And if you are consistently winning they will ban you! They can legally back off (reduce max bet to a tiny amount) or straight up ban people who bet smart.
These books also market what are the hardest to understand and worst bets to consumers. Think 4 way parlays. Like all 4 legs seem reasonable. They probably on their own each have a 70 pct probability. But that means a 24 pct of hitting. Of course they are all over props because people love to bet over. They are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't understand expected value or odds of multiple independent things happening
I know a guy who sells odds to online betting platforms.
If they don't purchase his odds (effectively paying him not to play), he just plays them. Wins either way. I dont think he has ever been banned, but I think thats because they appreciate the option to purchase his service.
The big asian bookies don't ban you if you win, they use your sharp bets to improve their price accuracy. Not legal to bet on them if you're from the US though (land of the free??).
The biggest betting syndicates use platforms like Punterplay to place bets (often via API) at multiple bookies (Pinnacle, Singbet, SBObet, Betfair, Matchbook, 3ET, VX etc) at the same time.
In a somewhat ironic turn of events the more regulation you have, the worse it is for the customer. Big regulatory burdens require the bookies to extract more from the users, making the offerings more predatory. This is also why the likes of Kalshi can provide a better product to customers at the moment - because they ignore all the regulation.
Casinos have a ton of leverage in some states. Here in Nevada MGM and Caesar's and Wynn, thanks to their expansion, are effectively treated as too big to fail and given huge amount of deference in how they operate by the gaming commission. But there are also incredibly problematic protectionist regulations that I and several other residents who didn't really know each other tried to get rid of through the admin law process, primarily allowing remote signups which would also allow out of state entities to set up shop without literally having a physical casino. Having to physically go to a casino and sign up in person was onerous and clearly pointless, and then impossible during the pandemic, and became a really silly charade. What was supposed to start as public meetings right before the pandemic got dragged out, meetings would get rescheduled at the last minute, and casinos made entirely spurious rationales like "there aren't enough local datacenters" (Google Cloud's Henderson datacenter is surely sufficient for in state traffic?), that they would want taxpayer money for potential loss of revenue (capitalism dude, what are you afraid of?) Meetings would get scheduled in Carson City and that's literally six hours away by car. Agenda items would suddenly be altered. It was a hot mess. We managed to get iGaming in theory legalized but they straight up never even pretended to start working on regulations for it, and now with the 90% loss deduction limit by the IRS on the OBBB books basically have 12.5% house edge on any line to start if it's properly priced. My model can beat 2.5% but 12.5% is insane. If the feds are going to ban pros constructively, well, I can't out lobby a casino. And the pro betting constituency isn't big enough to pander to, frankly. If there's action, it can't actually happen on shore. I realize that "people who can beat the books due to specialist knowledge and can bankroll drawdowns to the extent that returns long term profit" is also publicly not sympathetic and generally people either think we're touts (if it makes me money touting absolutely won't help me, in fact the fewer people I have to interact with the better) or something. Wagering by hand sucks, but no model is perfect, just some are more useful than others, and someone in accounting may be able to figure out that ban or bankrupt is not a sustainable strategy to run books. But with the feds involved to put that imprimatur of authority in writing, I guess I'm never getting my limits lifted. Good luck finding stable liquidity elsewhere.
Not as much as traditional bookmakers but they absolutely care. Betfair has a "premium charge" where if you earn over a certain amount in a year, you get charged a fee equal to a % of your gross profit.
Its the same as poker. An exchange wants a bunch of equally skilled players betting against each other. If everyone has zero edge, all the money stays on the exchange betting over and over and the money eventually all goes to the exchange in commissions.
Players with a strong edge dramatically reduce the time before the losing players run out of money, meaning less commissions for the exchange.
If you earn over a certain amount in a year, and are categorised as a deriving your majority income from gambling in a 0% tax Territory (Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, UK/Ireland etc...), you can offset the % charged as an expense.
FWIW, an exchange doesn't necessarily want a bunch of equally skilled players betting each other, they want a lopsided book on the bigger markets to attract domestic bookies and match-makers laying or staking across multiple platforms to leverage Matched betting discrepancies on promotions for new players etc...
