![]() Sports betting interests the guy making minimum wage to the guy making $5 million a year. SH: What’s the profile of some of your clients? Blue collar guys, lawyers, small-business owners, politicians? It’s just easier to vet ‘em up front so you have less problems down the road. I always want to know what they do and if you’re working at a Starbucks, you shouldn’t be betting $1,000 per game. I was always cautious when getting a good client. Maybe we’d talk about sports for a while. Even when I met someone, I didn’t always tell them this is what I do. I was always one to vet ‘em and move slow. There’s some guys out there that’ll take a guy he meets having a cup of coffee and right away gives him $500 a game or $10,000 a week. ![]() John: Pretty much at the beginning I’ll vet them. SH: Prior to or after accepting a client, do you vet them at all– look into their backgrounds, occupations, public profiles available online? We set unique betting limits for each individual customer so that they avoid crippling losses. ![]() I manage the betting lines from a master dashboard. It’s a user-friendly site and we provide more sports betting options than Nevada sports books because we provide all the European sports and worldwide soccer games. They can access their account 24 hours per day from their mobile devices or computers. We provide our customers access to sports betting platform from Europe, and they all set up an account under an alias. SH: How do you service your customers? Are you constantly on the phone and meeting them in bars? Are you sometimes hard to find? But our average client has probably been with us 10 years. Most of the clients stay with us unless they go broke, which happens a lot, or realize they can’t win. SH: What’s the average length of time your clients have been with you? Probably the easiest way right now is by acquiring agents and that form. John: As we went to the Internet it became tougher to find new clients so basically there’s a lot of what we call ‘agents’, basically a person might bring you 10 or 20 players, and you’re the main guy and he gets a commission as a partner, whatever you want to call it. SH: How do you typically acquire new clients? And somehow I just always got back to it. Thought I’d go into the real world and see what I could do. After college I took a few years off and didn’t do it. So in college, there’s always kids who wanted to get a couple bets down on the game, so I just started as the guy who could help you get the bets down. ‘You’re never going to win.’ The only side that wins is this side. I was a terrible player and the guy I was betting with told me ‘Why don’t you ever think about being on this side?’ Basically, a 75-year-old Italian guy who said I’ll give you some advice. SportsHandle (SH): How did you first get started in bookmaking? Inside the Mind of a Local Bookie: How It Works, Misconceptions, Potential Impact of Legal Sports Betting in U.S., Human Touch, Credit, Challenges and More market with state-licensed casinos/sportsbooks might impact the illegal market, and how ill-advised state legislation and the NBA and MLB’s “integrity fee” might be the best thing to ever happen to local bookies and offshores. ![]() Part I focuses on operations while Part II (to be published next week) looks more closely at how a legal U.S. This is the the first of two installments of SportsHandle’s conversation with a real bookie - we’ll call him “John” - who has a clientele of 250 bettors. How much do any of these players really know about the local bookie and his/her operation? Let’s explore. Dean Plocher echoed the same sentiment about local (and yes, not legal) bookies in proposing a piece of legislation dubbed the “Comprehensive Missouri Sport Betting and Sports Protection Act.” L ast week Missouri State Senator Denny Hoskins and Rep. “The big question we’re asking: Is 2018 finally the year when governments, sporting bodies and the gaming industry work together to put the illegal sports betting market out of business?” asked American Gaming Association president Geoff Freeman last month. What we don’t hear about is how illegal bookies actually operate, advantages some may offer, and how they view the possibility of legal sports betting in numerous states, pending the outcome of the Supreme Court sports betting case. One of the prevailing ideas in the conversation about expanded legal sports betting in the United States is that the illegal sports betting market - consisting of local bookies and offshore bookmakers - will go out of business. ![]()
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