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What to do When a Bookmaker Won’t Pay up…

Posted by Aegist on February 25th, 2009

Inevitably we will all find ourselves worried that a bookmaker doesn’t want to pay us. Hopefully it will be because we made a mistake ourselves (which we can easily fix) and not because the bookmaker doesn’t have our money any more… (or worse, DOES have our money and simply wants to keep it). So lets look at how to resolve this problem…

Check YOU Aren’t the Problem

Before anything else, you really have to make sure you haven’t made the mistake which has led to this problem. Don’t start off with the assumption that the bookie is a crook and they are trying to steal your money – it will only make this process harder.

First, read any information that you can find on the bookmaker website that describes the steps you need to take before you attempt to withdraw. For example, many bookmakers will require scanned documents to be sent to them to prove you are who you claim to be, and that you live where you claim to live. They might want a scanned copy of photo ID, a utility bill (at the address where your betting account is listed at), a scan of the credit card you used to deposit with (if you used one), or sometimes all three of these.

In other instances, you may be expected to have bet all of your deposit at least once through, or reach a rollover requirement for a bonus you had claimed – the bookmaker shouldn’t hold your money in these cases, but most will not provide your withdrawal straight away but instead ask you if you are certain you want to withdraw early and pay some associated fee or forfeit your bonus – so check your email spam box and your in-house bookmaker message system to see if this has happened.

If you are confident that you have everything in order to enable you to withdraw, then you need to check to make sure you have provided them with the right withdrawal information. You can’t always withdraw using the same method you have deposited with, so make sure you are able to withdraw via the method you want, and make sure you have entered your account number, or whatever, correctly.

Check for Miscommunication

Many withdrawal problems may come from the fact that a bookmaker has requested some information, or some action, but either they have not been very clear with the request or you have misunderstood the request. The result of this is to leave you waiting for them to do something, while they are waiting for you do something – they forget about the situation and you assume they are avoiding paying up.

If in doubt, always go back and read through all of the emails you may have exchanged with the bookmaker in question. Also do a search of your spam inbox if you have one to make sure no crucial emails were missed.
If no emails have been exchanged at this point, be sure to remember this point as you begin to exchange emails – always ask for clarification if in doubt. Don’t try to guess.

Open a Friendly Dialogue

Assuming you have given the bookmaker a reasonable amount of time to make the payment (most good books will make the payment within a few days, but about a week is a reasonable amount of time to allow room for errors or genuine problems), you should send an email to customer service and explain your situation (calmly), and ask for someone to help resolve the situation and settle your account as soon as possible or explain the delay. Don’t demand anything or be rude about it, give them an opportunity to deal with a pleasant customer who they won’t mind helping out.

Persist with the friendly dialogue as long as is appropriate. If they offer a good reason, then take their word for it, and give them an appropriate amount of time to resolve the genuine problem before writing again and asking if the problem has been resolved and if you should be expecting your payment. Exactly how to handle this stage will vary completely from situation to situation, but if the bookmaker offers bad reasons, then try to call them out on it. If they repeatedly offer different reasons and seem to be stalling your payment, then you need to decide when the ‘friendly’ has gone on for long enough and move on to the next stage…

Make an Ultimatum

If you get to this stage, then you may have a real problem. If you have done everything right, been really nice about it and given the bookmaker plenty of time to fulfill his end of the bargain, then it is time to let the bookmaker know that if you don’t receive your money within the next 3 days, then you will go to the various major online sportsbook review services, and any appropriate governing bodies with your complaint.

Give them a specific period of time to make your payment and/or reply. Let them know that if no money or adequate reply is received, you will be contacting the appropriate governing body (this will very from bookmaker to bookmaker) and all of the major online bookmaker review sites to seek their assistance and lodge a general complaint about the service provided by this bookmaker.

If no money has arrived in the designated period of time, move on to the next step…

Contact the bookmaker review sites and any governing bodies

Exactly which site to contact will depend on where the book is registered, and which bookmaker review sites acknowledge its existence. Sports Book Review and The Online Wire are both very large well established websites that have a lot of influence over US facing books. Bookmakers Review and World Online Sports Bookmakers have a more global outlook and tend to get more of the smaller European, British and Asian books in their ratings guides. So if your bookmaker isn’t rated at SBR, it is not likely that SBR will be much help to you, nor would BMR be much help if your bookmaker isn’t rated with them. If your bookmaker isn’t rated at any of these rating websites – you really shouldn’t be betting with them in the first place – what were you thinking?!?

See FAQ Should I bet with this bookmaker?

Exactly how you contact the bookmaker review sites can be done one of two ways, and you will have to decide this based on your circumstances. If you think you still have a chance of getting your money (because the book is well known, has a reputation to maintain and/or has a C or better rating on average), then usually the best thing to do will be to go to the most appropriate bookmaker review site and submit a complaint/assistance request form or email the site owner with your problem. Then see if they are able to negotiating on your behalf with their stronger position of power.

