Other Matched Betting

A couple of years ago my mother (bless her heart) bought me a book about the origins of crime in the East End of London.

Oddly enough there was a huge section of the book about gambling, and the origins of it. It was designed by criminals with which to fleece people. Mostly it began with stalls outside of horse races, crooked as can be.

This origin then continued and well, gambling is now what it is.

However, any one thinking that gambling isn't fixed really need to have a word with themselves. Many years ago I was quite heavily involved in the production of a real fruit machine emulator. I can't even begin to explain how many illegal activities were found during that time.

One of which was the fact that pretty much all Hi Lo gambles and any repeat chances were completely pre determined. One machine even showed you how many gambles the machine had allowed if you connected up an Aux 7 segment display (easy in the emulator).

Needless to say an enormous poo storm ensued, with the end result being that BACTA basically put a sticker on their machines to cover themselves.

But it goes on a lot further than that. I also met a few people during that time who actually worked coding the software for fruit machines. In many cases they were putting in 'emptiers' and then selling them to friends and associates. Some were caught but it still goes on.

But I'm wasting my time really. Obsessive gamblers are pretty much in the same ranks of drug addicts and alcoholics and you can give them all of the facts you want yet they will just ignore you and continue regardless.

It's quite an illness is gambling. I've seen people lose their wives, jobs and even their houses because of it.

So IMO this forum should not be used to promote it. It's just like some one posting saying they know where to get cheap weed or alcohol IMO.

 

Right, so as I suspected earlier in the thread you do eventually run out of offers, making it more difficult to actually sustain over the long term.

If you bet in person in the bookies surely they get to know you and what you are doing and just refuse you. Do physical bookies have the same offers that enable match betting?. It seems unlikely to me.

 

For those claiming all forms of gambling is bad, should we all stop taking out house insurance, then?

 

How many people do you know that are addicted to taking out insurance policies on their house?

The cost of losing your home would be devastating. I would think that most people get enough job stability to find a place to settle and just about squeeze a mortgage in over their working lives. When you have no insurance and your house burns to the ground, you can't simply go, ah well better luck next time and start again.

Yes, insurance is putting money down against an event that might happen in the future. However, buying insurance doesn't stimulate the brain in the same way that gambling does. No one gets excitement from it. If anything its the opposite. Even if it does stimulate excitement, there is no means which enables the immediate repetition of the process. So in terms of stimulating excitement, having the ability to create a compulsion and addictive traits within a person, buying insurance and gambling are completely different.

Also when insurance pays out, you haven't won anything. You have lost your house. You also aren't up any money, sine you have essentially lost your biggest asset. So even financially it is different from gambling.

Your point is based on cherry picking the single similarity between these two things and then implying they are both the same whilst ignoring every other aspect of both. There's probably a name on that fallacy.

 

In other news, flying is the same as walking (they're both modes of transport), red is the same as green (they're both colours) and up is the same as down (they're both directions).

 

I'll put a tenner on that...

 

There's no great about it, I have never been a gambler. As i said earlier, i don't mind losing the odd £20 on blackjack after a few pints but thats mainly as the only place near where i lived that opened late and wasn't a club was the Casino on a rare night out.

I started with a £1000 float, but still have that, so if you feel that way, match betting isn't for you.

Agreed, as i said earlier, i wouldn't have commented if it wasn't a new site that i hadn't heard of and it's good to see someone else have a go. I don't try and persuade people or even discuss it with people as know people don't understand it and can't get out of their head that this is about maths and not gambling (keep saying it guys, i don't agree with you). It's only a gamble if you decide to take your winnings and whack it on a horse, which is simply stupid as you destroy all the hard work. The name here is to not be greedy.

Thanks for your foresight and infinite wisdom on this, once again i've been doing it for five years and had seven emails on saturday with free bets. I didn't even look at them but from knowledge this would probably average as a £100 take home after the days work. Yes accounts get closed, but hey, five years isn't bad right?

Once again, i'm pleased i learnt about it and have had a good time with it. The first person to get me involved with this was a house wife/mother on MoneySavingExpert that i knew. She was a maths teacher and enjoyed doing the maths, and the bonus was the money as the outcome, we all shared codes and signup bonuses etc. Have a read, there are a few people who share this philosophy still active on the forum.


Guys, we should agree to disagree, some of you think it's betting, some are worried about weak minded people getting into gambling and i think some simply don't understand it. If it's not for you then that's absolutely fine. I'm only replying as the comments make me sound like some lying gambling addict, which i'm not, whatever you may think. Anyhow, i'm out.

 

Insurance, especially house insurance, is a legal obligation....

 

No it's not. Motor insurance is, though.

 

Buildings insurance is usually required to be in place under your mortgage terms which is contract law, not civil law.

 

By my understanding, some mortgage providers do occasionally make it a requirement, but it's mostly about common sense - if your house burns down, do you really want to be paying the mortgage on the charred remains?

 

Almost all providers do. Especially if you live in a terrace.

We had mortgage quotes from ~15 providers 3 years ago. All of them required house insurance to cover the adjoining houses.

 

Thats a condition of the lender, not a legal obligation.

 

I'll admit that maybe it isn't, but when 90% of lenders now all require it, you have to wonder why it isn't.
And especially when car insurance is required by law to cover all victims of an accident, why are all adjoining and affected homeowners not required to be covered?

As an aside, you're picking at threads that have nothing to do with the initial question. Insurance is not gambling. It's coverage against the possible.
Not getting insurance, now that's gambling.

 

This is in 'general'. It's also a valid discussion

 

And I've been contributing to it, rather than giving a frivolous to a point taken out of context.

My argument still stands, insurance is not gambling...

 

You're really spoiling for a fight aren't you!

Insurance is all about risk, odds, chance, and making decisions about likely outcomes. It really is quite a lot like gambling. Instead of bookmakers setting odds, risk assessors set likelihoods.

Similar sums, similar ethos.

 

Anyway, my point is we make bets all the time, even if they aren't so conveniently packaged. The reason placing a bet at the bookies (or going to a casino, playing the lottery etc) is generally looked down upon is twofold:

First of all the expected financial return (i.e. amount of money gained times the probablitily of making it) of making such a bet is less than zero meaning that if you make a lot of bets then you are almost certainly going to be worse off. However for most people, the enjoyment of putting a tenner on the grand national outweighs the £1 or so they will lose on avergae from placing it i.e. the expected utility of the bet is actually positive. The same logic applies to taking out insurance; on average you will lose money, but actually the cosyt of not being able to afford a new house is greater than just the cost of the money lost so it makes sense. This reason doesn't apply in this case, on average you will make money if you take advantage of the £10 for £10 deals and if you place enough of them you will be making money. The matched part is just insuring you from losing too much on a short term basis.

Secondly, and probably the better reason, is that gambling can be addictive. This is always something to bear in mind in these instances and it applies even beyond the world of traditional gambling (e.g. to financial traders). But in this case, so long as you stick to the free bets (and set a limit to how much money you are prepared to be in-debt by at any given point) there's not much that can go wrong, so I don't think the gambling bogeyman is really that applicable in this case.

 

So when my house doesn't burn down, I win? Don't think so.

Trying to equate gambling to insurance would be to commit insurance fraud. Burning down your house on purpose with a massive claim behind it, hoping the assessor doesn't detect the scam.

If anyone in this thread is deciding to diverge that far from the point, then life is a gamble, walking out of the front door is a gamble, going for a bath is a gamble. Etc etc. The payoff being that you get to live another day.

 

What on earth are you on about?! I give up. I can't follow such a hotch-potch line of argument.

Besides - you don't win when your house doesn't burn down, the insurer does.