CHAPTER 2

My Betting History

During the summer holidays in 2016, there was a major football tournament, the European Championship, in which I was sufficiently interested. On the internet, I sometimes read the comments on the sports pages related to an upcoming or past match. On these pages, advertisements of various betting companies often flicker, luring new customers with so-called welcome offers by holding out the prospect of a bonus, usually €100.

I was never actually interested in betting at that time — it goes without saying for a statistician, that betting providers ALWAYS win — and I never bothered to give these ads even a moment of my time. Betting providers were, in my mind at the time anyway, organisations with a criminal background.

Apparently, I must have been very bored during these holidays because I did click on an advertising banner of a well-known betting provider. At the time, I only wanted to read through the offer to prove to myself once again my above-average knowledge of statistics. After reading the bonus conditions carefully, I wanted to have proof that the betting provider was not giving me €100, but was making a profit — if everything went “normally”, of course!

So, I sat down, studied the rather hidden conditions of participation and began to calculate: Turnover conditions, margins, expected value, etc….

After I had studied the conditions for about two hours and noted down a few sample calculations, I knew that the betting provider would not give a new customer €100, but at least €40.

A competitor of this betting provider was also put through its paces by me with an almost identical offer: Here, too, the so-called “expected value for the player” was €40.

Well, I thought, that can’t be true, I’ll just do that now. Registered with both providers, deposited €100 and was pleased with the betting account of “€100 real money” plus “€100 bonus money” in each case.

I placed my bets — and lost all my capital pretty quickly with the first betting provider! With the other betting provider, however, I was pleased to have a capital of over €350 in real money after going through €600 worth of bets! I still believed that betting providers were actually criminals and could hardly imagine that the betting provider would pay me the €350 without any problems.

I was really pleasantly surprised: without any fees, I had my entire betting balance in my current account two days later.

I had made a profit of more than €150 because I had deposited €100 twice and now had €350.

I then played this game — just play the bonus and then cash out — with a good dozen betting companies — I lost my capital with some, but the winnings with the other betting companies exceeded the losses of the other accounts. I then realised during this game that you have to meticulously read and understand t