//Players with a strong edge dramatically reduce the time before the losing players run out of money, meaning less commissions for the exchange.
Poker Players with a strong edge have a +ev Variance. Over 100 hands they're not guaranteed to be a winner. Over 10,000 hands they are.
YMMV massively in other sports, but for horse racing the big gamblers tend to only put down big money once or twice a year on maidens and trial-runners for Cheltenham or Grand National. They wouldn't touch a big festival other than for fun.
The exchange is not taking the other side of the bet; they're just matching you up with another user who wants to take the opposite position to you and then taking a fee for providing that service.
The problem I you compete with other exchanges and so need to compete on odds or customers go elsewhere. If there is an imbalance in your system because the favored home team has more people on you platform (or someone else has extra of the unfavored team and so has better odds) you take the losing side just to keep the customers and then pay out when you lose.
the above is much less likely if you are national, but there may be small competitors with an advantage live this you are trying to compete with
A restaurant won’t start selling clothes because if they don’t the customers will go elsewhere to buy clothes and they won’t come back.
A stock exchange won’t start holding a book of shares to give “better” prices to customers. What would that even mean? If the price is better for the buyer it will be worse for the seller! (If you mean that they will buy for a high price and sell for a low price to keep all customers happy maybe the customers won’t go anywhere but the “exchange” will go bankrupt.)
Why would a betting exchange be different? Does Betfair for example act like you suggests or is it just something you’re imagining?
In Stocks exchanges and brokers are different things. Exchanges list companies, they are the places where different brokers gather to exchange stocks and agree on prices. Brokers are people/companies who go to the exchange on your behalf (historically someone physically went there, now it is mostly computers)
NYSE and NASDAQ do complete with each other for companies to list on them. (as do other exchanges around the world). When a company is on more than one exchange there are people who make it their job to run "arbitrage" - this is they buy on one and sell on the other anytime the prices are different and this keeps things in check.
It is also valid for betting platform to run arbitrage with their competitors - but various anti-monopoly laws and other such things should(!) get in the way. I don't know what they are doing about this or exactly what the law says. As such I don't know what Betfair is really doing, but I know this is a risk they somehow either take (which if they are national might be low enough), or if they somehow get arbitrage done.
And betting platform is normally both the exchange and the broker. As such they have this risk and need to mitigate it while staying within the law. There are many ways to abuse mitigation that need to be illegal and so it must be hard to mitigate - this doesn't mean impossible.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is all the online options are platforms - the exchange for their own bookmakers. Vegas does have exchanges, but most online options don't use them.
That ESPN link doesn't tell me anything. Wikipedia says Kalshi is trying to become available on other brokers, but also implies that the majority of their "trades" come from their own in house brokers.
As such I still need to stand by what I said: at least for now the online platforms are not exchanges (though some are trying to move that way)
> The company says one difference is that users are not going up against the house but instead trading contracts with other users on the opposite side of the proposition.
> "We are simply an exchange. So we sit between people that are buying contracts on a yes and a no side. We don't win by people losing. And we don't lose by people winning. We simply sit in between that transaction."
I don’t know what else would you like to be told. That’s an exchange, with one user taking one side and another taking the other side. No brokers are involved when end-users connect directly to the exchange.
Wikipedia mentions that they would like other platforms to give access to the exhange, and the existence of market makers (one affiliate company, one independent company) that may provide liquidity. But the basic exchange is user-to-user.
It's an exchange. You offer to bet X and wait for a matching offer. If no one wants to bets that much your order waits in a queue - same as on a stock market.
There is 0 risk for the exchange and the bettors can only use what they put in front.
Bookies run some risk because they accept the bet first and try to hedge (or got more people to bet on the other side) later. The exchange doesn't have this problem.
Exchange doesn't even need to charge commission cause they make money on float.
It’s even worse with parlays: the events are potentially negatively correlated. There may be a 70% chance that Giannis has 3 or more turnovers and a 70% chance the bucks win, but the odds of both happening are less than 49% because more turnovers directly reduces the likelihood of a Bucks win.
