Ladbrokes H1 Results.

[tikay]

Ladbrokes announced their H1 results yesterday.

Ignoring the rest of the business, Poker - an extremely small part of Ladbrokes overall - fell another 20%, as it seems to have done for 7 or 8 years now.

They have broken out some of the poker number which are on page 29 of the PDF below.  

http://www.ladbrokesplc.com/~/media/Files/L/Ladbrokes-V2/results-presentations/2015/interim-results-2015-presentation.pdf

For the new breed of Online players, you may say "so what?", but Ladbrokes was the biggest European facing site 8 or 10 years ago, they ran the Poker Million, Ladbrokes Cruises, & had a huge hospitality room at the WSOP every year, & sponsored Tournaments all over the shop.

It was a lovely bit of software, too (by the then standards) smooth as silk & very reliable. We all played there, & "The Daddy" was quite the thing to win.

Every afternoon they ran a $200 MTT with an $8,000 Guarantee, I played that every day as did most of the then regulars. It always beat the Guarantee, then one day, out of the blue, they halved the Guarantee & the thing died within weeks.

I don't have any flag to fly for Ladbrokes, but I do find it all rather sad. There's no way back for them now, of course, they have no USP to offer, & presumably they simply use it as a cross sell tool.

Shame really.

Click to see full-size image.

[doubleup]

I'm pretty sure that they are the only poker site whose WSOP "team" came back with a profit over the years - two winners came from the site, Eastgate and Hachem, with numerous other decent scores.  Somehow they managed to avoid cashing in on all that success.

[aaron1867]

I find it pretty amazing that Coral are in talks with Laddies. You can only suspect this is good news for Laddies really, because they really are on a "downswing".

[FUN4FRASER]

Tikay is right Ladbrokes was massive in 2004/5/6

Remember the good old days there Tony ?

There were may faces played there  You & I (SarahJane) RED-DOG, Marky147 ,Skalie ActionJack ,Kunku Wap ( John Tabbatabai )loop8(IanFrazer) Sealey (ConorTate) T8MML(Tim Blake) Punk Floyd ( John Conroy)  and a massive swedish  crowd  ,William Thorson (ILCAPITANO) Erik Sagstrom (The Salmon ) Bengt Sonnert (pkrbt) and obv more

The afternoon 8K was actually a $250 buy in but as soon as the guarantee was cut in half all the other tournaments followed suit and the site very quickly died .As Tony says they used to have a strong presence in the poker industry  sending 40/50 players to the WSOP main every year

Strangely the reason why there was such a strong community spirit was because there was a massive scrolling chat box on every open table so everybody used to be able to chat way to each other , sometimes the banter got a bit lively ( a very young Kunku Wap was an absolute Legend) but generally it was all in good humour and friends (and enemies) were made ( I was always at loggerheads with Paul Jackson)

story about Joe Hachem,...its true he did play there under the alias KAIKEY but he was constantly foul mouthed in the chat box and had  actually been banned for about a year but as soon as he won the WSOP main event  Ladbrokes claimed him as their own player 

Met some great people from that site....Good Times !

[arbboy]

Personally i think ladbrokes need to totally change their business model.  They prove every time they release their latest set of results that any part of their business which requires skill to price up they don't make money at.  Their entire income comes from products where the price is mathematically fixed so they can't lose.  They keep blaming 'unfavourable' sporting results blah blah.  The bottom line is every other firm faces these unfavourable results as well as them.  The reason they don't make any money is that they have a terrible trading team who are pretty clueless at pricing up the vast majority of sports they offer.  As a small defence quite often nowadays marketing teams incredibly have the final say over the price of the biggest turnover events on any given weekend rather than the trading director.  Even so, by price matching rivals on the biggest backed teams/horses of the weekend by offering commission free betfair prices/offering all these money back free bets etc etc you are just setting fire to margin.  

The amount of times i see Ladbrokes going top price the big 4 in the EPL (betfair price on 1/3 or 1/4 shots).  If you are laying a 4 team acca at betfair prices long term you don't have much margin in what you are selling.  Just because you are laying a 1/3 shot doesn't mean you have any margin in the bet you are laying.  Their old school mentality of 'you will never go skint laying a short one' is one of their biggest problems imo.  If they bet a football match to 108% they pretty much put their entire margin into the draw and dog which hardly anyone bets.

