Post by Carl LaFong on Aug 7, 2019 12:37:00 GMT
Final proof gambling is a mug's game.
Even with the help of a team of professionals, Lloyd Griffith couldn’t turn a profit.
www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/04/can-you-beat-the-bookies-review-final-proof-gambling-is-a-mugs-game
Anyone watch this last night? I missed it.
Even with the help of a team of professionals, Lloyd Griffith couldn’t turn a profit.
www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/04/can-you-beat-the-bookies-review-final-proof-gambling-is-a-mugs-game
Anyone watch this last night? I missed it.
If you are serious about becoming a professional gambler, and you really shouldn’t be, you will need to grow your hair over your ears. Then buy a tiny Bluetooth earpiece. Then fly somewhere outside Europe – Florida, Uganda or South Africa are good bets – and start your research. What you are looking for is a tennis match overseen by doughnuts and umpired by a slow-handed, technophobic muppet.
Joe from Sussex cleared upwards of £300,000 last year thanks to this business model. He sits discreetly in tennis crowds and when, say, the usually hopeless server puts away an ace, he places a bet in the few seconds before the umpire registers the point with bookmakers. One umpire in Romania, Joe recalled, managed to lock himself out of the online system so had to enter his pin before registering each point. The result? Pay day for Joe. The longer the delay between point and its registration, the more likely you are to make money.
If you are suspected of engaging in this form of non-illegal cheating, called courtsiding, you will not only lose your strawberry and cream privileges, but be invited by security to leave (hence the hair-earpiece trick). Best not to chance it at Wimbledon.
Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to mug off the bookies. And why shouldn’t we? They have been mugging us off for years effectively by taxing stupidity at exorbitant rates, using Ray Winstone to sucker us into addictions that can result in house repossession, divorce and even suicide, and breaking ads rules on targeting children while paying themselves silly money.
Lloyd Griffith, who presented this show, noted that the world’s best paid woman, Bet365’s Denise Coates CBE, earned £265m last year (as the Guardian reported, if you stacked that sum in new £50 notes, it would be almost twice as high as the Shard). That’s more than Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar made together. To be fair, she is probably doing a better, if more socially eviscerating job, than them: Bet365 made $2bn (£1.65bn) last year.
Griffith was once part of Britain’s gambling problem. You may not have heard of him as a comedian or a TV football pundit, but you will likely know him as the character Gut Truster from the appalling 2014 TV ads for Ladbrokes. Here, Griffith was told by Dr Philip Newall, a postdoctoral researcher in applied psychology, that he helped “normalise stupid”. One diabolical trend to exploit Britain’s growing band of stupid gut-trusters, Newall highlighted, was the multi-bet. Newall spotted a multi-bet at 14-1 that involved both Lukaku scoring and Belgium winning 2-1. Each possibility seemed likely, but the odds of them both happening warranted much longer odds than those offered by the bookies.
More prickly still was Griffith’s old mate, fellow standup John Robins, a recovering gambling addict, who reported that Ladbrokes ad campaign to the Advertising Standards Authority. Why? Because the billboards claimed that the first time you bet, it is luck, the second, it is skill, which, Robins said, “is such a dangerous message”. Especially at a time when apps and online betting make gambling much more addictive than when Robins was suckered in during his teens. If he were a teen gambler today, Robins reckoned, he would have become hooked faster and would soon be dead.
Griffith’s task in this programme was to double his initial stake of £7,500 in four weeks. Imagine that money as your child’s university fund, or that, if you lose it, you will have to remortgage, counselled Robins.
Griffith initially coined it, making more than £3,000 by FaceTiming Joe, who was courtsiding in Florida. For Joe, Griffith was a useful idiot: his online betting profile revealed him as a mug, so the bookies wouldn’t suspect that his next clutch of spot bets on an obscure tennis match would be the result of inside information. But the morning after cashing his winnings, he got an email: his gambling privileges had been suspended (although he was still allowed to play in its online casino).
With the clock ticking down, Griffith went for one big pay day. He bet on Swansea beating QPR, Sheffield United beating Millwall and Morecambe winning against his beloved Grimsby Town. At 5.55pm that Saturday, Griffith found he had lost all three bets. The moral? “Can you beat the bookies as an ordinary person? No.” Nor can you, as he had, with the help of a professional gambler.
