Casino Law To Blame For Ginola, Chocolate & Bad Odds For Burton?

The weekend “acca” is a long held tradition for many football fans across the country and I am one of them. Predicting 20 odd results and hoping for a big return on my £5 bet adds extra excitement to the weekend fixtures and in a strange way keeps me connected to “real” football because otherwise I would frankly have no interest in the fortunes of Burton Albion or Tranmere.

My habits have changed over the years from a Friday lunch time stroll to the local bookmakers with some work colleagues to pick up our slips to a more modern form of gambling – online.

Free from the bravado of picking out the ‘winning’ accumulator and flashing more notes than I probably should have I’ve gone from making a small loss to making a small profit on my weekend gambling activities and I put that down to online gambling.

No-one knows what I am betting (except the bookies) and as such I’m a little more conservative with my stake. I also take a few more risks as no-one can ridicule my predictions and greater risks have greater rewards. I still sting from the time I almost won £33k and was this close *holds finger a millimetre away from thumb* to quitting my job on the way to the bookmakers only to find out an extra time win – the only one – did not count.

I learnt a valuable lesson that day. I learnt it’s only the 90 minute result that counts despite there not being any small print to confirm it and not to brag about my winnings before I’ve cashed them.

My winnings these days are extremely modest and becoming increasingly more so. I’ve noticed the odds I get for attempting to predict a 20 match accumulator would land me less than a quarter of what it would have done 4 months ago. It’s not an exact science but I would regularly see a potential return on my betting slip of up to £8000 from a £5 accumulator (I wish!) yet recently they’ve been around the £1900 mark (I still wish! Always just one or two results shy).

I wondered why the odds were getting shorter as surely there can’t have been that many big wins the bookmakers are trying to control the damage and what I have ‘discovered’ is quite interesting.

I found out that there are new laws about taxes for online gambling in the UK and I wonder if that has had any effect. Casino’s and football accumulators aren’t intrinsically linked however if a larger proportion of gross gambling taxes are taken in taxes then the money will have to be made up elsewhere and this is how I think football accumulators are being affected.

Shares in some of the biggest bookmakers fell on the passing of the new law and that incorporates the football betting side of their businesses too. How to make up the shortfall though? The obvious choice is to reduce your payouts which means shortening odds but that could drive customers away. On close inspection of recent odds for my accumulators I am seeing close to evens on most lower league matches and I don’t think that is because of the difficulty bookmakers have in predicting a result I think it is the Cadbury’s formula.

Cadbury’s have been charging the same amount for chocolate for years as their bars have shrunk in size and weight. They are getting more money without raising prices just by shaving off a few grams of chocolatey goodness so effectively we are paying more but don’t realise it. We’re getting less for our money.

I think the same is true for my weekend accumulators as the headline odds on the big matches are still attractive but by shortening the odds on the “filler” matches we us to extend our accumulators the bookmakers have changed the odds from roughly 1600-1 to 380-1! The few winners amongst us are getting less Dairy Milk today than they were 6 months ago.

And then you have some aggressive and outlandish marketing campaigns to pay for like David Ginola going for the FIFA presidency. Anyone would be better than Blatter at this point but the cost of such a campaign will ultimately be funded by the consumer and that means shorter odds for lower payouts or to entice people to speculate more.