Betting is a really simple business.  If you keep pricing things incorrectly you will lose money.  For years Ladbrokes have been reactive to the now major players of the game and scared to lose customers to them.  I think now they are so far behind the major players it is time to reinvent themselves totally as a brand and become the UK version of Pinnacle.  Get a team of crack traders in for big money who know what they are doing, slim down their product offering to the core sports and focus solely on them at low margins but turn over huge volume and actually lay a bet.  When you lay a shrewdie who you respect actually go with his opinion, create some arbs to get action on the 'right' side, embrace arbers for the benefit they can bring to your business (because they are not going to go away) and move on from there.  People don't realise arbers have probably caused more harm to ladbrokes than any other firm.  The real problem with being on the wrong side of arbers is that by the very nature of the 2 way transaction if ladbrokes are losing one of their many rivals is actually winning the vast majority of ladbrokes loses to arbers.  Arbers only keep a tiny percentage of that transaction.  Effectively for years ladbrokes have been betting against their rivals, mainly betfair, via arbers and helping to finance the growth of their rivals effectively whilst sluming into the ground themselves.  

This would obviously be far too risky for a PLC board to do but the bottom line is their business is pretty worthless sports betting wise so they have very little to lose imo by taking a punt on this different angle.  They still have the fobt's to rely on to pay the ex's which they pretty much have for years.  They are never ever going to catch Hills,bet365,power,betfair.  They have all flown past ladbrokes and into the sunset for good.  Trying to keep up with these rivals is one of the reasons why ladbrokes are falling further and further behind because they don't have the skill set or resources to offer the products these firms do profitably.

Ladbrokes have for years tried to expand their sports betting product offering in order to keep up with the big players of the industry.  Bet365, hills, power, betfair etc.  These firms have far superior trading teams/software tools/wesbite customer experience to price these additional products than ladbrokes do.  As ladbrokes add more and more sports to their offering they just proceed to lose more and more money.  How they traded the General Election in running this year was just one of many examples of setting fire to money hand over fist.

[tikay]

I find it pretty amazing that Coral are in talks with Laddies. You can only suspect this is good news for Laddies really, because they really are on a "downswing".

Personally, a merger between Ladbrokes & Coral looks like mating an ass with a mule. Heaven knows what the progeny will look like.

But they have to do something, Industry consolidation is leaving them even further behind.

[arbboy]

I find it pretty amazing that Coral are in talks with Laddies. You can only suspect this is good news for Laddies really, because they really are on a "downswing".

Personally, a merger between Ladbrokes & Coral looks like mating an ass with a mule. Heaven knows what the progeny will look like.

But they have to do something, Industry consolidation is leaving them even further behind.

How bad must corals results be if they are keen to merge with ladbrokes though?  Consolidation isn't leaving them behind.  It is their inability to correctly price (what used to be and still should be) their core product week in week out which is causing them to fall behind.

Do Ladbrokes have a 'what if' plan if the FOBT's were banned?  I would love to see it.  They effectively don't have a business without them.

[tikay]

Tikay is right Ladbrokes was massive in 2004/5/6

Remember the good old days there Tony ?

There were may faces played there  You & I (SarahJane) RED-DOG, Marky147 ,Skalie ActionJack ,Kunku Wap ( John Tabbatabai )loop8(IanFrazer) Sealey (ConorTate) T8MML(Tim Blake) Punk Floyd ( John Conroy)  and a massive swedish  crowd  ,William Thorson (ILCAPITANO) Erik Sagstrom (The Salmon ) Bengt Sonnert (pkrbt) and obv more

The afternoon 8K was actually a $250 buy in but as soon as the guarantee was cut in half all the other tournaments followed suit and the site very quickly died .As Tony says they used to have a strong presence in the poker industry  sending 40/50 players to the WSOP main every year

Strangely the reason why there was such a strong community spirit was because there was a massive scrolling chat box on every open table so everybody used to be able to chat way to each other , sometimes the banter got a bit lively ( a very young Kunku Wap was an absolute Legend) but generally it was all in good humour and friends (and enemies) were made ( I was always at loggerheads with Paul Jackson)

story about Joe Hachem,...its true he did play there under the alias KAIKEY but he was constantly foul mouthed in the chat box and had  actually been banned for about a year but as soon as he won the WSOP main event  Ladbrokes claimed him as their own player 

Met some great people from that site....Good Times !

