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Must be a lot of mugs out there with money to burn as anyone with a semblance of a brain can't get a bet on.
If you show any semblance of winning, you are restricted or account closed, so for them to produce the profits they have then there must be a hell of a lot of mugs out there who are happy to lose their money. However, when they (the boomakers) get restricted, ie FOBT's restricted from £100 to £2, that's not on and they cry like babies.
Such has always been the way, Repression. The bookies nourish their profitable clients and discourage the costly ones. I knew Bernard Murphy, owner of one the largest betting shop chains in Liverpool, fifty years ago. An amiable man, who freely admitted that he loved the punters with their sixpenny-each-way 6-horse accumulators and hated the likes of myself who placed one or two single bets a week on a stakes race, usually two-year-olds, ignoring all handicaps, with £10 or £20 each-way.
When I said that 6d each way was a tough way to earn a living, his reply was "All grist to the mill", explaining that the chances of those long-odds bets ever coming in was close to zero, so if you had 1,000 punters betting a shilling a day for six days every week, that amounted to £300 a week, equivalent to at least £4,000 a week today. But if I came in and turned £20 into £120, that wiped out the losing efforts of hundreds of his punters that afternoon. This is the reason why the bookies drive Rollers.
It used to be possible to learn each shop's limit where they had to call the bet into head office, before taking it, and then have a good lunch-hour walk, around the city-centre betting shops, putting on just under the limit here and the same there. Although they did get to know my face. Nowadays with these pesky computers, head-office knows every bet going on in real time, which must make your job very difficult. Good luck anyway.
By the way, you're absolutely right. They do want mugs. Just look at the bets they offer, "Arsenal to win and keep a clean sheet plus Lacazette to score." with odds of maybe 4-1. It's nuts. The bet is a triple anyway and they're offering single odds. Anyone making a bet for a particular player to score, even Lionel Messi, is tossing a coin, but Barça to win? Until recently, that was a very different bankable proposition.