Essentially, bookies retain the right to limit how much money you are allowed to stake on a bet. They cannot make you lose a bet, but they can ensure that you cannot place high stakes on any bets that you are likely to be successful in. Got a good track record on the horses? Might as well get used to winning just pennies. Conversely, bookmakers often do not limit you in sports or categories that you do not do well in, allowing you to lose all your money on a high stakes bet on the footie if you have shown you do not know the net from the goalposts.

Some successful gamblers log in to their bookie accounts only to find that they have been banned altogether. If a bookie decides they are never going to make anything out of you, why keep your custom? They do not want it. This ruthless culling maybe makes sense from a businessman’s perspective in terms of increasing profit margins for the bookies, but it flies in the face of customer rights and is ethically dubious at best.

If limiting accounts is not bad enough, we are also starting to see cases of bookies simply refusing to pay out. In April of this year, a number of punters told the Daily Mail that their accounts were closed when they won up to £1600 on races at Cheltenham Festival. Just a few months later, one ‘lucky’ Belfast punter was denied £14K based on a system error.

At least not all the stories of bookies refusing to pay out have unhappy endings, though. In March this year student nurse Julius Ndlovu sued William Hill for refusing to pay out £1,000 on a tennis bet, claiming that the odds they set were a mistake. The court ruled in Ndlovu’s favour and awarded him his winnings plus £209 in costs. It is just one case, but it hopefully highlights to other punters out there that as customers just like any others, we do still have rights in the eyes of the law.