Good Post Fraser, so many memories there. Bob the Burtcher & Debbie used to play that afternoon jobbie, too.

I rarely missed it, I had retired from work & it was the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

Don't think we had luxuries such as Late Reg in those days - log on 2 seconds late, & that was it, too bad.

   

[Omm]

Tikay is right Ladbrokes was massive in 2004/5/6

Remember the good old days there Tony ?

There were may faces played there  You & I (SarahJane) RED-DOG, Marky147 ,Skalie ActionJack ,Kunku Wap ( John Tabbatabai )loop8(IanFrazer) Sealey (ConorTate) T8MML(Tim Blake) Punk Floyd ( John Conroy)  and a massive swedish  crowd  ,William Thorson (ILCAPITANO) Erik Sagstrom (The Salmon ) Bengt Sonnert (pkrbt) and obv more

The afternoon 8K was actually a $250 buy in but as soon as the guarantee was cut in half all the other tournaments followed suit and the site very quickly died .As Tony says they used to have a strong presence in the poker industry  sending 40/50 players to the WSOP main every year

Strangely the reason why there was such a strong community spirit was because there was a massive scrolling chat box on every open table so everybody used to be able to chat way to each other , sometimes the banter got a bit lively ( a very young Kunku Wap was an absolute Legend) but generally it was all in good humour and friends (and enemies) were made ( I was always at loggerheads with Paul Jackson)

story about Joe Hachem,...its true he did play there under the alias KAIKEY but he was constantly foul mouthed in the chat box and had  actually been banned for about a year but as soon as he won the WSOP main event  Ladbrokes claimed him as their own player 

Met some great people from that site....Good Times !

Good Post Fraser, so many memories there. Bob the Burtcher & Debbie used to play that afternoon jobbie, too.

I rarely missed it, I had retired from work & it was the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

Don't think we had luxuries such as Late Reg in those days - log on 2 seconds late, & that was it, too bad.

   

The important question is, did you ever win it?

[tikay]

Tikay is right Ladbrokes was massive in 2004/5/6

Remember the good old days there Tony ?

There were may faces played there  You & I (SarahJane) RED-DOG, Marky147 ,Skalie ActionJack ,Kunku Wap ( John Tabbatabai )loop8(IanFrazer) Sealey (ConorTate) T8MML(Tim Blake) Punk Floyd ( John Conroy)  and a massive swedish  crowd  ,William Thorson (ILCAPITANO) Erik Sagstrom (The Salmon ) Bengt Sonnert (pkrbt) and obv more

The afternoon 8K was actually a $250 buy in but as soon as the guarantee was cut in half all the other tournaments followed suit and the site very quickly died .As Tony says they used to have a strong presence in the poker industry  sending 40/50 players to the WSOP main every year

Strangely the reason why there was such a strong community spirit was because there was a massive scrolling chat box on every open table so everybody used to be able to chat way to each other , sometimes the banter got a bit lively ( a very young Kunku Wap was an absolute Legend) but generally it was all in good humour and friends (and enemies) were made ( I was always at loggerheads with Paul Jackson)

story about Joe Hachem,...its true he did play there under the alias KAIKEY but he was constantly foul mouthed in the chat box and had  actually been banned for about a year but as soon as he won the WSOP main event  Ladbrokes claimed him as their own player 

Met some great people from that site....Good Times !

Good Post Fraser, so many memories there. Bob the Burtcher & Debbie used to play that afternoon jobbie, too.

I rarely missed it, I had retired from work & it was the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

Don't think we had luxuries such as Late Reg in those days - log on 2 seconds late, & that was it, too bad.

   

The important question is, did you ever win it?

Not often......

It used to get 45 to 50 runners most days, so maybe 6 or 7 got paid. I cashed regularly - more often that most - but the wins were far & few between. It was my sort of structure, very playable, lasted about 3 hours, & I could sit & nut peddle for hours. 

Generally, when it got 3 handed - & bearing in mind we all knew each other - we chopped it up. There was no Player Transfer facility, but we sorted it somehow, & I don't recall anyone ever getting diddled.

