The current policy by the betting companies with regard to affordability checks is so misguided and in many instances is encouraging the opposite behaviours of what was intended. Some of the policies actually discourage responsible gambling. I have touched on it before but it was highlighted again to me this week through a good friend. I will use hypothetical numbers rather than the actual numbers to protect them.
Let’s imagine you have an account where you won £200k last year. However, you don’t want to leave £200k in your account for various reasons. Maybe you just want to leave £50k in the account. The reasons might be that it is the responsible thing to do to remove some of your money from the table as such. Maybe you don’t trust a betting company enough to hold £200k of your money. Maybe you have other bills to pay. Any which way you still have a decent bankroll left on the site. You have won at a consistent rate for several years. You are one of the biggest liquidity providers on that site. You go on a downswing that is the worst one you have ever experienced. The £50k bankroll you had on site is wiped out.
You then try and deposit funds back onto the site. However, all you are faced with is ludicrous request after ludicrous request for information relating to affordability. Despite being able to show you have a pot of funds much larger than the £200k you are unable to deposit as freely as you wish. You are caught up in a never ending tangle of paperwork that shows no sign of relenting. You have been unable to take positions that you normally would because you have been struggling to get money onto the site. It is absolutely bonkers. By being responsible and taking money out of the betting company you are causing yourself a whole world of pain and potentially costing yourself future opportunities.
What it then encourages is people to leave more money on the betting sites than they would like. How can that in any shape or form be described as a policy encouraging responsible gambling/behaviours? It doesn’t. Variance is a very real problem for punters no matter how good you are.
I have made a specific effort in recent months to keep more money on Betfair than I would do in an ideal world. For this very reason. It’s something that you have to be incredibly aware of. The issue is very real. Common sense out of the window. Eventually people will say enough is enough. I will go and spend my time and effort in a different industry. That type of thing doesn’t bode well for the future of Betfair and Betting Exchanges. If they disappear the game will be gone for most.
I am not for one moment advocating a situation where if someone has won £200k they should be allowed to deposit £200k. The reality is that they are unlikely to have all that money still. It also doesn’t make sense for them to be struggling to deposit £10k a time.
People will see this on a much smaller scale across a set of bookmaker accounts. Depending on how you bet you may have lots of losing accounts where you run into deposit issues. If you then had a big winner with another account you will be greeted by restrictions.
The joys of the current betting landscape. As usual you may well have to adapt strategies and the way you bet, to account for what is happening. We need to at least make the affordability checks make sense and not penalise people for being responsible!
ProPunting 