I agree with all of Studyform's posts.

About 17 to 13 years ago most of my betting was placepots.

I won over £800 with my third ever p/pot bet [ a 6x £1 stake ] and thought it was a good thing ..
.... though a lot of the time I was barely breaking even, I did win a £195 x 5 p/pot (£975) which remains my biggest ever p/pot win. Most of my bets were perms with a unit stake of 10p as I was used to doing this in my j/pot betting. on

I used to put these on in Hills where I became friendly with the shop manager. After putting the placepots on I would stay to watch a few races and play the bandits hoping to win a tenner before leaving but largely through the boredom of want was showing on the screens [ fake races etc ]

Occasionally the m/c wouldn't pay out at all and I would lose £30.

The manager told me that when they opened the machines to collect the money they had the ability to alter the payout ..... so generally a new bandit would pay out more in the first week.

In 2003 I joined betfair and it's years since I went to a betting shop.

The jingles, lights and sometimes entertaining games are all designed to attract and get punters losing their money.

I'm lucky I've never had a serious addiction but those who do have to deal with it in their way.

I would have thought those who attempt or commit suicide have personal problems that include more than gambling ......... there are so many things to enjoy in life surely a way could be found to turn your life round.

Make some rules ... perhaps no listening to Morrisey or the Smiths  ......

though I guess those that do are 'miserable now'.

Hello C-C, I hope you're well.

ZenMaster, very, very true.

Akabula, Steve Frater didn't invent the machines. He was a bookie (Admiral, I think) and a mate of the inventor, Walter Grubmuller, an Austrian chap who had the idea of putting Numbers games into betting shops. Roulette wasn't even a game on the early FOBTs. I was one of the first bookies to take their machines. Mr Frater made himself millions and sold most of it off, but still is involved in them a bit. Also it's every 20 seconds, not 30!
The ABB manipulate the statistics (figures) around gambling to keep the press and GC (not that they understand them or even care) quiet.
I would suggest the £6.75 per spin quite possibly applies to all games, or at least all roulette variants and includes the smaller stakes to lower the average.
You're right, online is harder to stop, BUT the people who lose online are limited to what is available in bank accounts or credit cards and will soon hit their limits and be unable to play. Whereas the FOBTs take cash. I've done it! Got a loan, borrowed money, used money meant for other things and got into loads of trouble all from feeding the Global Spunkers.
They have percentages displayed and apparently ratified - by a Dutch organisation (mostly). How are they proven? Are they possible to prove?
I think not.

A couple of years ago, on all the machines in my shop, after making some fuss, being on radio, TV and Press, I had the Roulette content removed. This led to some tough times for me (from the machine company and GC too), but I couldn't in all conscience, be responsible for the misery I watched them create.
Anyway, I noticed 1 particular game was paying out bundles to this one regular who used to come in with his wages every Saturday, it was a Hi/Lo card game which had never really been played before, quite possibly in any of the 1000s of betting shops with these machines, especially at higher stakes. After a couple of weeks I checked the machine meters (records) and found we were losing about £3000 on this one game over a few weeks. I called the provider. They showed, but wouldn't let me copy or keep, the document, the certificate verifying the %age. It was from a lab in Holland. I asked if it had been established at higher stakes alone (£20 up to £100 a go), but got no answer and it certainly hadn't been shown on this document. Mysteriously my machine meters were all reset to zero overnight a few days later and the game was taken off of every machine in the country. I asked about it but was given rubbish reasons as to why this had happened. It reappeared a few months later, I don't suppose many people anywhere had noticed, a non-roulette, several year old, rarely played game, going then coming back. My punter played it though and never came out in front again.

I have suggested and as I said above, another solution. And that is simply to take all the roulette games off of the machines. They other games are bad but are nowhere near as damaging, nor are they as expensive, nor are they quite as easy to launder money through.

I've never played an fobt as I never go into bookies.
I used to play jackpot bandits in snooker clubs and casinos and the tinker toy versions in pubs and saw how badly they could grab attention so I can understand how lethal fobts must be.

It's a pity these programmes have keep doing the job of shaming the greedy and that the ugliness of our system has to be tackled by innocent parties as this woman in the documentary.
There was a question like 'do they put profit before people?'
Come on ffs, I understand that a rallying cry but I think we all know exactly how the land lays; business and enterprise doesn't give a flying fook about people other than needing them to feed off of.
Politicians don't ban anything other than opinion and worship at the alter of anything that pays however immoral so they will continue to be their slimy selves, some sounding genuinely concerned (while playing politics) and the others suggesting they arnt problems because they themselves arnt effected and they don't want to give up the finance that they indirectly benefit from.
Civilisation is degenerate, that was said 2500 years ago....the only thing that changed was they got more efficient at being degenerate.

Donny

the guy has been banned out of all coral shops for his own good
for the last few years

regards

ronnie

It isn't £6.75 per spin  ..."the average loss of a FOBT is £6.75" ..whatever that means ?

