Is There Any Good Bookies These Days ?

[Nfehily19]

must occasionally be manual intervention on price cuts. Had a bet on machines yesterday at 9/4 and after a 5 min walk to 2nd branch to top up was cut to 7/4. Sports not horses

Depends on which bookie u used, most ssbt's are operated by outside companies and not the bookie, therefore prices are different on machines to over the counter most of the time too.

 

[Nfehily19]

Bookies vary obviously, but the average will allow a brand new customer to bet to a liability of £1000 if a price is taken on a weekday horse and twice that on Saturday and festival races.
Liabilities larger than that will require a "permission to lay" phone call to the traders.
The affordability/laundering checks come further down the line and obviously depend on the number and amount of said bets.

I wanted to prove I had balls once so had 500 pounds win on a 4/1 shot in a local Coral shop. The horse won. I got paid out in a brown envelope the next day. No questions asked. No answers given.

That was about 2009. Nowadays I'd probably be given a psychological evaluation not to mention a proper financial check.

I also had a couple monkey bets that went astray, one of them was actually pulled up, but I like to think merrily about the one I landed anyway. My stakes are a lot smaller these days, unless I've got winnings to play up that is.

Ry

 

[Nfehily19]

I wanted to prove I had balls once so had 500 pounds win on a 4/1 shot in a local Coral shop. The horse won. I got paid out in a brown envelope the next day. No questions asked. No answers given.

That was about 2009. Nowadays I'd probably be given a psychological evaluation not to mention a proper financial check.

I also had a couple monkey bets that went astray, one of them was actually pulled up, but I like to think merrily about the one I landed anyway. My stakes are a lot smaller these days, unless I've got winnings to play up that is.

 

[Quixall Crossett]

Very interesting to read a lot of ur posts, and agree with all of them in this thread.
I believe the bookies are goin the same way as the pubs, in that there will eventually just be one supersize bookie in each area pretty much, and it will be filled with as many ssbt terminals that they are allowed to have in and the max number of 4 (currently permitted) bgt's.
Over the counter business is dead nowadays and greyhound racing will very soon become a thing of the past, followed by horse racing within 50 years maximum I reckon.

I honestly dont know how it is gonna look in the future but i can safely say that the number of betting shops is gonna keep on dropping.
Go back 20, 30, 40 years ago and if a Tote monopoly had been mentioned i would have fought it as much as i could. But nowadays, bearing in mind that we have no REAL bookmakers around any more, it wouldnt bother me in the slightest although it probably wont happen in my lifetime.

But going back to price movements and the need to do it manually. i do remember quite a few occasions where i did lose it a bit with one or two people who just became so reliant on the bot that i really thought that there was no real need for them to be there at all. They are probably stacking shelves in Poundland now. I would shout over that they have just taken seven or eight bets in a row on a horse and they would reply "the bot isnt moving the price quick enough". My reply (minus the expletives) was "do it yourself then". They were just so reliant on the f**king thing. And thats just how it is these days. Everything is bot driven. No opinions, no going out on a limb, no taking one on. Nada !!!!!!
Boring !!!!!

 

[Quixall Crossett]

And speaking of taking one on, something which may surprise a few people is that we would use Betfair to take a bit more money on an odds on chance that i/we didnt fancy.
I've heard people talk about how bookies just offload all the money they have taken on each horse in each race and have it all back on Betfair and i've read people on about it as well. That is the biggest load of nonsense i have ever read or heard and if anybody really thinks that is what happens then i think they need to give their head a shake.
But when you have a very short one that you dont fancy for whatever reason, you just sit there and wait for all the short price punters to pile in and hope there is plenty of them. But occasionally, if it is quiet or they are playing smaller or whatever, the liability on that horse is nowhere near where you would really like it. So, and i know at least two other firms who did this, we would use our company Betfair account and start laying the odds on chance for as much as we felt comfortable with and get that liability, and hopefully our profit, up. And that was just classed as Betfair having a bet on the odds on chance with us.
That, to me, was what it was all about. Going out on a limb. Having an opinion and taking one on. And thankfully, looking back, it came off far, far more times than it didnt.

Happy days.

 

[reet hard]

I've a bookie friend who regularly lays off on Betfair.

 

[Quixall Crossett]

I've a bookie friend who regularly lays off on Betfair.

Yeah, plenty will lay off on Betfair reet, but what i am talking about is laying on Betfair to get our liability up. For example, lets just say we wanted the 2/5 fav to be a minimum £30k loser and there were only a few minutes to the off and it was only a £22k loser, we would look to lay £20k on Betfair to lose £8k and take the liability up to £30k.