Contemporaries have turned on fellow bookmakers, some of them high profile, after it was reported that some layers would not take some multiple bets on Frankie Dettori’s rides at Royal Ascot last week.
Star Sports boss Ben Keith was among those furious that punters had been unable to get bets on one of the sport’s most popular figures at one of racing’s biggest meetings of the year.
Dettori, of course, pummelled bookmakers in 1996 with his Magnificent Seven, also at Ascot. Online firms were in panic mood last Thursday when the Italian won the first four races at the Royal meeting. However, they were spared further heavy losses when outsider Biometric edged out Frankie’s heavily-punted mount Turgenev in the Britannia Stakes.
Bet365 were then allegedly refusing some four-horse and all five-horse accumulators on Dettori’s rides for the final two days of the meeting, a move replicated by Skybet on the Saturday. The latter were also rejecting multiple bets that included all of Dettori’s three bigger-priced mounts.
Social Media in Uproar
Social media was in uproar with punters claiming that bookmakers were now telling them which horses they could and couldn’t back. There is no doubt, placing restrictions on the names which appear on bettors’ betting slips is not a road down which bookmakers want to travel. The whole exercises has been something of a PR disaster and you would not imagine that the actions of some bookmakers has endeared them to those who regulate the industry.
Dettori’s four-timer at Ascot this year did produce accumulative odds of 144/1 but the decision to ban multiples on his mounts on following days was a total over-reaction. It would not have been countenanced in the days when bookmakers – ‘proper’ bookmakers as they’ve been described on social media platforms – would have hedged their liabilities.
Matt Bisogno, the soon-to-retire chairman of the Horseracing Bettors Forum, described the actions of the bookmakers involved as curious and thinks it should have been better managed.
What the firms involved have done is basically make Dettori a special case. Danny Tudhope rode a treble on the opening day but nobody tried to ban multiple bets on his mounts the following day. As the Italian appears in Ladbrokes‘ commercials, it would have been bad form for that firm to take the same view as bet365 and Skybet – I can’t even imagine that there was a discussion in their HQ to follow suit. At the end of the day, it’s up to punters to vote with their feet if anything like this occurs again. But I would imagine that lessons have been learned and trading managers may not be so keen to hit the panic button again so quickly.
