Bookmakers Cheat - Tracking & Sustainability

Bookmakers are not your friends. They are in the business of making money. They win when you lose.

When you place a bet, you're entering into a metaphorical contract with the bookmaker. The terms of this contract are designed to ensure that, over time, the bookmaker will make a profit regardless of the outcome of individual events.

As matched bettors, we're not honouring the spirit of this contract. Instead, we're exploiting the bonuses and promotions offered by bookmakers to generate a profit for ourselves.

This profit doesn't come from nowhere - it comes directly from the bookmaker's losses. Every time we successfully complete a matched bet, the bookmaker is losing money.

Getting 'gubbed'

It'll vary from person to person, but as you continue your matched betting journey, you'll likely find that bookmakers will start to limit or ban your access to their promotions. This is because they've identified you as a "professional" bettor who is exploiting their offers.

We call this being 'gubbed'. The vast majority of the time a gub is permanent, meaning you won't be able to access any future promotions from that bookmaker.

This naturally presents a question - how do we avoid being gubbed?

Should we care?

Some bookmaker accounts can be worth protecting. To speak plainly, some aren't.

If a bookmaker consistently offers poor odds, has a terrible user interface, or is known for not paying out winnings, then there's little reason to care about being gubbed from that bookmaker.

This presents us with two strategies:

Bet Sustainably: On bookmakers you care about, we should make sure we're betting in a way that minimizes the risk of being gubbed. We'll cover some strategies for this in the next lesson. Typically we care about protecting our corporate bookmaker accounts.
Bet Aggressively: On bookmakers you don't care about, you can afford to be more aggressive in your matched betting. Go all-in on every promotion, knowing that if you get gubbed, it's not a big loss.

Your personal situation will dictate how you balance these two strategies. For some people, matched betting is a short-term endeavour, and they don't care about being gubbed at all. For others, matched betting is a long-term strategy, and they want to preserve access to as many bookmakers as possible.