I understood it to mean the average loss per person per session is £6.75....but how could they work that out ?

curious-cat
The manager told me that when they opened the machines to collect the money they had the ability to alter the payout ..... so generally a new bandit would pay out more in the first week

He was telling you lies cc. Only the machines manager can alter the payout which btw is displayed on all machines.
90%+ in bookmakers but as low as 60% in service areas for instance.

I didn't say the manager did it ... a bloke came in daily.

The problem with my situation, akabula, was that I had to stand the loss!!!
I suspect it happens more than they'll ever admit. In the early days when we had just AWPs engineers frequently came round with new boards for them where people had discovered bugs. When AWPs and slot games are invented it is supposed that several people in different places are involved in their invention so dodgy doings can't be done.

My son's mate works in the IT and development dept of a big online slots/casino company, he'd been there a few months when he told me this tale.....
"The average payout is set to reset at midnight, and if a particular game is not making enough there's no way you can win on it in the last few minutes, conversely one that is massively under its payout %age will pay more than it should. However there's no way of knowing which are which"
So, overall not unreasonable, until he told me this....
"I was going through the coding of one of the games and came across a line actually written in the code which said 'And this is the line that fuhks them over'".

My advice to anyone playing online slots is:
Open an account with ALL the online companies you can find and then ban (self exclude) yourself for 10 years. Do NOT take up ANY free offers (they're not free anyway).
better still, NEVER play them.

With all computerised gaming there is no way to be absolutely certain that you're not being fleeced.
Anyone who remembers Ultimate Bet's (or was it Titan) Poker scam, whereby one player could see everybody else's cards and won all the big tournaments. Should already be wary. I believe this can still be seen on Youtube, but I'm not certain.

This thread is more interesting and informative than the Panorama programme - I can only assume Panorama have already blown their budget for the quarter or the year and were therefore reduced to asking a member of the public to investigate when her only qualification for doing so was that she was a victim by association (not criticizing her, she came across very well in the circumstances but she was n't exactly Roger Cook).

Production values were woefully poor - 'average loss of £6.75 per FOBT' is meaningless, why were the ABB not asked to qualify that? - per spin?, per hour? per session?, per individual? How did they think that giving the owner of a casino a platform to take the moral ground was a good idea?

Panorama used to be about hard hitting investigative journalism - too much emphasis on human interest here, as sad as the stories are, anecdotal evidence based on a handful of tragic cases is unlikely to be enough to trigger a change in legislation.

A really half hearted effort by the BBC, I'd imagine the overwhelming feeling at Big Bookie HQ following the programme would be one of relief.

The ABB refused to appear on the program btw. I always refused to join this organisation. After an article in a Sunday paper, they tried (through a PR organisation) to get me to change the story or put words in my mouth. Again faceless and without any scruples.

The one big thing I seem to be the only one saying, is that if the machines were banned tomorrow (and if Horse racing stopped overpricing itself), the over the counter business would resume some of its former glory and the non-expense of renting the machines would cover the difference and the only losers would be the FOBT companies, who have ridden on the gravy train for ages now anyway.

Can only speak as a consumer, the only time I go into a bookies now would be on my way to football on a Saturday to watch a race or two which I'd had a bet on (or not) via an app on my phone earlier in the day.

It's quite depressing, would n't be unusual for me to be the only person watching the horse race - though the place is busy enough with people playing the machines or even watching the lunchtime football match on a screen 4 times the size of the one showing the racing.

It was n't so long ago that I would go in to watch a race before the match and strike up a conversation with a few like minded souls I did n't know who were likely to be there all afternoon watching and betting on the racing (that was in an independent shop which is now an Indian restaurant).

I struggle to see how we get back to the latter scenario.

I appreciate small independents on last legs i was thinking more big firm estates.

Study where do you get your info less than 100 indy left ?

for the tv licence dodgers watching i wouldnt lose to much sleep the bbc had 6 peado,s working for them and couldnt detect 1 of them in 50 yrs.

Studyform said:
"My advice to anyone playing online slots is:
Open an account with ALL the online companies you can find and then ban (self exclude) yourself for 10 years. Do NOT take up ANY free offers (they're not free anyway).
better still, NEVER play them."

Mmm. He's now come round to telling people to take some personal responsibility for their actions. Finally, he gets it.
And this is how people at GA beat their addictions - by admitting nobody but themselves made them do it ( you have been to a GA meeting right, Study? )
People who persistently blame their wife, the government, or the bookies for their problems never recover fully. And if they have mates telling them that it's not their fault then the recovery will be longer and harder.

And imo, my best point still stands - the way to get a sense of community back to betting shops and to have punters looking out for each other is to get rid of the limits of 4 FOBTs per shop, to have fewer betting shops and let larger shops develop with lower overheads per punter. Nobody would restrict bingo halls in the way that bookies are restricted, and there is a lot of community at the bingo. Nobody wants to ban supermarkets or big sports centres with 8 football pitches. Lone cashiers and lone players exist in betting shops precisely because of the restrictions.

