Palmerbet promise challenge

I really hate when I see an article like this in mainstream media which with a little bit of research can be seen to be a big fat lie. Pretty much the owners of Palmerbet have said they will take a bet from anyone and not limit them

“Mr Palmer said although he can’t promise the company will take “every” wager, he will try to take as many bets as possible from punters who are knocked back elsewhere.”

In my personal experience this is a big fat lie. After a few days everything was sent to a trader and 95% of bets were limited. I no longer even bother going there to see what odds they offer as I know they will not take my bet.

If you look to the right you will see a Palmerbet ad (I am an affiliate), and some of you have signed up with them, and while I can not play I am sure those betting smaller amounts and not worried about odds too much can get on fairly easy. I have no issue advertising them but I do have an issue with them making statements that in my experience are clearly false. My problem is unique in the fact that I need my bets accepted very quickly and this isn’t possible here.

So here is my challenge to Palmerbet. I challenge you to accept me as a customer and take all my bets. I challenge you to not refer any of my bets to your “traders” and just take them on the spot. I will even allow you to limit me to win just $2,000 on bets. I believe it is a law for a NSW bookmaker to accept racing bets to win at least $5,000.

Do you accept my challenge?

Update
Within an hour of posting I received a call from the owner of Palmerbet and let’s just say he was not happy with me “writing bulls&it on social media”. He was very passionate about his company and said I had never been rejected on my bets. I have thus edited the article to read that I was only limited (which in my book isn’t very different). I also asked him about a few other concerns such as taking the AFL lines off the website a few minutes before Sportpunter released his weekly picks and he said they have never done anything like that, when pressed he said someone must have bet huge and then the system would do that. Not sure why every single game would disappear though. My belief (and the sad thing is, I need to keep repeating that this is only my opinion and not fact), is that the Palmerbet system might in some way follow Topsport who also take the games off a few seconds before release. It is evident to many of us that Topsport have purchased a subscription to the AFL model and do not want anyone placing their bets with them.

In regards to the challenge, he said if I called and asked for a bet then he would probably accept it, but once again my bets are very time sensitive so this would not work. I will try and place some bets there over the coming weeks to see if some of my other bets will be matched.

As usual you have to take my rants as they are. All of this is simply my opinion based on my own experiences and the experiences of others that have been shared with me by like minded gamblers. I’m always up for people to reply and state their view and offer that to Palmerbet too. If they would like to reply to this post I will happily post it with no edits.

Just an extra note on the size of Palmerbet which the article quotes as looking to turnover $100,000,000 this year. While that number seems big that is only 0.38% of the entire Australian turnover. They have 1,600 twitter followers and lets say they have around the same amount of customers. That means on average each of them turnover $62,500 a year or $1,200 a week. Off course they would have some really big bettors and much smaller bettors but this seems about right. I would say a 5% ROI is a fair amount of profit which is $5 million a year and from the article we see they spend $120k a year on facebook advertising, probably the same on google and other social media, add in employee pay and software license (website and app), player bonuses, affiliate payments, taxation and I would then guess the company is only making $1 to $2 million profit in it’s first year. Most of the big guys actually lose a massive amount in their first year so if this is right, it is quite impressive. Again, only my opinion on the numbers, I could be way off by $20 million in either direction.

We also have to understand that most of this turnover is probably on the horses and therefore they would not have a large book on many sporting events (which is what I mostly bet on), this results in them not being able to accept massive bets. I hope to keep talking to Palmerbet and really hope they are trying to differentiate themselves by allowing winners, but there is a reason why most bookies don’t allow winners. It will be interesting to watch if this angel will generate customers. You know how cynical I am about bookmakers and I believe they will find it difficult to grow in such a crowded market and eventually they will sell to one of the big UK companies, but Mr Palmer did state “We’re here for the long run,”. Let’s see how this turns out.