Betfair: Fair Gamble or Excessive Risk?

Betfair is one of Europe’s largest online gaming houses, holding a virtual monopoly on virtual gaming on “the continent.” Based on personal experience and online reviews, it seems they feel that if you are the biggest on the block, things like fair play and customer satisfaction no longer apply. A quick search in Google results in a plethora of unhappy forum posts from current and former players.

Complaints generally center around a common problem: Betfair offers promotions which benefit the players initially, and when the players accept these promotions and Betfair ultimately loses money, the service provider cries “foul,” and freezes player accounts, making it almost impossible for players to recoup their money. While it is understood that Betfair is in business to make, not lose, money, where is the fairness in this system? If a player makes a “boneheaded” play on their site and loses money as a result, the players cannot then demand back the money they lost.

An example of a recent example of this kind of situation was a Happy Hour promotion which Betfair offered in November, 2010. The promotion promised a 50% bonus on funds transferred into the casino, with the condition that the bonus amount must be bet 10 times before it could be withdrawn. To anyone who plays games of chance, this is an obvious “pennies from Heaven” situation: the odds are just too good to turn down, which is what they expect. In online Hold ´Em, with a house edge of about 2%, you would statistically expect to lose 20% of this bonus money if you bet it 10 times. So, you would have a reasonable expectation of being able to cash out with 30% more money than you transferred.

However, Betfair realized the promotion was overly generous after the fact and froze players’ accounts, confiscating the resulting winnings. Did they also return the losses that some players suffered? After conducting multiple searches, the author has not found a single post suggesting that they did, not even on the Betfair site.

While a person who plays online games cannot reasonably expect situations that always guarantee a profit (where is the gamble, otherwise?), they should be able to expect a fair playing field. An online gaming house should live up to their end of the bargain. A player takes the risk of losing, and the service provider should accept the same risk; that is a true game of chance. In the world of casinos, both virtual and physical, the house has an edge, meaning the average player will always lose more than they win. With one of the largest service providers in the industry manipulating the rules to claim for themselves a further edge, the game they offer appears to have crossed the line from chance into outright robbery.

**Note: The Author has opened numerous accounts with this service and had similar experiences with all of them. Additionally, the Author has done intensive research into the service and online reviews.