My bookmaker banned me for winning once. So I'd like to thank the Racing Post for showing me how to bet illegally

The Bookmakers Have Banned Me. Apparently I'm Too Good At Losing

There is a letter on my kitchen table — well, I say letter, it's an email I've printed out because I'm 65 and that's what we do — informing me that my account with one of Britain's leading bookmakers has been "restricted for commercial reasons." This is the industry's magnificently Orwellian way of saying that I once backed a horse at 14-1 that duly obliged and they've decided they'd rather not have my business anymore. I am, apparently, a threat to their operation. A danger to the market. A man who must be stopped.

I should point out, for the record, that I have lost, across the span of my betting career, enough money to have bought a reasonably decent helicopter. Not a good one. But one that would have got off the ground most of the time. The Chester Vase is this week, a race I look forward to with the specific, doomed optimism of a man who has studied the Racing Post every morning for thirty years and learned almost nothing useful from it. And I cannot have a bet. Not a proper one.

So I rang the helpline. Obviously. A man called — and I'm going to say his name was Gary, because it clearly wasn't — answered from what I can only describe as somewhere in the Eastern European time zone. He was perfectly pleasant, Gary. He had clearly been given a script, and he was sticking to it with the grim determination of a jockey riding a 100-1 shot at Carlisle. "Your account," Gary explained, with the careful diction of a man translating as he spoke, "has been assessed by our trading team." I asked Gary if I could speak to the trading team. Gary said that wasn't possible. I asked Gary where he was. Gary said he was in customer support. I asked Gary where customer support was. There was a pause of approximately four seconds that told me everything about Romania.

This, then, is the modern betting industry. A man in Bucharest, paid to read from a laminated card, is the human interface between me and a corporation that has decided that my forty-year lifetime of net losses somehow represents an unacceptable commercial risk. They will take money from absolutely anyone. Just not, apparently, from me.

And where, one might reasonably ask, is the BHA in all of this? The same BHA that sits on committees, attends working groups, and produces documents of such magnificent comprehensiveness that no one reads them past page three. Racing's governing body has apparently decided that the white market bookmaker — licensed, regulated, Gambling Commission-approved, the whole gleaming apparatus — is beyond reproach when it comes to restrictive practices. Beating the price is, in their studied silence on the matter, a perfectly acceptable reason to be shown the door. The Save Our Bets campaign, which arrived with great fanfare and genuine popular support, turns out upon examination to be a campaign to save the bets of people who lose. If you win, or show any inclination toward winning, the campaign has nothing whatever to say to you. You are, commercially speaking, the wrong sort of customer. A Fiat Panda at a Rolls-Royce dealership. Save Our Bets, it transpires, means save the bets of the people the bookmakers are already perfectly happy to accept. Which is to say, everyone except me.

Which is why I read the Racing Post's recent investigation with the warm glow of a man who has been accidentally vindicated. Their reporters spent their afternoons asking AI chatbots where one might bet on British racing without triggering the Gambling Commission's forthcoming system of "financial risk assessments" — which are definitely not affordability checks, the Commission would like you to know, despite being entirely indistinguishable from affordability checks in every meaningful respect. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok responded like enthusiastic young men who've just discovered a gap in the market, cheerfully recommending black market bookmakers, explaining the advantages of cryptocurrency deposits, and essentially doing everything short of posting a signed letter to the Gambling Commission's own offices in Birmingham — which, brilliantly, is precisely the address the Racing Post used when opening a fraudulent account on one of the sites. Under the name of champion Flat jockey Oisin Murphy, who at the very moment of this transaction was riding at Newmarket, presumably unaware he had simultaneously become a registered customer of an unlicensed Caribbean-registered bookmaker called Velobet.

I should be appalled. I am, in the way that one is appalled by a particularly audacious seagull stealing your chips — briefly, then mostly just impressed.

The regulated market has spent the better part of a decade constructing an elaborate architecture of restriction, friction, and paternalistic intervention, and the net result is that punters are being directed toward completely unregulated offshore operations by a chatbot. John Gosden, who trains racehorses for a living rather than drafting policy documents, put it with the blunt clarity that comes from actually understanding things: the checks are already pushing people into unprotected places. Two-thirds of punters, according to a YouGov survey, would rather go dark than hand over their payslips to Gary in Romania. You can agree with that decision or deplore it. But it is not a surprising one.

And so, with Chester beckoning and not a regulated account left to my name, I found myself doing what the Racing Post has now helpfully confirmed is both entirely straightforward and technically illegal. The grey market — those offshore operators licensed somewhere, just not here — turns out to operate with the frictionless efficiency that our own industry spent millions promising and never delivered. No Gary. No laminated script. No four-second pause suggesting Cluj-Napoca. Just a horse, a price, and a button.

The Gambling Commission's response to all of this has been to announce it will block IP addresses, a safeguard the Racing Post bypassed using NordVPN in approximately the time it takes a stewards' enquiry to find in favour of the obvious result. They have also been given an extra £26 million by the government, which is a lot of money to spend on a digital door that opens with an app anyone can download for free.

I opened the Racing Post this morning, studied the Chester form with the serious concentration of a man who understands pace figures perfectly well and chooses to ignore them, and found a price on the Chester Vase that would have made Gary's trading team reach for the laminated card. I had a bet. It lost. I am, once again, contributing to someone's bottom line.

Just not, this time, the regulated one. Which apparently is the only kind the BHA has any interest in protecting.