I want it

When I heard this phrase coming out of Ari Gold’s mouth in hit TV Show Entourage I couldn’t help but think about online betting firms and how it would make a really great subject for a post. Being one of the most controversial industry nowadays is by itself a good enough reason.

As seen in the picture, bwin.com has language localization

In my previous post I mentioned F.C. Barcelona refused to sign many sponsors in the latest years, one of the most interesting coming from betting tycoon Bet and Win¹. In the end they couldn’t convince them to put their name on the jersey, but they got a pretty nice deal as the “official betting webpage” of the club. That in the end meant I was sent a 6 euro coupon to play for free. Everyone loves this kind of coupons, there’s nothing to be lost, and you get to feel the rush of winning money without risk. On a surprisingly lucky streak I managed to get 20 euros out of the coupon, and then lost everything. And I also lost the money on my sister’s coupon.

Completely frustrated I forgot about betting for a while, you could say the strategy didn’t work for me. Then I got another coupon: get 10 euros for free if you put 15 euros in your bwin.com account. Now that’s a juicier offer, but I had to give something in exchange like investing some money first and giving my credit card number. I had to signal. For me it was too high of a price to pay, but now that I think about it, it is a much better approach to capture clients. They play with their money, so that rules out risk adverse people like me who value more money on the pocket than a chance at a fat price. And they are now targeting the real potential clients, so they risk losing money only to people that eventually will give them benefits. Because let’s face it, you don’t have to be a mathematician to realize that, in the end, the house always wins.

¹The offer was 45 million euros for 3 years