Do you know what happens if you only let a few players on the business market (I believe it is called oligopoly)? They will do their best to squeeze as much as possible, while exercising their power through the whole chain. Starting with suppliers, possible future competition and ending with customers.
No matter the field of entrepreneurship. We have seen that in telecommunications, e-commerce, hardware, software, energy… but the story goes on. Rowdie is about football, betting and gambling and this means we look at this field – a field we understand the best.
Predators in gambling and the necessity of regulation
In a previous article we have analyzed the stages of gambling regulation and we have no doubt that player protection is the most important issue we need to solve. Try to play or bet with a non-regulated gambling operator and hit some big win. There is a huge chance you will never see that money and not only that money, but also your initial deposits. You will be spun in circles till you give up. What am I talking about? Some of you know, but let me tell the other ones. The communication between a Punter and a Bookie might look as follows:
B: At this moment we are not able to process your withdrawal due to technical issues
P: Ok. It has been 2 weeks now. Did you solve the issue?
B: Thank you for reaching out. Our tech team is still looking at the issue. We will get back to you as soon as possible
P: Another 2 weeks have passed. Any progress?
B: Your case has been forwarded to a higher stage. Please bear with us. We will get back to you asap.
P: It has been 2 months now. I really want my money.
B: Our tech team is looking at your issue. We will get back to you soon.
At some point you will get to a moment with no answer and hopelessly give up. So yeah… regulation is necessary to rule out and punish crooks like this.
There is a predator in each of us
Looking at one side of the equation we tend to forget the other side. Let’s look at what happened at the regulated markets with a low number of registered operators. Great examples are the gambling markets of Slovakia or Czechia.
We dived deep to look at problems with these ” markets together with Darktip. Please look at our interview.
Q: Darktip operates in the mentioned markets. What do you consider the biggest issue?
A: Darktip is an affiliate website and this means earn based on how much turnover we lead to the bookmaker. We divide the times into before and after regulation. Before regulation we could promote hundreds of bookies and none of them were crooks. Bookmakers were competing to be advertised by us. Situation changed around 2018, when non local bookies got banned and many times also blocked.
Q: I still do not see the issue. What exactly is the problem? Instead of promoting 100 of them, you promote 5.
A: Exactly and those 5 are not really forced to compete against each other. Before regulation we had lifelong revenue share plus other benefits, now it is no more than one year. Hope this will change as some big names enter the local market.
Q: What if those without a license still accept the local players?
A: You have a list of legal operators and then here is a blacklist.
Q: What happens to the blacklisted ones?
A: Some operators do not intend to intrude on the laws of Slovakia or Czechia. As an example I can say about some Asian bookies. They focus on the Thai or Chinese market and also provide their website in English. They don’t care nor know about our legislation and accept our players. This is when our finance department steps in and blocks them by internet providers.
Q: Are there also some that intentionally break our law?
A: Of course. Many of them are the predators I spoke about.
Q: Is blocking efficient?
A: Yes and No. It takes a few minutes to come up with a new domain. If e.g. illigaloperator.com gets blocked, in short there is a domain illegaloperator1.com live and so on. Same bookie, different domain. The problem is that the registered player has no idea about the new domain and needs to do research. This is a hindrance that players don’t like, so yeah. It is kind of efficient.
Q: Why do punters actually bet in non-regulated betting shops?
A: Sometimes you have better odds, most of the time you have more betting markets. In general, I don’t recommend losing protection for this benefit.
