The undeniable truth about the world of sports betting is that it’s far from being an ideal one, despite all the effort made by both regulators and the companies that operate them. Everybody understands that all mouths have to eat, but the proportionality of it depends quite heavily on the restrictions and guardrails put in place.
One of the most notorious cases of this happening is how sportsbooks tend to restrict or close certain accounts without warning, since doing so is at their discretion. This happens mainly because they realize that your bettor profile is of a certain kind, and in most cases, it entails you engaging in fraudulent behavior.
However, there are also cases when you simply are too good at it, which impacts their bottom line. This is the point that we’ll strike home multiple times throughout this editorial effort, especially given that we’re also going to talk about strategies to avoid it.
So, in the interest of showcasing and highlighting why exactly there are moments when this can happen, we’ll discuss both the reasons and considerations. Moreover, you’ll get to learn about certain practices that can help you avoid unwanted attention and suspicions from a sportsbook.
Explaining account restrictions at online bookies
Account restrictions are, by all means, handbrakes put upon the wheels of your bookmaker membership. Rather than allowing you to gamble as much and as daringly as you want within the site’s own internal limits, you have custom thresholds that you need to respect.
These can vary quite a lot, depending quite heavily on the considerations of the casino. For example, you can see your total number of bets that you can place as being outright limited, or even the amount that you can stake either on a wager or during a selected timeframe.
This has the purpose of inhibiting your winning potential. As you’ll see, the primary reason is to keep your payouts in check, which happens much more often than not, and that’s alarming for the bookie.
The biggest and most regrettable of cases is when you lose your account altogether. If such a thing happens, you usually get it via an email or an in-site message (usually both), with any remaining real money balance returned to you right away.
As a result, you’d simply receive a ban from rejoining the gambling platform, usually on a permanent basis. That’s quite an extreme action, and some formal explanations could be regarding problematic betting patterns, or just a break in operator policy.
Nevertheless, you will not have the same access to your account, regardless of the measure, which means that the staff found part of your activity to be questionable or detrimental to their interests.
The intentions of the sportsbook are understandable
Full disclosure: by understandable, we mean explainable. There’s a certain thread of elements that every bookmaker has as part of its desire to be profitable over the long run. For some operators, it also means staying afloat, and players who eat into their bottom line consistently are not very tolerable from their point of view.
That doesn’t mean that it’s a desirable outcome for you. It’s also far from being a fair one. It’s not your fault that you are strategic, know what you’re doing, and obtain positive results, including at the expense of the bookmaker. After all, you’re wagering by the book, so why would you bear the brunt of their losses?
With that being said, we need to return to the idea that online gambling platforms are commercial entities, and their profitability is their only purpose. Yes, it’s entertainment, but any activity that feels like an exploitation of the system is against the spirit of fun, which is how these gambling sites perceive things.
So, to make sure that they keep things under control, these bookmakers find it within their prerogatives to restrict your gambling to cut down on the costs that your winnings entail. If they do so, and you end up taking money from another sportsbook, that’s a positive thing. They’re making their cash from the losses of casual players, so it’s all good for them.
Use unpredictability as your best off-scent method
The first line of defense that we need to mention is the idea of making your actions (i.e., betting patterns) feel unpredictable. This generally means that you look like a regular gambler: wagering based on vibes, and almost always on big games. We’ll talk about these details a bit later.
Doing so is a principle that, in earnest, can apply at any level and in every detail. The idea is that efficient, highly dedicated gamblers will almost always be methodical. This translates almost directly into consistency, but also looking for opportunities that casual players can hardly identify.
The following sections will be practical directions toward doing such things. As you’ll realize, the concept of unpredictability shouldn’t deter you from also being relatively consistent, but you’d need to cover at least a few of your tracks.
Avoid constantly going to niche markets
A lot of the common wisdom that revolves around highly successful online betting is the idea of looking where others don’t, and finding opportunities in markets that do not attract the attention of many, including the sportsbook itself.
Most of the cash flow, and, thus, the focus of bookmakers, is on big events. The more popular a competition is, the likelier it is to attract a lot of activity from bettors who do so sporadically. As a result, the oddsmaking process is very tight.
The exception comes via boosted odds and double chances being occasional, but highly deliberate incentives to convince casuals to join a specific bookmaker, as BetBrain has keenly found out.
So, given that these markets rarely have any place for margins that you can exploit for positive closing line value, you may be looking at other ones. This means assessing niches that you may know of or that you discover, and using any resource to research an event before assessing the correctness of the odds.
If your betting log is full of wagers placed on highly niche sports, competitions, events, and markets, it’s very likely that there will be a flag placed on your account. The best way to avoid it is to mix your winnings farm with big, popular events so you don’t exhibit an obvious pattern.
Keep your staking somewhat diversified
The very same principle that we’ve discussed regarding the subject of your bets should apply to the money that you stake. In simple terms, you’d have to be inconsistent with how much money you pay for each wager that you place, which is quite interesting if you consider how intentional some are.
The hallmark of a successful bettor is maintaining a staking strategy, complex or not. Some use the same bet regardless of the event, while others go with proportional ones, based on the current budget. The most advanced ones use the fractional Kelly criterion, which uses a formula based on the upside of an opportunity.
If there is such a pattern involved, there are good chances that the bookmaker will realize it, especially now that AI pattern recognition is able to identify minute strategies of this sort.
What you can actually do is break such habits every now and then. Yes, you might forsake some cash in the interest of it, but even that money may turn into an unexpected or small win. It’s important to be able to deter a bookmaker from realising that you’re very careful and methodical as part of a disciplined approach, typical of a high-profile gambler.
Bet on lower odds and accumulators as well
Another highly fascinating detail that has attracted attention from bookies and, consequently, restrictions and bans, is the type of odds and bet structures chosen.
Accumulators are high-risk, high-reward matters that not many advanced gamblers seem to gravitate toward because it’s a big commitment. Rather than going margin by margin, as the hunt for the edge entails, parlays are all about the promise of a huge win from the jump.
Moreover, the same type of unassuming, casual player flocks toward short odds that make it seem like the underdog is in a very good position to succeed. Given that they chase a big win by betting on low chances, they lose quite a lot.
As a highly experienced and efficient bettor, you’d generally avoid doing so, instead going for beating the house and achieving closing line value when betting on high-chance events at favorable odds.
To look like a normal gambler, you’d simply need to add some accas and short odds to your betting patterns to add the aforementioned unpredictability.
Conclusion: No strategy is infallible
The title of this section speaks for itself: even if you manage to identify a method of avoiding scrutiny and losing, you’re still under the pressure of your own winning ways. As such, you should remember that even these methods do not mean that you’re never going to face such account restrictions.
Moreover, you should remember that, fundamentally, you are not doing anything wrong. These are just byproducts of how the industry works, and you should be proud of any ability to obtain winnings rather than having to deal with constant losses.
Lastly, we should remind you that the most important part about the sports betting phenomenon is to never let it get to your head and drag you into gambling addiction. Instead, play responsibly and take care of your mental health!