If this first option still yields no results, or if you don’t think you have a chance in the first place based on your ‘friendly dialogue’, the only thing left to do is to contact all of the ratings sites and submit your complaint to all of them. Hopefully, this will create enough negative publicity for the book that they will really regret screwing you around and find themselves heavily pressured into apologising and paying you your withdrawal in an effort to reduce the negative publicity.

Resources:

1. SBR Sportsbook Complaint Form
2. BMR Complaints Page – information and directions for contact
3. WOSB Sportsbook Assistance Contact Form
4. TOW Dispute Assistance Page – email contact provided

Hope…

There is no way to guarantee payment, but this is the best way I know of to give yourself the best chance of receiving payment. If the bookmaker is genuinely suffering from financial hardship, then unfortunately there is nothing that can be done to help – they can’t pay money they don’t have. If you are really lucky, they may find the money after some time and still complete the payment – but this is rare.

How to Avoid the Problem to Begin With

The reality of the situation is that some online sportsbooks and casinos are run by criminals who will have no problem stealing money from people. Your job as an arber is to minimise your risk by avoiding books that might fall under that category. As well as that, some honest books will go bankrupt from time to time. Again, you need to minimise that risk to the best of your ability by never allowing too much of your bankroll to end up in any one bookmaker, to watch out for warning signs of bookmaker collapse (watch chatter on forums, postings on bookmaker review sites, and any delays in payment processing etc.), and to stick with highly reputable books (well regulated ones too – for example Australia has strict regulations ensuring no bookmaker will ever close down and not be able to pay all of its players).

Everything outside of those two scenarios though, you just have to deal with to the best of your ability, along the lines described above. By doing so, you should usually get your money back by just being patient and diligent.

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Palps – How to Spot Obvious Errors

Posted by Aegist on February 13th, 2009

The obvious/palpable error clause is present in every bookmaker you will find online, and it is the bane of all arbitrage traders. It basically states that if the bookmaker makes an obvious error in setting or accepting a bet, then it has the right to void that bet at any time. Any bet which is voided (or likely to be voided) under this rule is commonly called a ‘Palp’. Most bookmakers are honourable enough to only void palps before the event starts, but some bookmakers will cancel bets mid-match, while some of the dodgier ones will actually cancel bets after the match is completed (another good reason to avoid dodgy sportsbooks).

If only all palps were this obvious…

The consequences of placing a bet on a palp are twofold…

Firstly, if the bet is voided you will be left with an open bet; you will need to search for a new set of odds to cover the voided bet in order to maintain the arb. You will either be able to cover the voided bet with significantly lower value odds (locking in a small guaranteed loss),  or you will be unable to find odds to cover the voided bet and be left with an open bet (leaving to chance a large loss or large win).

The second major consequence of placing a palp, is that it identifies you to the bookmaker as a potential ‘sharp’ or arbitrage trader. You are in effect openly admitting to them that you are going to use them for their weak lines (odds higher than they probably should be), and take full advantage of any weakness they show – without mercy. Most bookmakers will respond to this by limiting your account to relatively small bet volumes to help protect themselves against the losses they will face at your hands. Losing key bookmakers to tiny bet limits can be particularly frustrating.

How to avoid Palps

So with good reason to try to avoid placing palps, the trick is in spotting them. Exactly what constitutes ‘obvious’ is always left undefined by bookmakers, and when the clause is enacted usual varies a lot from bookmaker to bookmaker. The best we can do as arbers is follow a few guideline rules until experience kicks in and makes it much easier to just recognise when a bet is a palp rather than great value.

Some of the guidelines below will only apply to two way arbs (two team no draw bets, asian handicaps, over/under, etc). This should be quite obvious in each example as only the ‘two’ odds will be referred to. Obviously the two way specific guidelines are no good for when dealing with 3-way arbs.

Compare Odds with the General Marketplace

The first step is to simply look at the marketplace – compare the odds of your arb with all of the other odds available at other bookmakers. Most decent alert services will allow you to view all odds for the bet you are looking at with a simple click, but if they don’t you can use other free odds comparison services for this function. You are probably looking at a palp if one of your sets of odds is clearly out of line with all of the other bookmakers, while everyone else has a general agreement about the odds. If there is a wide range of odds and your odds are just the best of that range, then that is probably a good arb.

