I’ve been asked quiet a few times in the last two weeks by our readers how is the best way to avoid closures by bookmakers and about shifting their betting over to Betfair. In all honesty although I’ve had many accounts closed I wish I’d known what I know now in order for this to never of happened. Of course there are ways around continuing to bet by using partners and family etc but how do we stop these from being shut down?
When I worked for William Hill at their head office I learned that generally speaking people that bet more than £25 were monitored and there were two reasons as to why they’d be restricted or closed down.
Firstly as has been mentioned so many times on forums is that people who have not even shown a profit in their accounts have been shut down.
So why is this?
An excellent example of this is punters who bet on Pricewise selections are monitored immediately and restricted or shut down depending on stakes. There are no records of Pricewise’s results but I can assure you, although a great judge he doesn’t make an overall profit. Of course I cannot back this up as there is no results to verify this.
So surely if it’s common knowledge within the bookmaking industry that the UK’s biggest tipster shows a loss why wouldn’t any bookmaker take as much as they can to increase their profits?
This is all down to one word. The “market.”
Taking large sums of money on one particular horse is bad for business as quiet simply a bookmaker needs to have a good spread of money across the entire book. As an example of this if there was a four horse race and the bookie only took all the money on one horse, even if it lost the business model is flawed as when eventually it does win and it’s the only horse they are paying out on the margins are never going to be conclusively in the bookmakers favour.
So highlighting this problem for bookmakers should start to help us understand why, although we can lose on an account we can still be shut down.
So what to do about this.
Firstly and not wanting to state the obvious we need to open as many accounts as we can. If you have accounts shut down then open in your partners name. Once we have all of these accounts open then we need to make sure that with each bookie we are looking to be a £10 per bet player.
I appreciate that it can be laborious to have to place 10 bets across 10 different bookmakers but with the Racing Post and Oddschecker sites offering us bet baskets this can with a bit of work initially be easily done through each site. On top of that you can install LastPass (it’s free) that will automatically place your username and password on any site that you save into your vault.
I tried this a few months back and I can now place 10 £10 bets across 10 different bookmakers in less than five minutes.
Another trick and I by no means condone gambling in casino’s but it’s worth turning over £50 once a month on Blackjack or Roulette. These games if we play with the even money outcomes can be low risk and the reason we want to do this is the bookies software will flag up that you like to play in the casino and this puts you at less risk to them.
We also need to consider using the exchanges. Obviously Betfair is the bigger one and this can make life a lot easier but a question that I get asked all of the time is when is the best time to place bets and what about liquidity?
Personally I prefer Betfair for longer shots. As I write this I was able to get 18.5 matched for a stake of £40 and there was over £150 available at that price. The industry price was 14/1 at the time so in the long run I’ve got a massive edge over the bookies price there. The favourite ended up winning at 7/4 which was 2.88 on Betfair so although again a better price it was available at 2/1 early doors with the bookmaker but at the time there was only around £30 available to be matched on Betfair.
So my advice would be to back favourites early with the bookmakers using the spreading about technique I outlined above and then later in the day use Betfair to back the bigger prices. This should keep your accounts open for longer and enable you to carry on using all the great concessions available to customers nowadays.
