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I’d have taken the law into my own hands on that one
By the time I’d have finished with him the only thing he’d be threatening people with would be an apology
Shameful behaviour from that company Gladiateur – sickening behaviour. Your family must have felt abandoned and betrayed on that one. Desperate stuff.
The trouble is that such behaviour is reasonably commonplace in betting shops- certainly in the less salubrious parts of South London, at any rate. Losing punters swear at, threaten, spit at and even physically assault staff, yet the bookmakers don’t care as long as the pennies come rolling in.
And my ex, and everyone to whom I’ve spoken in shops (both staff and punters), will all tell you the same thing: despite what the ABB and others might say, 99% of trouble in betting shops comes from FOBT players.
yeats, I understand your moral objections to FOBTs. Your reasoning around the economics of machines V horse racing is utterly wrong.
The cost of media rights (controlled by racetracks) and the level of knowledge and skill among punters has combined to make racing a product that is close to untenable from a business viewpoint, especially in shops with the attendant costs – rates, rent, staff etc. It’s not a choice for bookmakers between the ‘risk’ of taking bets on racing and encouraging FOBT use. Why would anyone sell a product on which they make no money or little money, and in many cases lose money?
FOBTs are keeping many shops open. Believe me, I’ve seen the figures. No FOBTs means losing about half the High St shops. If that happens racecourses start closing and racing’s demise comes closer. If you have no objection to that, then that’s fine. But don’t carry on in the belief that once FOBTs are gone, bookies will happily start selling racing again. That won’t happen.
I live in a medium sized town in the north Midlands. In the town centre there are 2 Ladbrokes, 2 Hills, 2 Betfred and 1 Coral and 6 others within a mile or so, not including independents. Punters would hardly be inconvenienced by losing half of them, The introduction of FOBTs incentivised more shops than were needed by punters, though I admit you are correct in doubting bookies will return to selling racing again.
In theory a shop manager can refuse anyone’s business on any product. But if the point is trying to encourage a player to seek help through counselling and the formalities of self-exclusion then just barring the customer makes no sense. In doing that staff are only, as the Yanks say, kicking the can down the road for someone else to pick up.
If there’s no can, in this case the immoral Fobt’s the problem is allayed to a certain extent and the can wouldn’t be kicked down the road.
steeplechasing, you appear to support bookmakers in their use of Fobt’s and are keen to continually put forward the questionable negative impact you consider will apply to horse racing with their withdrawal.
Yet these exact same bookmakers you are dead against because they wont become ABP of horse racing.Sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture rather than what might or might not be good for racing.
yeats, it’s not that straightforward. I’d rather FOBTs had never been invented, not so much because of their social impact, but in the way they have become the basket in which everybody’s eggs are now resting – bookmaking and racing.
I worked in the the betting industry for many years and, like a few others, saw this coming at the start. Easy money: let’s throw all our resources at FOBTs. Er, that would be a bad idea guys, because if you ever lose them and you have no reliable fallback product, you’re ******. Nah, we’ll be fine, lets crack on. I ended up feeling like Hooper in Jaws and finally walked away from the industry mentally mouthing as Hooper did ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’
What brought about the ‘success’ of FOBTs was not technology, it was John Brown (Hills CEO at the time) and his campaign for the abolition of turnover tax and the introduction of gross profits tax. FOBTs operating on turnover tax would have been ridiculously unviable – a punter starts with a tenner, turns it over ten times before he loses it and the bookmaker has to pay tax on £100 to win that tenner.
As soon as that changed to tax on a bookmaker’s gross profit the Golden Goose was released – or so they thought. Anyway without detailing every one of the 15 years between then and now, FOBTs are keeping the betting industry alive. The betting industry keeps the racing industry alive. Neither industry should have allowed themselves to get anywhere near this position.
Bookies must bear the blame for indulging in suicidal short-termism and the BHA made a massive mistake when it ceded the commercial control of fixtures to racetracks, because racetracks are concerned with their own profits, not the sport’s profits. You’d think those go hand in hand, but human beings are short-termers by nature, and sure enough, racetracks took the view that the bookies have a lot of money so let’s bleed them while we can with media rights charges. And that’s how racing was pushed over the edge.
Bookies were already on the defensive selling racing as a betting product. Another effect of the gross profits tax was to remove the barrier punters faced in long odds-on betting. Fifty grand at 1/5 was way too risky when you had tax deducted from winnings. For many, after GPT was introduced, it became investment territory. That was probably the start of serious restrictions by bookies on stakes.
From then they’ve been battling against ever more skilful punters using ever-improving technology. Betfair flourished in the years after GPT came in, driving down over-rounds and therefore profits and bookies found themselves almost punch drunk trying to handle betting on racing. They couldn’t stop taking bets on it because it was the reason most customers came into shops.
When it seemed things were pretty bad, a competitor to SiS came along and did deals with half the tracks, effectively doubling the cost to bookmakers of getting pictures into shops – media rights. Racing cheered at finally having the bookies against the ropes, until it realised – 1. Racing doesn’t get the media rights money, private companies running the tracks do. 2 putting your most important retail distributor on the ropes is foolishness of the crassest kind (celebrating the fact doesn’t help much either).
Now FOBTs, aside from the social damage to some users and to some betting shop staff, tower over the future of two industries. It cannot be the fault of inanimate machines that we’re in this state, it can only be the fault of those charged with keeping betting and racing healthy.
So, that’s my position on FOBTs and my history. There will always be people vulnerable to gambling addiction and there will always be others who suffer collateral damage because of that. When FOBTs go, something else will addict players who are prone to addiction.
