I was lucky enough to get an insight into some financial results for a bit on line bookie/ casino recently. The latest figures showed a turnover of $4 million per day with a profit of $2 million per day 😯

An online casino is almost like submitting to being robbed. I would be very suspicious of online poker as well.

Is there any form of regulation on these things? Can the software behind it all not be massively rigged?

There’s not much need to rig the software for online poker etc. as the house just takes it’s margin.
Roulette etc. is rigged in the sense that fixed odds system and the house knows how much it’ll make [it’s edge] usually around 2%

All the software is developed by largish software houses employing hundreds of developers, trying to ‘fix’ it would surely leak out.

brother of a mate made a living for 2-3 years playing online poker and when I say a living it was more than he was paid net for being a management consultant.Only the prospect of being married/kids made him go back to the ratrace. I remember him saying “there’s a lot of idiots who think they can play who you take money off” he could play and wrote a card counting/probability programme to help too.

A colleague of mine loves gambling – it’d his hobby and he’ll bet on almost anything in sums from a fiver to a grand. But he puts all his gambling through a dedicated bank account so that he can keep tabs on it. A good year for him is when he breaks even.

So his hobby actually (probably) costs no more than a good MTB habit and he gets to stay indoors in the warm & dry this weather!

He does still make mistakes like going to the races, getting drunk and losing 2 grand chasing his loses!!

RE online poker – I don’t doubt that there are lots of idiots out there that lose lots of money on a regular basis but I very much doubt that astute individuals are picking up the pieces and making consistent profit.

It is a game of luck at the end of the day and all poker games come down to shit or bust which can only lead to lumpy returns.

An online casino is almost like submitting to being robbed. I would be very suspicious of online poker as well.

Jota is right re: online poker, it is 100% legit. They never pay out their own money like a bookmaker would because all the bets are between the players. The site just holds the money and skims a few percent off the top. Basically a licence to print money given how popular they are and the fact that god knows how many millions of pounds change hands every day.

What I do is bet against my team – it sounds counterintuitive but in big matches (say Wales v England rugby) I’ll bung £20 on England – if Wales win, great and I have only lost £20, if England win( boo! etc) but I’ve won some money to drown my sorrows with

I do this but to an even more extreme variant. It works on the basis that I’ve lost just about every bet I’ve ever placed, hence i can actually influence a result simply by betting against it. The downside is that if you only bet a couple of quid, it doesn’t work. it has to be substantial enough to have a bit of an ouch to it, and that varies of course down to importance.

A bet on Reading to win next week, would have to be in the region of £25+, but there’s no point on me betting £25 on England to win the World Cup* because I’d happily pay £25 for that. That level of want would need £1000’s to hurt enough.

* yes, there’s no point anyway…….

A lot of people do alright on betfair – that is betting against other people. people do alright on horses too but only because a lot of races are fixed, you need to be in the know

eople do alright on horses too but only because a lot of races are fixed, you need to be in the know

you work for security at BHA ?– what bollox– suspicious betting patterns are very easily spotted due to betfair etc– the only reason to rig a race is to make coin– it is now impossible to do that is worthwhile…

There will be (or at least should be) a size chart on the packaging.

You will need to know the tyre size of the car (eg- 195/65/15) rather than the make and model.

Personally I would go for Snow Socks over snow chains for short term use.

hot tip from the horses…..

Orifice Hunter, do it each way !

Only 2% of Betfair accounts are profitable and there mainly people working in pairs and using Gruss to place in-running bets at the very end of a race. Betting on horses is about finding value, this basically requires you to price up the market yourself (form your own tissue prices) then bet on the horses that you percieve to be overpriced in relation to their chances of winning, not quite that simple as you have to have the knowledge and experience to be able to assess the “true odds” in the first place. I live in Newmarket and a good friend of mine makes a good living from gambling (or trading as he refers to it), having seen the ups and downs of it and the amount of hours he puts it to it I personally don’t think my nerves could take that kind of lifestyle, he spends more time “working” than anyone else I know.

It’s fairly easy to make decent money off the bookies free bet offers (my last bike was paid for by these) but once you run out of these and start just arbing it`s hard work to make a reasonable return before getting gubbed (very limited stakes).

The mse forum gives the basics on low risk methods on extracting money from the offers but don’t believe people who tell you it’s entirely risk free.

Just gambling, rather than having a guaranteed outcome is for mugs though.

Personally I would go for Snow Socks

Might go a tenner each way on Snow Socks, then.

Some very interesting things on this thread, however the person in question is a gambler, likes to go to bookies regularly and i think fits the bill of you hear when they have won and have a pocket full of tenners but not when they haven’t. Just slightly concerned that my friend who is about to move in may start seeing some of her money going the same way. Hopefully not.

