How to Avoid Bookmaker Restrictions in Australia

If you bet with an edge, you will make money in the long run. You will also, sooner or later, get restricted. Bookmakers are businesses built to profit from recreational punters, and when they spot someone who consistently beats them they act on it.

Restrictions come in a few forms: being removed from promotions, stake limits, limits on particular sports, or the account being closed outright. None of them can be avoided forever, but how long an account lasts is largely up to you.

The key is to look like a regular punter while still taking the profitable bets. That comes down to your betting patterns, your stakes, the markets you bet on and how you treat the account overall. Every extra month an account stays open is more profit from it.

Why Bookmakers Restrict Accounts

A bookmaker makes its money from the margin built into every price. Most punters take bets that lose over time, and that margin pays for everything else, including the promotions.

A punter who only takes positive EV bets or only bets when there is a promotion running costs them money on every bet. Their systems are built to find those accounts, and a human reviews anything that gets flagged. Everything below is about not getting flagged in the first place.

Mug Bets

Mug bets are throwaway bets on ordinary, non promotional markets. They are the most important habit on this list, because nothing flags an account faster than a history made up entirely of promotions and value bets.

Mixing in bets that lose a little makes your account look like every other punter’s. The trick is to place them so they cost you as close to nothing as possible.

How many to place

• Promotions: about one mug bet for every promo bet.
• +EV betting: about one mug bet for every three value bets. The margins are smaller, so one for one would eat too much of the profit.

These ratios are a starting point, not a rule. They vary by bookmaker, and by whether you want faster profit or longer lasting accounts.

How to place them

• Vary your stakes, $50, then $30, then $40, so there is no obvious system.
• Stay above 1.40 odds, and vary between 1.40 and 5.00 so the bets look natural.
• Keep the qualifying loss under 5%. The qualifying loss (QL) is what the mug bet costs you once it is hedged.

To keep that cost down, back the bet at the bookmaker and lay the same selection on Betfair. One side wins, one side loses, and you are left with a small, fixed loss whatever happens.

You do not have to lay every mug bet. If the qualifying loss is already low, you can place it on its own and save the commission and the time. Your results will swing around more without the hedge, so only skip it if you are comfortable with that.

Priming a New Account

New accounts get looked at more closely than any other, so how you start matters most.

Turning over your sign up bonus straight away is fine. After that, do not go straight into high percentage arbitrage, +EV bets or daily promotions. Place 20 or more mug bets at a small loss first, then make a small withdrawal. That withdrawal usually triggers a review, and an account with nothing but ordinary bets on it gets marked as a recreational punter.

Everyday Habits That Keep Accounts Open

Avoid withdrawing

After that first withdrawal, leave your balance where it is for as long as you can. Every withdrawal invites someone to look at the account, and once you are placing value and promo bets, that look can end in a restriction.

Bet close to the start

Place bets as close to the event as you can. That is when the most money is going through the market, so your bets blend in with everyone else’s.

Stick to popular markets

Avoid low volume markets like division six Nigerian table tennis or the Hong Kong Premier League. Stick to big sports like AFL, NRL, MLB and the NFL, where your bets do not stand out.

Watch your liability, not just your stake

Large stakes get accounts restricted quickly, however tempting the bet. What bookmakers care about most is their liability, the total return minus the stake, so judge a safe bet size by that. There is no magic number, but keep it lower on smaller markets.

Round your stakes

A stake like $47.63 is a giveaway that it came out of a calculator. Round to the nearest dollar at minimum, or better still the nearest $5. It changes your arbitrage returns slightly, and it keeps the account open longer.

Spread your promo bets around

Sportsbet and TAB are known for Wednesday and Saturday racing promos, and everyone using them piles into the same races. Spread your promo bets across other bookmakers too, like PalmerBet, Ladbrokes and Betr. Race 6 with Sportsbet, race 7 with PalmerBet, wherever the promotion applies.

Keep mug betting

Keep placing mug bets for the life of the account. It matters most early on, and too many will eat into your profit, so use them in moderation once the account is established.

Skip the obvious misprices

Every so often a price is so wrong it is obviously a mistake. Leave it. Those bets are often voided anyway, and taking them is one of the quickest ways to get an account looked at.

The Bigger Picture

No account lasts forever. The goal is to take as much profit as possible from each one before it is limited, and with over 100 bookmakers in Australia there is a lot to take.

That is also why restrictions are the real ceiling on how much you can make. Every account you keep open longer is more turnover, and more profit, before the limit arrives.

Where to go next

• How bonus bets work, and how to turn them into cash
• Positive EV software, with the Kelly stake worked out for every bet
• Bet tracker, to log your mug bets alongside everything else