One last question. Who was, ultimately, mugged off? When Griffith returned the money to his BBC paymasters, there was only £4,500 left, meaning he was three grand light. Unless the BBC has people (by whom I mean tooled-up thugs) to recoup that debt, it looked as if us licence-fee payers were the real mugs.
• This article was amended on 5 August 2019 to remove a reference to Lloyd Griffith being an ex-poker professional. He is not.
Joe from Sussex cleared upwards of £300,000 last year thanks to this business model. He sits discreetly in tennis crowds and when, say, the usually hopeless server puts away an ace, he places a bet in the few seconds before the umpire registers the point with bookmakers. One umpire in Romania, Joe recalled, managed to lock himself out of the online system so had to enter his pin before registering each point. The result? Pay day for Joe. The longer the delay between point and its registration, the more likely you are to make money.
If you are suspected of engaging in this form of non-illegal cheating, called courtsiding, you will not only lose your strawberry and cream privileges, but be invited by security to leave (hence the hair-earpiece trick). Best not to chance it at Wimbledon.
Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to mug off the bookies. And why shouldn’t we? They have been mugging us off for years effectively by taxing stupidity at exorbitant rates, using Ray Winstone to sucker us into addictions that can result in house repossession, divorce and even suicide, and breaking ads rules on targeting children while paying themselves silly money.
Lloyd Griffith, who presented this show, noted that the world’s best paid woman, Bet365’s Denise Coates CBE, earned £265m last year (as the Guardian reported, if you stacked that sum in new £50 notes, it would be almost twice as high as the Shard). That’s more than Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar made together. To be fair, she is probably doing a better, if more socially eviscerating job, than them: Bet365 made $2bn (£1.65bn) last year.
Griffith was once part of Britain’s gambling problem. You may not have heard of him as a comedian or a TV football pundit, but you will likely know him as the character Gut Truster from the appalling 2014 TV ads for Ladbrokes. Here, Griffith was told by Dr Philip Newall, a postdoctoral researcher in applied psychology, that he helped “normalise stupid”. One diabolical trend to exploit Britain’s growing band of stupid gut-trusters, Newall highlighted, was the multi-bet. Newall spotted a multi-bet at 14-1 that involved both Lukaku scoring and Belgium winning 2-1. Each possibility seemed likely, but the odds of them both happening warranted much longer odds than those offered by the bookies.
More prickly still was Griffith’s old mate, fellow standup John Robins, a recovering gambling addict, who reported that Ladbrokes ad campaign to the Advertising Standards Authority. Why? Because the billboards claimed that the first time you bet, it is luck, the second, it is skill, which, Robins said, “is such a dangerous message”. Especially at a time when apps and online betting make gambling much more addictive than when Robins was suckered in during his teens. If he were a teen gambler today, Robins reckoned, he would have become hooked faster and would soon be dead.
Griffith’s task in this programme was to double his initial stake of £7,500 in four weeks. Imagine that money as your child’s university fund, or that, if you lose it, you will have to remortgage, counselled Robins.
Griffith initially coined it, making more than £3,000 by FaceTiming Joe, who was courtsiding in Florida. For Joe, Griffith was a useful idiot: his online betting profile revealed him as a mug, so the bookies wouldn’t suspect that his next clutch of spot bets on an obscure tennis match would be the result of inside information. But the morning after cashing his winnings, he got an email: his gambling privileges had been suspended (although he was still allowed to play in its online casino).
With the clock ticking down, Griffith went for one big pay day. He bet on Swansea beating QPR, Sheffield United beating Millwall and Morecambe winning against his beloved Grimsby Town. At 5.55pm that Saturday, Griffith found he had lost all three bets. The moral? “Can you beat the bookies as an ordinary person? No.” Nor can you, as he had, with the help of a professional gambler.
One last question. Who was, ultimately, mugged off? When Griffith returned the money to his BBC paymasters, there was only £4,500 left, meaning he was three grand light. Unless the BBC has people (by whom I mean tooled-up thugs) to recoup that debt, it looked as if us licence-fee payers were the real mugs.
• This article was amended on 5 August 2019 to remove a reference to Lloyd Griffith being an ex-poker professional. He is not.
