Dealing With Victory

The ultimate goal of gambling is to be entertained. Or is it to win? Or is it a mix of being entertained while winning sometimes? This thinking from the player perspective, obviously. From the operator side sure, there is the goal to entertain and allow some wins, but the name of their business is profit.

With this in mind, how do gambling operators deal with the customers that win big and win often? Do they roll out the red carpet to them? Or do they limit their gambling opportunities to get the most profit as possible?

If some online betting companies are fined by giving access to customers who had banned themselves, the regulator can’t still control when winning players are shunned out by online casinos.

Bet limiting

There have been successful player complaining that their accounts were closed due to “business decisions”, while others mention their accounts got a betting cap to small amounts. These are unpopular moves for the players, but inside the limits of the law.

Gambling operators say that a scrutiny on winners is a necessity to detect and prevent fraud, even more when online betting takes the operators to offer their odds on new markets. Some of these new markets are in Eastern European countries and other countries where the wages are low, making fertile ground for match fixing.

With this in mind the operators also take the opportunity to take down the players that win the most, in what’s called risk management.

To remain profitable bookies cap their losses, which just means the unprofitable accounts are shut down, similarly to what insurance companies do by avoiding high risk houses or drivers.

Profiling your customer

Online casinos investigate their clients online, tracking their habits and seeing if they visit odds comparison sites. This can also be called profiling, something that is now easier given the existing anti-laundering regulations, which demand the players to give detailed information when their account is being created.

The right balance in this screening to is hard to get, as the gambling houses claim that keeping professional gamblers out will allow the offer of better odds to the casual player.

In the vast amount of resources booking houses have at their disposal, it would be no surprise that the professional gamblers are clearly identified as a “risk management” and ruled out of the game.

Those professional gamblers, after all, play the same game as online booking houses, given that sometimes they even hire their own analysts to calculate outcomes and define winning strategies based on the different odds from the different bookmakers, guaranteeing in this way a profit.

Answering with an algorithm

The answer to the professional gamblers is given with algorithms that detect odds behaviors, like for example unusual amounts of money being bet, like $11.33, against the usual round numbers used by regular players.

Ignoring free bets and bonuses, time when the bets are made and other behaviors are analyzed, explaining why professional gamblers look for the bookmakers that have no restrictions on customers that win more often, even if some companies do charge a premium fee to their most successful players.