I won't bother asking how this is legal because it's clear there are no rules to any of this stuff right now. But it's absolutely insane that as a business you can just take your 20 most unprofitable customers and then just ban them.
In the US, a business can refuse service to anyone, generally, as long as it isn’t because the person belongs to a protected class (e.g. you can’t ban all black people or all Jewish people). You could refuse to do business with someone because you didn’t like the way they looked at you, or because you were grumpy the day they came in.
Famously, for example, James Dolan bans all sorts of people he doesn’t like from Madison Square Garden and any of the other venues he owns. He notoriously bans all lawyers who work for any firm that sues him (which happens a lot). He even uses facial recognition to catch them, and kicks them out without refunding their tickets. People have tried to sue him for this (many of them are lawyers, after all!) and so far no one has won against him for it, so he keeps doing it.
IIUC, that article is written in 2025 and cites stuff pre-2023.
IN 2023 the city threatened them with violating the terms of their liquor license [1] (which doesn't prevent you from refusing service to anybody short of actually illegal behavior). I can't really find any follow-up about this.
In Colorado, such service refusals are illegal. The civil rights agency prosecutes them and their legal rationale is that historically every "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" has only been used to discriminate against non-white customers.
> Rule 20.4 – Discriminatory Signage in Places of Public Accommodation.
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited.
Generally most businesses are allowed to refuse service to customers for any reason, or no reason at all (there are certain legal exceptions to that principle for protected classes). As a practical matter, banned online bettors often sneak back in with strawman accounts.
Likewise. The guy bought two laptops to compare for a week and returned the one he didn’t like, then later that year did the same thing between two TVs. When he went to return the TV he didn’t want, he was told he was banned from returning any other good to Best Buy and it’s monitored against his credit card.
Perhaps after just two events that might seem a little harsh, but I definitely understand the store's reasoning here. You've got a guy that is pretty much guaranteed to lose you money in the form of his regular auditioning of big ticket items (can't sell that returned item for full price anymore). Why would a store want to keep a customer like that?
It’s not returns fraud - he was operating entirely within their policy, just returned too much stuff too often and BB eventually figured out they weren’t making money off him.
I don’t think he was even intending to return things when he bought them. Dude just had high standards.
A brick and mortar casino down here banned a guy for some bathroom activity. But made him agree that it’s to everyone’s advantage if they agreed it was because he was a sharp.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. I've definitely seen my fair share of people on Reddit who seem to regularly have the misfortune of opening video card boxes only to find rocks inside. Multiple times -- just a coincidence, I'm sure. Not saying the person you know does this, but return scamming is definitely a thing.
This dude wasn’t doing that, he was just using Best Buy as an extended trial period for whatever new gadgets looked cool. Eventually they decided they weren’t making any money off him.
Years and years ago I had the misfortune of knowing someone that bragged about how he'd buy a video card at best buy, swap a dead card in it, then redo the shrink wrap at his job (an indie computer place) before returning it. There's lots of banal scummy scams you can do like that.
There are absolutely companies that “stack rank” their customers and cut the bottom N%, or even just keep the top N, period.
I have always found this to be maddeningly counterintuitive, because surely at least some of these customers yield a net profit. But I have to admit that I’ve seen it done to very profitable effect.
I think the problem isn't banning per-se, because I can "ban" companies as well.
The problem has something to do with the asymmetry of information or bargaining-power. Unlike card games, the house has quite an advantage in data-mining.
I'm pretty sure they actually use their data-mining advantage to make their betting offers as attractive to regular users as possible, and therefore maximise profit.
It's so easy to just ban any user who gets "too lucky" (simply ban the top ~0.1% of your userbase every week) why waste resources on offering actually fair bets? And the requirement for "fair bets" probably interferes with the requirement for bets to be as attractive to "regular users" as possible.
> And the requirement for "fair bets" probably interferes
Don't forget the possibility of promotions, which is a major thing for marketing and distinguishing yourself from the pack.