I went over to Martin de Knijff's Club in Stockholm once for some Fessie, & for the first time met up with most of the Scandies who dominated Ladbrokes at the time. I could barely believe it, they were all kids.

[arbboy]

Tikay is right Ladbrokes was massive in 2004/5/6

Remember the good old days there Tony ?

There were may faces played there  You & I (SarahJane) RED-DOG, Marky147 ,Skalie ActionJack ,Kunku Wap ( John Tabbatabai )loop8(IanFrazer) Sealey (ConorTate) T8MML(Tim Blake) Punk Floyd ( John Conroy)  and a massive swedish  crowd  ,William Thorson (ILCAPITANO) Erik Sagstrom (The Salmon ) Bengt Sonnert (pkrbt) and obv more

The afternoon 8K was actually a $250 buy in but as soon as the guarantee was cut in half all the other tournaments followed suit and the site very quickly died .As Tony says they used to have a strong presence in the poker industry  sending 40/50 players to the WSOP main every year

Strangely the reason why there was such a strong community spirit was because there was a massive scrolling chat box on every open table so everybody used to be able to chat way to each other , sometimes the banter got a bit lively ( a very young Kunku Wap was an absolute Legend) but generally it was all in good humour and friends (and enemies) were made ( I was always at loggerheads with Paul Jackson)

story about Joe Hachem,...its true he did play there under the alias KAIKEY but he was constantly foul mouthed in the chat box and had  actually been banned for about a year but as soon as he won the WSOP main event  Ladbrokes claimed him as their own player 

Met some great people from that site....Good Times !

Good Post Fraser, so many memories there. Bob the Burtcher & Debbie used to play that afternoon jobbie, too.

I rarely missed it, I had retired from work & it was the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

Don't think we had luxuries such as Late Reg in those days - log on 2 seconds late, & that was it, too bad.

   

The important question is, did you ever win it?

Not often......

It used to get 45 to 50 runners most days, so maybe 6 or 7 got paid. I cashed regularly - more often that most - but the wins were far & few between. It was my sort of structure, very playable, lasted about 3 hours, & I could sit & nut peddle for hours. 

Generally, when it got 3 handed - & bearing in mind we all knew each other - we chopped it up. There was no Player Transfer facility, but we sorted it somehow, & I don't recall anyone ever getting diddled.

I went over to Martin de Knijff's Club in Stockholm once for some Fessie, & for the first time met up with most of the Scandies who dominated Ladbrokes at the time. I could barely believe it, they were all kids.

Tikay did you ever meet any of the scando high rollers who had ladbrokes over on an exchange rate coup moving their balances from their poker account to sports betting account depending on which way the $ moved against the £?

[AlunB]

Personally i think ladbrokes need to totally change their business model.  They prove every time they release their latest set of results that any part of their business which requires skill to price up they don't make money at.  Their entire income comes from products where the price is mathematically fixed so they can't lose.  They keep blaming 'unfavourable' sporting results blah blah.  The bottom line is every other firm faces these unfavourable results as well as them.  The reason they don't make any money is that they have a terrible trading team who are pretty clueless at pricing up the vast majority of sports they offer.  As a small defence quite often nowadays marketing teams incredibly have the final say over the price of the biggest turnover events on any given weekend rather than the trading director.  Even so, by price matching rivals on the biggest backed teams/horses of the weekend by offering commission free betfair prices/offering all these money back free bets etc etc you are just setting fire to margin.  

The amount of times i see Ladbrokes going top price the big 4 in the EPL (betfair price on 1/3 or 1/4 shots).  If you are laying a 4 team acca at betfair prices long term you don't have much margin in what you are selling.  Just because you are laying a 1/3 shot doesn't mean you have any margin in the bet you are laying.  Their old school mentality of 'you will never go skint laying a short one' is one of their biggest problems imo.  If they bet a football match to 108% they pretty much put their entire margin into the draw and dog which hardly anyone bets.

