If you haven’t experienced a bookmaker paying out early for yourself, you’ll doubtless have read about the phenomenon at some point or another. Sometimes it happens because you have placed a bet with insurance (e.g. early payout if your team goes two goals up), the benefit of which is that you get paid out early on the wagers that you’ve placed.
Other times, a bookie decides to pay out early because it earns them plenty of publicity, which in turn results in other people placing their bets with the company and earning it far more money than it would have got without the publicity.
If you know anything about bookmakers and the world of betting, you’ll no doubt be aware that they rarely do anything out of the kindness of their heart. As with casinos, betting companies are built to make as much money as possible, so they look for any and all ways of doing so.
Equally, it is a competitive world and bookies need to work hard to bring in punters that might otherwise choose to bet with a different company. Paying out early on something that they’d likely have to pay out on anyway is just a good way of doing so.
Closing The Market
It goes without saying that, as punters, we’re not going to be queuing up to complain about a bookmaker choosing to pay us out early on a bet that we’ve placed. Most of the time, bookies seem to do what they can to avoid paying us, so getting our winnings earlier than expected is a good thing.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t be suspicious about why it is that a bookie has decided to make such a decision, with some companies becoming famous for having offers that benefit the punter. With some sites, for example, you will be paid out early if you’ve placed a bet on a football club to win and they go two goals up.
One of the reasons why they do this is that it allows them to shut down that betting market, stopping people from being able to make large wagers for a small profit on something that is as good as guaranteed. At the end of August 2022, for example, Manchester City played newly promoted Nottingham Forest in the Premier League.
City went 2-0 up early in the first-half, so companies with such an offer will have paid out on City To Win bets, then shut the market down. In the end, Pep Guardiola’s side won 6-0, justifying the decision to stop people making a profit that was as good as a certainly from the moment the second was scored.
Gaining Publicity
Though shutting the market is a wise thing to do in order to stop people from making money, some bookmakers look to do it in order to make themselves some money. That might seem strange when you consider the fact that paying out on something that hasn’t definitely happened might end up costing a bookie money.
Arsenal were once playing Watford, for example, so bookmakers with such an offer in place paid out on bets on Arsenal to win when the Gunners went 2-0 up, only for Watford to score twice and draw the match.
Generally speaking, it is rare for teams to lose or draw from a winning position, so a bookmaker is unlikely to lose money by paying out early on footballing wagers. What they will do, though, is gain a good amount of publicity, regardless of whether the decision ends up being right or wrong.
Such publicity is likely to bring in other punters to the company that paid out early. Given that the vast majority of bettors lose their wagers, this means that, even if the early payout was the wrong decision, the company will make money in the long-run.
It isn’t just football matches that see bets paid out early. Sometimes bookies will pay out early on the likes of election results, which obviously drives all sorts of content for media companies. It is not a coincidence that one of the companies that pays out early on a bet is Paddy Power, who have become the masters of gaining publicity over the years.
The Irish bookmaker doesn’t even care whether it’s good or bad publicity, they just want to be in the news because that will result in them getting more customers, which will equal more money.
Winning It Back
Of all of the reasons why a bookmaker might choose to pay out early on a wager, the most obvious one is the one that few of us will actually think about: they reckon they’ll win it back quickly. Imagine having placed a bet on Arsenal to Win against Watford during that infamous match. You are logged into your account and it has suddenly been bolstered by the win from your wager, so what are you going to do? In many cases, people will look at the In-Play market of the match and place some more bets with their winnings.
If not, they might look at other games that are taking place at a later date and decide to place a wager or two on them. Whatever they do, they are unlikely to withdraw the money from their account. Bookmakers are confident that they will win the money back from the majority of punters that they have paid out early to, so it’s a win-win scenario for them.
They get the publicity that comes with an early payout, the new customers that arrive thanks to the publicity and they even win most of the money back that they’d paid.
Examples Of Early Payouts
Given the fact that we keep referring to publicity that comes with early payouts, it is not a surprise that more than a few of them have made the news over the years.
Some of them have made the news simply by virtue of being an early payout that garners attention, whilst others have created headlines because they’ve gone wrong and left the bookmaker in question red-faced by their own actions.
Here is a look at a selection of each one of those:
The Fight Between Mayweather & McGregor
Conor McGregor made his name in the world of Mixed Martial Arts. He was exceptional at it, becoming champion of the world in MMA, so he decided that he needed a new challenge. That challenge, it turned out, was for him to enter the boxing ring and go up against Floyd Mayweather Junior, a fighter that managed a career of 49 fights without losing. Though he’d retired by the time that McGregor came calling, there are some things that you never forget how to do and Mayweather had never lost the ability to fight.