A world of fair bets would be a world where you would need to market your superior odds (e.g. what pinnacle does).. which is directly at odds with fleecing your under-educated customer base.
How does the house not have a data-mining advantage in card games?
They would know whether you make bad choices on Tuesdays, how people of your nationality and consumer preferences react to seeing an Ace, they can deal the better card to the person they’d like to have win, or the opposite, they know what effect the equivalent of a hot waitress bringing you free drinks will be on you specifically as well as on people statistically similar to you and at what moment in time…
Do you just not play against the house when you play cards? And do you 100% trust the house to deal randomly? Does the house not care at all who wins at cards?
Sorry if these are stupid questions, I don’t gamble, but it seems like they have lots of actionable data if they want to use it. Even if they only use it to get you to play more (or less).
I know few mathematicians that work in betting world and model data (both odds as well as user profiling).
It is not true that you get banned if you win too often, but it is true that you get banned, and flagged, if your winning patterns are suspicious.
It's essentially like in a casino. You can win more than once and big, good for you.
But if patterns emerge, you get banned.
E.g. Betting small sums on football and suddenly betting very big on a specific baseball game and winning. Do it few times and you're banned as it's obviously strange.
In these cases one should apply the cybernetic principle. The purpose of the system is what it does.
The intention of the mathematician friends of yours may be to prevent money laundering and match fixing from being profitable (and thereby providing a public good). However, so many genuine sharp and/or plain lucky bettors are caught in these AML & Match Fixing cross-fires, it would be very naive to assume these are all just unfortunate false positives.
Sportsbooks are however legally hamstrung in what they can admit to of course. By doing so they would also admit to completely ignoring and even violating one of the core duties imposed on legal sportsbooks: the duty of care (in EU countries at least this is supposedly an important aspect of the legalisation).
By kicking someone off your platform, you definitely no longer have any way to nudge their behaviour into something less self-destructive. Some players might quit, but for those that do not: Illegal sportsbooks will try to take even more advantage of their players, and now you have also indirectly caused the financing of all kinds of other activities that AML regulation is specifically designed to prevent.
My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.
> My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.
I have no clue, but I'm sure that it's meant to make money, not be a charity. If someone does show some suspicious alpha he gets banned.
Users with non-suspicious alpha are generally kept on the platform but they get limits (how much can they bet).
I absolutely believe that the betting industry is exploitative in any case. It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
Of course I don't expect these businesses to be charities, but I do expect them to uphold their side of the bargain.
The basic bargain of sportsbetting legalization is that sportsbooks are allowed to legally operate (retain a license) in this lucrative market if they 1) ensure taxes are paid, 2) the money involved is not flowing to bad actors (e.g. through match fixing and other methods of money laundry), 3) the sports themselves are not corrupted (imo an impossibility, but a different discussion) and 4) gamblers are taken care of properly (i.e. nudged away from self-destructive behaviours).
Point 1 is one of those unavoidable things like death. Point 2 is actually in line with their own incentives: match fixing directly hurts their bottom line by paying out on essentially highly mispriced odds. Point 3 is a much bigger discussion, which I feel they are already failing on (for me as a sports viewer with the incessant ads, but also in protecting the athletes that are not in the top 0.01% of any sports).
Point 4 however is something they are claiming they are doing, but in actuality it is complete reversed: the illegal sportsbetting market is, by all measures, out-growing the legal one. In the current environment, the major thing sportsbook legalization did is to provide a gateway drug for the illegal market. Limits and bans in order to (POSIWID) protect margins are the strongest nudges gamblers experience to move from legal to illegal sportsbooks.
> It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
Good :) The fewer competent individuals involved in any way, the harder it is for (owners of) sportsbooks to claim they are upholding their side of the bargain, as this will stand or fall with the competent execution of the AML/Match fixing & duty of care controls. Now to actively discourage others from working there as well...
