Revealed: how bookies clamp down on successful gamblers and exploit the rest
On any given Saturday, Rory would spend several hours glued to a screen flickering with hundreds of football and horse racing bets placed by customers of the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power.
One of multiple insiders from firms including Paddy Power Betfair, Ladbrokes and William Hill who spoke on condition of anonymity, Rory was part of an obscure corner of the gambling industry that exists to maximise profits by clamping down on successful punters.
“The volume of customers they had, you could afford to get rid of anyone you thought wasn’t going to be profitable,” he said.
Punters know the house usually wins, but most have no idea that bookies sharpen their edge via something called “stake factoring”, the process by which winning customers are dialled down, while losers are allowed to bet more.
It works like this: when a customer opens an account, they might be given a stake factor of 1, meaning they can bet 100% of the normal maximum stake, for example £500.
“As soon as people start winning or losing, that gets adjusted,” said Cameron, formerly of William Hill. “It starts with 50% and if they keep doing it [beating the bookie], it’ll keep going down. At William Hill it went down to 25% to 10% and eventually down to 1%.”
Sometimes, such decisions are determined by other factors.
“We’d make judgments based on what job you do, who you’re friends with on Facebook,” said Steve, who works as an odds trader at a well-known betting website.
“It’s particularly true of any account with a female name,” he said, explaining this was often someone who had had their stake factor reduced on their own account and was posing as a spouse, sister or friend.
A manual, handed out to employees of Paddy Power within the past six years and seen by the
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