Considering McGregor is a famous Irishmen, you might think that Paddy Power would have his back. The company is many things, but stupid isn’t one of them and it realised that their countryman never stood a chance in the ring. They paid out early on a Mayweather win, which was an entirely justified decision thanks to a Technical Knockout by the boxer on the MMA champ in the tenth round. Paddy Power’s controversial tagline that ‘We Always Bet on Black’ generated headlines, but the publicity gained from it all made it worthwhile.
Betfred & Manchester United
When it comes to betting, the most sensible thing that you can do is to keep emotion out of things. When you place bets on a football club that you love, for example, you’re more likely to make decisions based on your feelings than on the reality of the situation. Never has that been more evident than when Fred Done, Manchester United supporter and owner of Betfred, decided to pay out early on the Red Devils winning the Premier League title during the 1997-1998 campaign. They were 12 points clear at the time, but even so.
Arsene Wenger had made a big impact at Arsenal, which surprised everyone given that his major experience before then had come in Japanese football. His side had three games in hand on United, winning all three, whilst points dropped to Liverpool and Newcastle resulted in the Gunners winning the league at United’s expense. It ended up costing Betfred around £500,000 in early payouts, whilst Alex Ferguson reportedly told Done never to do that again, feeling as though it put undue pressure on his side to succeed.
Fred Done was never the sort of person to allow someone else to tell him what to do, though, even if that person is the greatest manager that the club he supports has ever had. As a result, he made the choice to payout early on United winning the title once again as the 2011-2012 season reached its climax. United were five points clear of their rivals at the time, with Ferguson having won loads of titles and the Cityzens having yet to claim one in the wake of being taken over by the sports-washing outfit of Sheikh Mansour.
United dropped enough points to mean that the title went down to the final day of the season, during which time they were playing Sunderland and City were up against Queens Park Rangers. Both teams had 86 points, but City had a better goal difference. United got the win against Sunderland, with City losing 2-1 heading into injury time. An Edin Dzeko goal in the 92nd minute offered them hope, whilst a Sergio Agüero finish with the last kick of the game saw City win the title and Betfred once again looking stupid for backing United.
Trump Left Most People Angry, Especially Paddy Power
A couple of weeks before the result of the United States of America’s Presidential election, Paddy Power published a blog with the following headline: A Woman’s Place Is In The House – The White House! Paddy Power Pays Out Over $1 Million On Hilary Clinton Victory. So convinced was the Irish bookmaker that there was no way that a former TV show host with awful hair could win the Presidency that they decided it was over before the voting had even been cast. We all know what nonsense, followed, of course, leaving Paddy red, or orange, faced.
The company had paid out early on Barack Obama winning the election four years earlier, but that at least made sense when you consider the polling at the time. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking in the case of the Clinton early payout, considering the fact that the polling suggested it was essentially the toss of a coin as to who would win. When James Comey, the Director of the FBI, wrote a letter to Congress and said that he was re-opening an investigation into Hilary Clinton’s use of an unsecured server to send emails, it turned the election in the favour of the Donald, sadly for Paddy Power, America and the world.
Betfred’s Payout On The Blue Side Of Manchester
During the 2017-2018 campaign, Manchester City raced into a lead at the top of the table before the players had even sat down to enjoy their Christmas turkey. When the Cityzens turned up at Old Trafford on the tenth of December 2017, they did so with a lead of 11 points over the Red Devils. Not even José Mourinho could halt their momentum, with the self-proclaimed ‘Special One’ instead having to moan after full-time that the referee had let them down. David Silva gave Pep Guardiola’s team the lead after 42 minutes, only for Marcus Rashford to equalise in stoppage time.
Nicolas Otamendi scored for City early in the second-half to put them 2-1 up, which is how the match finished. It meant that the sports-washing club had become the first ever team to win 14 games in succession during a top-flight season and Fred Done accepted that even his beloved Manchester United wouldn’t be able to catch up with the ‘noisy neighbours’. Betfred paid out early on a City title win, which ended up being exactly the right choice as they finished on 100 points, 19 clear of the Red Devils.
Paddy Power Pay Out On Liverpool After The Charity Shield
In 2022 Liverpool as FA Cup winners from the previous season played Man City as league winners from the last campaign. Liverpool were outstanding and won the game convinvingly.
Paddy Power then paid out on people who had bet on Liverpool to win the league, before a single game of the 38 match season had taken place.
Of course it was done for publicity but the fact Liverpool then went on to have one of the worst starts to a Premier League season meant the punters on the end of the early payout were especially happy.