You're right that people don't get directly banned for winning too often, but they will get their maximum bets limited to something like $10 if they consistently place bets where they get a good deal on the odds (i.e. placing a bet at +100 when the odds closed at -200). This is one of the worst aspects of legalized sports betting IMO, and why I think it should be regulated. The companies running the sportsbooks are free to make errors on their odds without consequences because they're allowed to identify and ban anyone who takes advantage of the mispriced odds. This means they get to limit their customer bases solely to people who don't understand expected value, which turns the whole industry into a mechanism to take money from the stupid/uneducated. If you have an account at a sportsbook that's more than a few weeks old, and it's still in good standing, it's because the sportsbook knows you're a loser and that even if you win big a few times, you'll be profitable to them long-term.
The hot new interview question for 2025-2035 will not be:
- How many golf ball fit in a school bus?
Or the like that dominated Google hiring for nearly a decade. No the hot new interview question will be:
- Do you have an account with any of the major sports bettors in good standing?
The Goofus answer to this is : Yes, I can bet whatever I like with them (they are an idiot that doesn't understand how money works. Hire appropriately)
The Gallant answer is: No, I don't do sports betting. (This shows they at least know to lie about it)
The Galaxy answer is: No, they banned me (only sharps get banned, meaning they are either very lucky or very good with probabilities and numbers)
There exists now the potential for a small service company that can help interviewees and the spouses of gambling addicts: We'll make you look like a sharp to the sports betting companies. You sign up for the service and a big-time sharp takes over your accounts (or directs you personally) and tells you what to bet and where. They then give you the money to bet, making you effectively a mule for them. It's win-win. Real sharps get a mule, you get to look like a sharp and you have the proof. This also works for the family of addicts (probably the larger market), as their affected loved-one gets banned/downgraded and all the money stops flowing out of their accounts.
Or they just don’t do it? I don’t enjoy gambling at all. I don’t do it in casinos, I don’t do it online, and I don’t even do it with friends where there’s no “house” to pay off. I think the worst night gambling I’ve ever experienced, I lost $20. I still remember it.
'Proper' gamblers use exchanges like Betfair rather than Sportsbooks, where the host takes a rake off the spread with individuals laying against you. The only major issue with this is not being able to do things like place betting accumulators.
FOI in EU means you can get the notes attached to your account - the insights can be staggering, down to friend and family connections with Jockeys or Racing Stables, Sports Personalities or High Net Worth individuals.
>And if you are consistently winning they will ban you! They can legally back off (reduce max bet to a tiny amount) or straight up ban people who bet smart.
I'm not from US, I'm from EU but I'm still paranoid of that so I only sports bet at state owned lottery/betting company.
State run bookies charge commission so high you will not win anyway unless you have insider info and then your risk is bigger with a state run bookies.
Big bookies won't have you so easily. Multiple small ones will but you will get your money back. They not paying is a very small risk even if they decide to not do business with you later.
Company is owned and run by state and I doubt they would allow themselves to have any shenanigans with their customers. You can always sue them, you can sue private companies too but private ownership is just an extra worry. That's why I also have a bank account at the state owned bank not the private one.
That’s probably a good intuition and definitely smart about the bank — I was dropped by Commerzbank in Germany without explanation — but if I were so good at betting that I worried about a ban, I’d want to double check the actual rules.
I mean state is probably the better custodian of your money and your interests than the private investors unless you live in a rogue state run by criminals.
Leaving aside the question of whether it has to be a rogue state to be run by criminals, I think that operating a gambling syndicate is never in the interest of the citizenry, and that includes the Lottery, which is functionally a tax on the poor. For very gaudy spectacles of that exploitation, turn on the TV at Christmas in Spain.
I mean technically stock trading platforms can ban you if you trade too well. Usually happens with options, not buy and hold positions. Retail trading platforms need users that are statistically no different than random to sell their order flow to HFT firms.
These books also market what are the hardest to understand and worst bets to consumers. Think 4 way parlays. Like all 4 legs seem reasonable. They probably on their own each have a 70 pct probability. But that means a 24 pct of hitting. Of course they are all over props because people love to bet over. They are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't understand expected value or odds of multiple independent things happening