Gambling site's 'no strings attached' offer had strings attached The UK's advertising watchdog has banned an online betting advert for free bets because the company behind it did not make clear that users needed to accumulate certain winnings before the money could be withdrawn. The advert for online casino 888.com contained information that was not properly qualified and omitted details …
"cannot withdraw less than £30 from their accounts with it and that they must have "wagered" that amount before those winnings could be withdrawn"
Thats more than misleading!
That means you must lose a further £20 before you can withdraw £30.
no, wait, that means you must *win* £30 before you get any money - and how much would that cost?
no, wait, if you win £30 with the free tenner you cant have it ,
so you must *bet* £30 and then you can have it, if you've got £30 in winnings?
does that apply to all withdrawals or just the first?
Thats like the lottery saying "No , you cant have the 3 mill because you havent spent 3 mill with us so far"
It should be mentioned that the total accumulates. If you win with your single free £10 bet, you can place bets wherever you like with the proceeds. So, start placing bets on both sides of wagers with only two possible results. This will lead to a slow decline, but it only has to be done once or twice to get up to a total of £30 in wagers placed. Once you've done that, make your balance back up to £30 then withdraw the lot.
yeah but if you bet online on horses or football etc, no amount of table-tipping is gonna change the result - you just didnt have to walk down to the bookies with the other addicts.
same as a fruit machine or a poker machine in a pub *can* fuck with the odds without being online.
But i fully agree with "gambling is a mugs game" and i dont do it.
"I discovered the perfect business - people come in ,empty their pockets, and leave!"
-Mr. Burns
If you believe the game is honest, then you know the house is taking a cut and you are sure to lose if you persist. The house doesn't care how long your persist.
If you believe the game is crooked, then you can only hope to win if you are a bigger crook than the crooks who are running the crooked game. Of course, in that case you can bet that the crooks running the crooked game will get you arrested for being a crook. Experience counts.
The fundamental thing about gambling is that our hardware is wired in favor of random reinforcement schedules. It's a weakness, but it's in the human hardware. Some people are slightly weaker and more likely to go bankrupt. Far more than the number of people who manage to win.
In theory, you could quit when you're ahead, but if you were smart enough to do that, would you have been gambling in the first place?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the math here, and the article didn't. If you can sign up for a large number of accounts at no cost and simply ignore all the unlucky ones and cash in the lucky ones, then this would be a money printing machine. These days, only governments are allowed to have money printing machines.
Someone should work out the exact math of the scam. The terms and conditions have to reflect the house's percentage.
Actually that's quite right.
- Open a number of accounts with £10 pre-paid, put £20 in each for total of £30
- Gamble the £30 in each account. Since bookies make money on the odds, on average you will lose, but with tight odds margins you should average winnings of about 95% of the stake *. With 95% (ie 5% losses), your accounts would average £28.50, of which you only put in £20, so £8.50 free money
- On all winning accounts you have more than £30 obtained by gambling £30 so you can withdraw and close. Losing accounts you just close.
Of course bookies will know this and will have many controls in place to make sure email accounts are not being reused and are valid, and to make sure that bets are placed by humans not by bots, that bets are coming from many different IP addresses etc so it probably wouldn't work on a large scale.
* for example red/black or odd/even on roulette, winnings are 200% (double the stake), odds of winning 18/37 so on average you make 97% of the stake
You are making the usual error about probabilities and averages. By that logic your odds on your favourite lottery numbers get better each week that they don't come up and heads and tails would come up within a 50/50 range over any given number of flips.
On average what you say is true. However - each bet is a different turn of the wheel - you are not betting multiple times on the same turn. The probability of your colour coming up at roulette is still 37-18 every time youy place a bet.
The gambling industry loves these theories of averages - it is the very attractive faulty logic which convinces people to run such systems as double your bet until you win, betting on multiple aspects of the offer etc. The house always wins isn't a slogan - it is a mathematical certainty.
i dunno colin , I wrote a little "double your bet" script in excel , with those odds
and it worked. It reprted "biggest losing streak" and capital required etc.
It wouldnt work in real life because of
a) tables have max bets
b) the huge amount of capital required for just a few consecutive losses
Just about all companies in the world exploit human weakness for profit...
As for gambling industry, just about all operators who offer up free cash do so with requirements for turn over. Operators vary but normally turnover can be from 20 to 40 times. Assuming they give you £100 free with 20 times turnover, you need to play that money over and over wagering all winnings from that £100 you need to play 20 times. If you have any cash left over from that £100 after playing it through 20 times, you get to keep it.
However, its so unlikely anyone will ever succeed in having anything left over but it drives the human emotion to want to keep playing and put their own money in. Also, most operators know that most players will play to extinction, or play until their funds run out. Either way, its a good way of getting people hooked into the games and stumping up their own cash.
Gambling in the UK has many safeguards, yes its all mathematically determined using random numbers and most games although they say 95% payout, what that means is a theoretical lifetime payout. Yes the house keeps 5% over its lifetime, but just like a lottery its a distribution of wealth where you get winners and losers.
UK Gambling is much more tightly regulated and controlled than the Bankng sector and their mass gambling addiction with depositors money (that's your money and mine) which is the real scam here.
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