In reply to Babika:
> £20k? They paid out £15 million on Leicester apparently!
I was referring that one bet at 5000/1.
the total value does not matter, it's the odds it was staked at that does. Plus how much was bet on their opponents and lays. It's not an initially obvious game.
If the other top 5 clubs all had £50-100 million placed for them to win, then Leicester winning is a bonus for the bookies.
If the £15m paid out was against very narrow odds, where to win 15m, you need to bet 14m in the first place. Then they've only paid out £1m. Again small margins in the big scheme of things for bookies. The PR getting their names into the papers would cost thousand if paid for, so a free advert is no bad thing.
Headline figures do nothing to show the detail behind.
Sad thing about high street bookies, is most shops make more money from the fruit machines in them, than from the betting. People are lured in, then robbed by electronics where they have very little chance of winning, compared to say betting on sport. I only bet on betfair(online exchange) as I kind of disagree of the way bookies are robbing some people on the high street.
Post edited at 06:57