comments.

Maybe that doesn’t sound too bad, but that figure is typically closer to 10% in a competitive book, so it’s on the high side. But let’s re-frame it.

If you were told the bank was going to charge you 17% interest on your deposits, you’d be swift to take your custom elsewhere. And they do things yearly. Paddy wants to keep a sixth (edit: a seventh) of your money after just one month!

Excuse my tmesis, but that’s out-blimmin-rageous. Let’s see if their competition does any better.

Next, it’s Bet365 and their final score odds for Scotland Vs Switzerland tonight. I’ll spare you the table, as it’s even less interesting than the last one. But out of interest, if you think it’ll be a barnstormer you can get 500-1 on a four all draw.

This information was a little harder to come by as Bet365 don’t just list the possible results – they require you to select the number of goals each team will score and then just show the odds for that outcome. 

To be fair, that’s a nice innovation for usability, but it has the handy side-benefit (for them) of obscuring all the other results, making it harder to work out their edge. But I managed it anyway thanks to a bit of data entry.

If you want to secure a £100 win on that market then you’ll have to bet £122. This time an even juicier 22% commission for the Coates family (edit: it’s an 18% house edge). And that doesn’t take into account all the outcomes. It’s only for results of up to four goals per team.

It doesn’t change things very much statistically, because the vast majority of the time teams don’t score that many goals. Although Scotland did lose 5-1 in their last game, so if you’d bet all of the default available options to win £100, you’d have just lost all £122. 

I think I’ve landed my point, and for once, I won’t labour it. Betting with the big name bookies is expensive. Know that the more complex the market (i.e. the more outcomes a bet has) the harder it is to calculate their edge, and the more they will rig it to their benefit. 

Do yourself a favour, bet sparingly and only when it really matters to you. If you can’t find a friend to bet against instead (more ideas on this in the coming weeks) when there is 0% commission, then use an exchange where you’ll pay just a few percent.

You have to vote with your feet, or the bookies will take advantage of you. Don’t let them get away with their greed.

Forfeit Bets

Gambling and betting are not synonyms. They’re often used interchangeably (even by me when I’m trying not to be repetitious), but they have slightly different meanings. At least in a regulatory sense.

Back when I was concocting promotions for PokerStars, I would usually have to run my ideas past our legal counsel. Particularly if the proposals were for acquisition campaigns that would go on TV across many markets.

In the heyest of days, that legal counsel was the late great Steve Kraut; a wonderful, mischievous American, whose drawling accent remains every former colleague’s favourite person to impersonate. You had to be very careful drinking canned drinks around Steve, because you could never be sure where his used chewing tobacco was ending up. That is a mouthful you will never forget.

“Booooooooooob”, he would say (though sounding like “barb” than how you just read it), “in order for your promotion to be considered aahhhhhhh… gambling, there needs to be aahhhhhh… ‘consideration’. If people aren’t staking their aahhhh… own money, then it aaahhhh… isn’t gambling”.

It’s a good job Steve was very efficient about forming his legal opinions, because it offset how long it took for him to actually say them. He was a great guy to have down the pub, to go on holiday with, and to have next to you in the gaming trenches.

The point at the end of this bittersweet memory lane, is that you don’t have to gamble to make a bet. In fact, for a lot of people, it’s much more fun if you don’t.

The gambling high comes from dopamine, and dopamine doesn’t care if you’ve got money on the line. It’s responding to anticipation and jeopardy. That means you just have to wager something you care about to get the buzz. That’s the beauty of a Forfeit Bet.

There’s a brilliant TV show that illustrates this well – Impractical Jokers. Four guys pranking around, trying to avoid being the subject of the end-of-show embarrassment prank. It’s great toe-curling fun.

The only tricky bit of coming up with a good Forfeit Bet is coming up with suitable stakes. For this to work it really has to be done before the event in question. Never give someone the power of a forfeit blank cheque!

For a lot of football fans, losing a bet and having to wear a rival’s shirt is more painful than any financial loss. I’m not that invested in any team, so it seems like light punishment to me.

Rubbish tattoos are a favourite stake in this kind of thing, but as an advocate of safer gambling I think that’s a stake too high. A good forfeit should be uncomfortable and embarrassing, but never permanently scarring.

Here are a couple of personal examples where I think the penance is in the sweetspot between putting on a disliked T-shirt and having a stranger inject you with poisonous heavy metals.

I went to see a Premier League game at Fulham with two friends. We were each assigned an outcome (home win, away win, draw), and whoever’s result came in had to roll up a trouser leg until such time as a stranger passed comment on it.

After ninety otherwise uninteresting minutes, I was the unlucky shin-bearer. It started to snow just as we left the ground, and because it was London, nobody dared say a thing about my stylish new Masonic look. I was finally shown mercy in a Clapham bar around midnight.

The second example was from a simple four-man game of Rock, Paper Scissors during one of my ski seasons. Whichever player finished bottom in a mini tournament would have to tape a bottle of wine to each hand, and stay that way until both were finished.

It remains the drunkest I’ve ever been. Although it wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t become over-confident at the halfway point and ordered shots. I took myself to bed soon after completing the challenge and fully deserved my hubris hangover.

I don’t regret either instance, and nor have I forgotten them. That’s what makes these bets so much more enjoyable than a standard punt.

No matter the result, everyone involved gets something out of it. And the bookies get nothing.