Exactly what makes your odds ‘clearly out of line’ is not easy to define and is something which you will come to know with experience (it will probably help to look at the marketplace for every arb you place, so you can regularly see what a good arb looks like in comparison to all of the other bookmakers). It is impossible to give a definite value difference because of how odds work – the difference from 1.10 to 1.20 is actually very large, while the difference from 10.00 to 12.00 is really quite small. So the value differences of 0.1 vs 2.0 are misleading. Percentage difference is more useful, but still not completely reliable for the same reason; comparing odds of 2.00 to odds of 4.00 is a 100% difference, but so are odds of 250.00 vs 500.00. In the first case, if the market agrees the odds are around 2.00, then the lone book with odds of 4.00 is without doubt a palp. In the second case, if the market agrees the odds are around 250.00 then the single book with odds of 500.00 is probably fine.

Underdog and Favourite vs. Close Game

Another strong indicator of error is finding an arb where the odds seem to disagree as to whether the game in question is going to be a close game (odds near 2.0), or a game with a clear favourite and underdog (one team well below 2.0, and one team well above 2.0). For the purpose of providing a rough guideline, anything between 1.85 and 2.25 indicates a close game, while anything outside that range indicates a clear favourite and underdog. Arbs should always be between odds that indicate a clear underdog vs a clear favourite, or they should be between odds of two close teams.

If you find an arb where one bookmaker offers odds of 2.5 for one team, it means they think that this team is a clear underdog. If the other side of the arb is 1.9, that means this bookmaker thinks their team has about a 50-50 chance to win (not a clear favourite or underdog). In order for these odds to be real, it would mean the bookmakers don’t just disagree on the correct odds for the game, it means they completely disagree on everything about the game. In this age, such a thing really doesn’t happen.

The only possible explanation for this example which doesn’t involve an obvious error in odds setting is that there has been a major swing (MVP of favourite team injured, for example) and one of the books moved their odds faster than the other one (this is what arber dreams are made of btw).

The point of this guideline, is to simply give you another indication that something might be wrong, and to go looking for the cause of this discrepancy. The section below describes a number of the common errors to look for.

Spotting the Actual Error in a Palp – Typos and Transposed Digits

An easy mistake to make…

In a way, all palps should come down to this – that is what the ‘obvious error’ is ideally referring to; someone accidentally typed a 2.5 instead of a 1.5 and the typo should be obvious to anyone looking. Unfortunately, not all typos are quite that obvious. If the bookmaker meant to set their odds at a relatively low 2.70 compared to the market average of 3.0 with a high of 3.35, but accidently typed in 3.70 instead, you could easily think that this book was simply the best option available and miss the obvious error.

So a constant thought when checking out an arb is to quickly run through a range of likely typos and transposed digits. Look at the general marketplace, and work through some of these examples of common errors, and ask whether the odds would look more reasonable in each instance:

1. Simple number substitution

Like the example above, simply typing one number when a different was meant. So if the odd is 3.6, compare it to the marketplace and see whether 2.6 is more in line with the norm. It probably isn’t worth doing that same exercise with any numbers after the decimal point though, because you will be left second guessing every arb if you do that.

2. Swapped Teams/Outcomes

This one is usually pretty obvious because both odds in your arb will be above 2.00, which should never happen in 2-way bets except for when the game is really close, and both sets of odds are right around 2.

3. Swapped Handicap
   

Nearly always the underdog will be given a positive handicap (+1.5 goals for example) in an effort to even the odds (bring them close to 2.00). So if you see a + handicap on the favourite (and the odds are still around 1.9-2.0), the bookmaker has probably accidentallyswapped the – for a +.

4. Swapped + / – Sign in US Odds

US Bookmakers will usually set their odds in the US format (+110, -110), so it is possible for a favourite with its negative indication on the odds to be accidentally entered with a plus, so what should be entered as -230 (1.43) might be accidently entered as +230 (3.30). So even if you are not working with US odds, remember that the bookmaker might have made an error in setting the odds in US mode, which will then be automatically converted to whatever odds you like to work in.

There are more errors than these four, but these are the major ones and give you a solid basis to figure out other ones. You will probably spot more as you look around at odds provided by your alert service.

As an educational exercise, go out of your way to inspect the obvious palps your alert service sends you. During a quiet period look for any 20%-80% arbs which have been reported by your service recently and take the time to look at the marketplace and the bookmakers themselves and see if you can spot exactly what is wrong – figure out what error has been made. You never know, you might find a real 20% arb which you otherwise would have let slide on the assumption it was going to be a palp .

Conclusion

Eventually spotting palps becomes second nature. Until then, these guidelines will help you spot them. Follow the advice above to regularly look at the general marketplace of any arbs you place as well as any particularly large percentage arbs which you would normally assume to be a palp without actually looking. If you keep exposing yourself to good arbs in comparison to the marketplace, and palps in comparison to the marketplace, you will start to get a feel for it pretty quickly.

Good luck, and may every voided bet you get stuck with leave you with a winning bet, rather then a losing one!

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