Originally posted on 10/27/2009:

The natural order of things is for books that can't manage risk to go broke.

1) Condoning books confiscating money won from bets (on good lines, etc) has huge drawbacks. You've seen the excuses books have come up with- he multiaccounted, he had accounts on sister sites (even though we told him it was ok), he's part of a syndicate, he shared an IP (from a dynamic range, like dialup from a particular town), he's a steam player, he used the Money Method. It's all bullshit. It's terrible for the industry when people hear about balances getting stolen, even when it's "justified", and it's blindingly obvious that books confiscate when they shouldn't. It's really easy to draw a bright line- if a book steals a player balance, ever, its max rating is D- until it's returned.

The tool simply shouldn't exist- and the only reason it even does exist is because of the cost of moving money. With frictionless money flow, people would "deposit" exactly what was necessary to make any given bet (automatically upon confirming the bet), and winnings would be sent back once the bet was graded, or maybe after a little extra time to allow for correcting grading errors. There wouldn't even BE such a thing as player balances. Confiscating balances is an archaic tool, and it's not viable at all in a future with clearly legal gambling.

2) The ability to confiscate balances gives books a huge incentive to defraud players. sportsbook.com tells people that skins are independent books, and says it's ok to sign up at multiple skins, and then steals the money, citing bonus abuse, circumvented limits, and all other manner of nonsense. Oddsmaker lets you bet, then jacks your balance if you bet a parlay. BP lets you bet a freeplay, then reduces a 5-teamer to a 2-teamer payout if you're lucky enough to win. Betway knows where you signed up from, lets you deposit, and steals your money if you have any left to cash out. And that's just the stuff that's completely obvious.

When a book detects a player it can steal from, it has absolutely zero incentive to stop him from playing. Even if the book catches somebody multiaccounting at signup, it has no reason to say anything. If the player loses (and winners can and do lose multiple deposits at even the softest of books, simply by betting "too much" relative to the deposit), the book wins. If the player wins, the book just steals the money. Allowing books to steal balances creates perverse incentives- the book is strongly rewarded for doing nothing to detect "fraudulent" signups.

3) The book suffers no actual harm from multiaccounters betting that it doesn't suffer from perfectly legal activity. And no, I'm not on crack. Let's take the standard example of signing up my brother for an account. I sign him up, I make all the bets, etc. Book screams fraud, and the muppets here all agree that this is some terrible crime that has defrauded the book, and that it's fine to steal the balance. Let's change things just a bit.

I am a tout service, and like a well-known tout around here, I steer my clients to sign up with a particular book (only I don't get a referral bonus and a % of losses, heh). My client has some financial agreement with me- this is none of the book's business. My client bets only my picks. Again, no foul. My client thinks this tout is awesome and sets up a script to bet anything I release (people actually do this for real touts). Again, no foul. I am computer savvy and provide this script to my clients. Again, no foul. So what we have here is a perfectly legal way for my client to bet every single thing I would bet. And then he pays me a bunch of money when he cashes out big.

Or I could just hate the book and want them to go broke and give away what I would play there for nothing. Then I'd have a nice army of people pounding all their soft lines, and although it would be at my impetus, I wouldn't even be profiting at all, much less defrauding them, and neither would anybody else, even if I write the book a letter telling them exactly what I'm doing and who's getting my plays.

Using the confiscation tool, books have no defense against these activities- well, they make up defenses, such as "syndicate play", "exceeding limits", and all kinds of other BS, but what it comes down to is that they have to make up infinite stupid rules- like not being able to play a tout's plays- without getting your balance stolen. It's complete BS. It's obviously complete BS. And books do stuff like that anyway.

4) So what's a poor book to do? Easy- STOP ****ING SUCKING AT BOOKMAKING. If books spent a tenth of the energy on player profiling that they do on investigating cashouts, they wouldn't be getting gnomed to death. And that's the ultimate answer- the only sustainable long-term solution is for books to make it not worth the time/effort to multi-account them.. and not by randomly stealing balances, which is just terrible, because it creates an expensive arms race with gnomers, and it's not one they're going to win in the end. Even if gnomers literally have to resort to calling up their friend and having him physically place all bets, it's still worth the time, and the book will lose- or have to confiscate on absolute BS grounds.

If a book like SIA wants to hang inflated numbers, a retarded chimp could identify a sharp account there in no time, quite possibly in less than a day, and close it out. Does SIA do that? Of course not. It's too logical. Who's really going to bother creating large numbers of identities on large numbers of IPs (catch shared name/address/IP on signup, obviously), sending and collecting all the money, etc, if accounts get booted in 1-2 days every time? Nobody. It doesn't matter how beatable their numbers are if they take the basic steps to make sure no account beats them for a lot. They don't "need" to steal balances if they just pay attention to the action they're getting.

If a rec book has soft/slow numbers, again, a retarded chimp could identify a sharp account in no time flat. Sadly, the euro books like Bet3.65 have the right idea here. Identify a sharp fast, limit to nothing, rinse, repeat. With basic risk management via profiling and checking for duplicate signups, the books would do fine, they wouldn't need to resort to stealing balances to manage risk, and the world would be a much better place.

Of course, that all makes far too much sense. SBR has been more than willing to subsidize shitty bookmaking/risk management by allowing balance confiscations. Maybe they'll see the light- maybe the books will see the light- and see that it's an unnecessary practice, an unsustainable practice, and that they'll eventually have to adapt because they won't have that tool anymore, but I doubt it.