Back in 2006 I lived in London. Working in a restaurant, I got to know many Polish people and some of them shared some really interesting tricks they used to get money out of the bookies.
Online sports betting back in 2006 was very young and there was lots of space for errors. If you were about to open some online sports betting business, you had 2 choices.
- Outsourcing the odds via third party like Betradar
- Copying the odds from other bookies
In Poland the economical situation was not perfect and many bookies saved money by simply hiring an army of people and they were copying the odds from the giants such as Bet and Win (now Bwin).
The cost saving process worked almost perfectly, but manual copying was prone to errors. The most common error was related to time zones. It happened about twice a week and was related to Russian Premier League. In Russia you have 11 time zones and the territories tend to operate by both – local and Moscow time. Back then it was really confusing and many times happened that in Poland you could bet on a match that was already finished. So you knew the result.
Another problem the bookies had was when the match got postponed. Many times it again went by without any attention and the story was the same. You could have bet on the already finished match.
One day we decided to go for it. Back in 2006 there was no real online gambling and sports betting regulation here in the UK and you could bet on any site in the world – Polish, Chinese, Maltese…
The first weeks went all smoothly and we ended up making about £1 000. Then we got a little greedy and that was the end. We placed a bet of £500 on the exact score and were supposed to win around £18 000. Of course the bookie revealed what we did and did not pay out the win. They even checked our previous activity and saw that 100% of our winnings was a monkey business such as the last one. They froze all our assets and that was it.
I am glad that we at least managed to withdraw some money before that and ended up with some decent winnings. After that the bookie tried hard to threaten me by calling or emailing, but you know. Back then it was difficult to fix injustice. Not just for the player but obviously for a bookie as well. Do I feel guilty? Not at all and if you are about to judge, I have a clear message for you. “Fuck you”.
Is something like that possible now? I doubt it!