I have no strong feelings about the machines themselves. I have very strong feelings about those, in both industries, who have painted themselves into a perfectly predictable corner. And there is no way out.
The betting industry’s response to the relentless media assault on FOBTs has been embarrassingly inept. If you are going to dam Niagara Falls, you’d better spend plenty years planning. I cannot see the machines surviving into the 2020s. Where we will all be after that is anyone’s guess.
You say that bookmakers are “battling against ever more skillful punters” But is that true?
My guess is yes there are more people clued up than before, but the reality remains that the majority of people who bet on sports and horse racing are still long-term losers.
The bookmakers employ large teams of people to make the odds, which are also heavily slanted in their favour.
I reckon they still make profits similar to what they were making twenty odd years ago, just that these profits are tiny in comparison to what they are making from FOTBS.
That’s an excellent post, Steeplechasing, and perfectly summarises how racing has become reliant upon those odious bookmakers.
The answer, of course, is for the sport to divorce itself from these parasites through the abolition of the betting levy; if the sport became self-funding, the less successful racecourses would sadly close down and there would be concomitant losses in the betting, breeding and other associated industries.
However, short of the introduction of a pari mutuel style system (and that boat sadly sailed years ago), there is no alternative.
You say that bookmakers are “battling against ever more skillful punters” But is that true?
My guess is yes there are more people clued up than before, but the reality remains that the majority of people who bet on sports and horse racing are still long-term losers.
Of course should FOBTs go the way of the dodo there would be an army of low/zero skilled punters needing to get their fix somewhere. Sadly that place would probably be an online casino or ‘Lucksin Downs’. Was in a Coral the other day and they have cartoon football now
EDIT: Just spotted this, I don’t really understand what’s gone on here but seems relevant somehow.
A rather good counterblast to the government’s decision to scrap the review of FOBTs
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/a-stupid-gamble-on-evil-machines
Sums it up well really. Too many making too much money out of it to stop it now. I’d say corruption is the more likely candidate, wouldn’t be surprised if the regulations deliberately contained the loopholes.
I would add that the £500 a minute figure is wrong. The real figure (at least in theory) of a ton every 20 seconds is surely just as shocking to the uninitiated.
A rather good counterblast to the government’s decision to scrap the review of FOBTs
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/a-stupid-gamble-on-evil-machines
Except that it’s short on detail and its key ‘shock value’ fact was taken from a Daily Mail Online report, that ‘paper’ being about as reliable these days as Breitbart.
Was an individual amount of £1,000 lost in all 233,071 occasions cited by the author? I seriously doubt it. I have zero love for FOBTs, have never played one, never would and would advise others to stay way from them. But the gist of the long, long campaign against them has been based on the manipulation of stats. (Someone placing say £50 in cash and turning it over numerous times is being counted as having “lost £1,000” when that is not the case. He has lost £50. That was what he went into the shop with).
If FOBTs are ever banned because of this campaign, I wonder what the next target will be. And I wonder how horse players would feel if our betting habits were next in the firing line and a way was found to use similar highly misleading stats to ban betting on racing?
I have zero love for FOBTs, have never played one, never would and would advise others to stay way from them. But the gist of the long, long campaign against them has been based on the manipulation of stats. (Someone placing say £50 in cash and turning it over numerous times is being counted as having “lost £1,000” when that is not the case. He has lost £50. That was what he went into the shop with).
If FOBTs are ever banned because of this campaign, I wonder what the next target will be. And I wonder how horse players would feel if our betting habits were next in the firing line and a way was found to use similar highly misleading stats to ban betting on racing?
A red herring if ever there was one steeplechasing.
Many labour poiticians now admit that the area where they really got the gambling deregulation wrong in 2005 was with FOBT’s, Newsnight last Thursday covered the issue again as did Vine on R2 yesterday.
Bookmakers couldn’t believe their luck at the time and of course they’ve made the most of their good fortune by the clustering of more betting shops, many just to facilitate these machines.
It’s wrong, they don’t belong on the high street and should never have been allowed.I’m surprised Simon Nott hasn’t yet linked to his latest blog.
Not guaranteed to go down well in these parts!
A new study says Britain is the only country to allow £100 punts on fixed-odds betting terminals.
It adds that one in three problem gamblers earn £10,400 a year or less – meaning that they could legally stake a month’s wages in three minutes.
The report by think-tank ResPublica says Belgium allows the second-highest stakes – £21 – but most European countries limit them to under £1.
I’m surprised Simon Nott hasn’t yet linked to his latest blog.
Not guaranteed to go down well in these parts!
yes terrible isn’t it. It’s like attacking those lovely dealers for handing out that heroin. how dare they!
<p abp=”265″>I’m surprised Simon Nott hasn’t yet linked to his latest blog.
<p abp=”266″>Not guaranteed to go down well in these parts!
<p abp=”267″>http://www.simonnott.co.uk/bookmakers-or-baby-sitters/
<p abp=”269″>yes terrible isn’t it. It’s like attacking those lovely dealers for handing out that heroin. how dare they!
Well he does say, at the end, “did I get it wrong”. Perhaps the direction of attack should be legislation which allowed machines in betting shops. Race betting gives you a chance of winning and they don’t call them bandits for nothing. In the 70s and 80s, perhaps moreso in the 60s, betting shops were a place for social gathering apart from gambling. Staff were generally raceing knowledgeable. Now they’re like clinics with staff who know nowt about medicine, how it works or patient care.
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