No, bongo, you don't get it.
I'm saying self-exclude before you get addicted.
In my 2 visits to GA, I didn't hear anyone blame everyone else. They blamed themselves and wanted to stop doing the damage they were doing to themselves and others.
Because they were addicted.
As I said, the same applies to drink or drugs, as I also said, anorexics and overeaters too have no-one to blame but themselves, but this doesn't mean they shouldn't be helped, does it?

Your last paragraph is nonsense. If it's your best point your others are seriously lacking.
As akabula says, bookies are not restricted, nor have they been for years.
They just need to satisfy the local council, which may soon be more difficult, but hasn't been an issue for a while. There is no 'needs proof' requirement either.
As for punters "looking out for each other" I can't even work out what that means, along with "lower overheads per punter".

Betting shops should be for betting, arcades for machines, casinos for casino games, bingo halls for bingo.

Lone staff exist because the bookies (mainly big companies) see wages as an evil and something which needs cutting. How you can say having more machines in a shop would lead to less lone players is a bit of a mystery too.

There aren't too many shops, they are just clustered. There are about 1/2 the betting shops now that there were in the 1960's. If those running the big firms thought about that and returned things to how they were before all the things I've mentioned throughout this thread, then perhaps less damage would be done and community values might come back a bit.

Study, I worked for SIS for several years, at the coalface taking in and disseminating information. A small room full of racing nuts and dedicated punters - I've worked over the years in several such workplaces and you get to know the odd proper judge as I'm sure you know. SIS was mental - there were eight people out of about the 25 there when I joined who made more money punting than the pittance George Irvine would sanction as wages.

SIS was established with the sole intention of killing off the Independent bookmaker - the major bookmakers joined forces to fund the purchase of the Rights, and brought Racal Wireless in to provide the technology. I was privy to a lot of the decisions that were made because of my position there, and in succession, measures were taken to take another few sole traders and small chains out of the game incrementally. Each step - Sundays, evenings, lunchtime dogs every day, cartoon racing - the most insidious step of them all - taken to remove competition from the High Street. This was the exact purpose of all the additions to the daily programme - I ran an Independent for years before I joined SIS and it was a total doddle, a license to print money and a barrel of laughs. I'm running one now for a mate who kind of inherited it, probably one of the last 100 as you say - I can't imagine there could be more than that - and it is an epic chore. Open 10, close 8. Ten hour day and from moment one not a minute's respite from the noise of the machines and Phil Lockett, who I could cheerfully strangle even though he used to be my little buddy.

One thing I do know for sure is that the machines should be banned. Not restricted, not amended, not more heavily taxed, just outright proscribed. I am not coerced into promoting them, we don't run competitions, we do some real good trade OTC and we have some decent punters. The things I see people do on my machines is absolutely frightening, and I always know when I hear people say 'it's all their own fault, nobody forces them, it's their own choice' that that person knows precisely nothing about the nature of addiction, or the nature of FOBTs.

jed

would your shop be viable without the machines ?

if yes dump them, not compulsory ?

You're sort of confirming what I've long suspected, jed. Very interesting stuff. Especially about the cartoon racing. I lost money on that too. It's all about small stakes - high returns now, I reckon this started with lottery marketing, and if someone cops it could be closing down level expense. I stopped taking tricast bets on cartoons in the end, the fear was too great.

imo, George Irvine deserves no wages.  I have absolutely no time for him, nor for many of his past and present colleagues come to that.

Another little fact about FOBTs is that they cost in the area of 50% of their take (inc tax) for the smaller bookies and about 35% for the big firms.
Same as the Gaming Licence (£1500 ish, single shop, £100 ish, Big 4 shop). and SIS, (£20K per single shop per year, £1 million or less for entire Badblokes estate - so about less than £1000 per shop per year).
Everything is plus VAT, so 20% is added to all costs.
I did contact the Office of fair trading about SIS and although they said I had a point, they told me there were no resources to deal with them.
My estimate is that the average indie needs to make in the region of £350 a day to stand still (off a current margin of about 12-14% which was 20-25% 15 years ago) but the big firms shops probably only need to make about £200.

So for small companies, capt_f, the cost of machine rental might take care of some of the income, but as jed says, punters perceive the shop as not modern and a bit skint if the machines aren't there, so not having them would cost custom. One step to take tho, could be the unique one I took, which was to get all roulette removed. Though the machine providers will want to come up with a new deal if you do.... like they did with me. (They also -unsuccessfully - tried to make me sign a non-disclosure clause in the amendment to the contract).

It's all quite depressing really, I worked my nuts off only to lose the lot and it was a situation designed by some greedy faceless yuppets working for companies and "on behalf of shareholders" who couldn't care less about them and who would have made a reasonable profit anyway.

imo, George Irvine deserves no wages

I vaguely remember a rick he made in the 70s when representing Corals at the cricket. England v whoever.
He went a ridiculously high price on the follow on and the players took advantage, on the quiet of course.
I'm sure it was 50s.