I’m a couple of hundred quid up on the bookies. Have been for over 4 years – which is when I last placed a bet. I had a look at the odds being given for number of British medals in the Beijing Olympics and reckoned they were being seriously pessimistic – did my own calculation of where I was confident we would win gold and it was far more than the bookies reckoned. I reckon they’d not noticed how good we’d got at the cycling amongst other sports I knew a bit about (in the event we won even more than I’d calculated). Put a few different bets on based on that, and also a handful of bets on specific events – for instance I got odds with one bookie on anybody other than Ainslie winning his event and odds with another bookie on him winning which meant I won either way (I think I’d only have lost if the whole event had been cancelled) – though I did weight my bets more in favour of him winning. That’s known as an arbitrage and there are still some of those around, though far less than there were as it’s so easy for people to find the odds – occasionally I have a browse to see if I can spot something, but nothing since, you really need something which is kind of complex like my Ainslie one (I’d not have spotted that had I not been looking in detail at the odds I could get on him anyway).

Didn’t place any bets on this olympics, and glad I didn’t, as I thought everybody was being too optimistic and we’d do worse than expected!

My friend uses betfair as he’s unable to get bets on with high street bookmakers anymore and the odds are higher even after the commission, plus you can use Gruss etc via the betfair api as an alternative to the slow betfair interface.

If someone’s placing bets in a bookmakers almost daily and the bookmakers are happy to keep taking bets from that person, that person isn’t winning or is up by a pathetic margin.

Having lived in Newmarket all my life I’ve seen a lot of people try to make a living off of it and only a couple who have made it pay, they were both very clever, very disciplined and sacrificed a lot for it, my friend spends his Friday nights at home studying Saturdays form.

To make money consistently you have to have an edge, that is the probabilities need to be in your favour.

With casino games this is impossible (discounting card counting) but with other forms of gambling it can be.

Bookies tend to not care who wins an event, they only care about the over round (or the sum of the odds always being over 1)

If you can calculate the true odds (or more accurate odds) then it is possible to make money, consistently.

I used to do fixed odds football many years ago and focussed on the lower divisions where I could commit more time and effort than the bookies would. I had about 5 years of making money and packed it in when I couldn’t commit the time.
On fixed odds you can make money if the bookies initial are far enough away from the real odds to give you an edge – as they are published almost a week before games then you can use information that they didn’t have to get this edge.

A good example is that one team has a key striker who gets injured midweek, reducing the teams probability of winning. You have this knowledge and the bookies can’t adjust the fixed odds to reflect this (the opposition would have a better chance of winning now so you may decide to back them for the draw or win)

boxbuster– you right, it just takes too much time,i have a mate who mainly lays on betfair, his method is to remove the four runners he thinks will be involved in the finish, then lay all the others, he starts ‘work’ at 8am and is at it till late evening studying next days form, its a relentless thing, he makes a cosy living ,but it is all consumming!

me, i have a bet if the odds are right in my opinion, mainly horses, but more ‘obscure’ football is good, found the league cup to be a good way, big teams want an out, so they field weaker sides, get some very good value that way. Never bet what you can’t afford to lose though–and don’t chase losses.

ui used to go to the races fairly regularly and never lost. At worst, I covered getting there and the entry, at best 3 figure profit (just). It’s not skill either. On a bad day having studied the form and going to make a bet I saw the police lift someone. At the bookies, there was Get Arrested at 12/1. omen, obviously, so chucked original choice and went on the nose. A Result and day moved into profit.
I’ve never replicated this in a High St bookies though

ah- the coincidence bet !!

I might have a look at this ‘original choice’, he must come good at some point.

i ve worked for Ladbrokes both in shops and on course and at the cricket.

theres a familiar saying ” only the bookies ever win” and its true.

you can ‘not lose’ as much as some but win, med to long term no.

the odds are calculated so that every event is profitable whatever happens.

persuading ‘clients’ to part with cash is the name of the game persuading them to take on more complex and multiple bets is the holy grail,,

what chance do you really have of naming the one amongst 22 who will score the first goal and predicting the final score.. next to zero so if you ever do the odds paid come no where close to the real chances of it happening..

what chance have you of picking the winner in the 2.30? then the 3 oclock then the winner of wimbledon and the fa cup? and yet folk try to every day.. fools and thier money..

you can though reduce the chances of losing and significantly raise the chances of breaking even..

2nd/3rd favs with odd of 5/1 or greater on the flat mid season mid card will at least break even over a period of time. however once your bookie clicks to what your doing they ll be having a chat..

Personally I would go for Snow Socks over snow chains for short term use.

reverse forecast , if you not sure

2nd/3rd favs with odd of 5/1 or greater on the flat mid season mid card will at least break even over a period of time. however once your bookie clicks to what your doing they ll be having a chat..

if you are patient you can of course wait for a horse you have been ‘following’– the next time Highway Code runs it will be trying to win !

I did well in a small-time way at online poker years back.
That equated to grinding out about £1500 over 6 months of tediously cautious play.
It paid for a few nice things but quickly became boring, even though I was ony playing on my time off between work shifts.

I still play occasionally but often find it too boring, become reckless and inevitably lose money.

what chance do you really have of naming the one amongst 22 who will score the first goal and predicting the final score.. next to zero

I reckon you have about 5% chance of predicting the first scorer actually – I’m assuming if you worked for a bookies you didn’t calculate the odds.