Betting is a really simple business.  If you keep pricing things incorrectly you will lose money.  For years Ladbrokes have been reactive to the now major players of the game and scared to lose customers to them.  I think now they are so far behind the major players it is time to reinvent themselves totally as a brand and become the UK version of Pinnacle.  Get a team of crack traders in for big money who know what they are doing, slim down their product offering to the core sports and focus solely on them at low margins but turn over huge volume and actually lay a bet.  When you lay a shrewdie who you respect actually go with his opinion, create some arbs to get action on the 'right' side, embrace arbers for the benefit they can bring to your business (because they are not going to go away) and move on from there.  People don't realise arbers have probably caused more harm to ladbrokes than any other firm.  The real problem with being on the wrong side of arbers is that by the very nature of the 2 way transaction if ladbrokes are losing one of their many rivals is actually winning the vast majority of ladbrokes loses to arbers.  Arbers only keep a tiny percentage of that transaction.  Effectively for years ladbrokes have been betting against their rivals, mainly betfair, via arbers and helping to finance the growth of their rivals effectively whilst sluming into the ground themselves.  

This would obviously be far too risky for a PLC board to do but the bottom line is their business is pretty worthless sports betting wise so they have very little to lose imo by taking a punt on this different angle.  They still have the fobt's to rely on to pay the ex's which they pretty much have for years.  They are never ever going to catch Hills,bet365,power,betfair.  They have all flown past ladbrokes and into the sunset for good.  Trying to keep up with these rivals is one of the reasons why ladbrokes are falling further and further behind because they don't have the skill set or resources to offer the products these firms do profitably.

Ladbrokes have for years tried to expand their sports betting product offering in order to keep up with the big players of the industry.  Bet365, hills, power, betfair etc.  These firms have far superior trading teams/software tools/wesbite customer experience to price these additional products than ladbrokes do.  As ladbrokes add more and more sports to their offering they just proceed to lose more and more money.  How they traded the General Election in running this year was just one of many examples of setting fire to money hand over fist.

As someone who cover the online gambling industry for a living, I will say this is an excellent post.

In many ways they would be better outsourcing all their trading while they rebuild. Then they can focus on brand and marketing and tinkering with acquisition and retention offers.

Margin of 5% is fine if you have a) scale or b) a lower cost base

Interestingly though Coral has done very well with what many would call a "bad" trading team and they too book to about a 5% margin. They don't have anything like the same overhead as Ladbrokes though.

[tikay]

Tikay is right Ladbrokes was massive in 2004/5/6

Remember the good old days there Tony ?

There were may faces played there  You & I (SarahJane) RED-DOG, Marky147 ,Skalie ActionJack ,Kunku Wap ( John Tabbatabai )loop8(IanFrazer) Sealey (ConorTate) T8MML(Tim Blake) Punk Floyd ( John Conroy)  and a massive swedish  crowd  ,William Thorson (ILCAPITANO) Erik Sagstrom (The Salmon ) Bengt Sonnert (pkrbt) and obv more

The afternoon 8K was actually a $250 buy in but as soon as the guarantee was cut in half all the other tournaments followed suit and the site very quickly died .As Tony says they used to have a strong presence in the poker industry  sending 40/50 players to the WSOP main every year

Strangely the reason why there was such a strong community spirit was because there was a massive scrolling chat box on every open table so everybody used to be able to chat way to each other , sometimes the banter got a bit lively ( a very young Kunku Wap was an absolute Legend) but generally it was all in good humour and friends (and enemies) were made ( I was always at loggerheads with Paul Jackson)

story about Joe Hachem,...its true he did play there under the alias KAIKEY but he was constantly foul mouthed in the chat box and had  actually been banned for about a year but as soon as he won the WSOP main event  Ladbrokes claimed him as their own player 

Met some great people from that site....Good Times !

Good Post Fraser, so many memories there. Bob the Burtcher & Debbie used to play that afternoon jobbie, too.

I rarely missed it, I had retired from work & it was the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

Don't think we had luxuries such as Late Reg in those days - log on 2 seconds late, & that was it, too bad.

   

The important question is, did you ever win it?

Not often......

It used to get 45 to 50 runners most days, so maybe 6 or 7 got paid. I cashed regularly - more often that most - but the wins were far & few between. It was my sort of structure, very playable, lasted about 3 hours, & I could sit & nut peddle for hours. 

Generally, when it got 3 handed - & bearing in mind we all knew each other - we chopped it up. There was no Player Transfer facility, but we sorted it somehow, & I don't recall anyone ever getting diddled.

I went over to Martin de Knijff's Club in Stockholm once for some Fessie, & for the first time met up with most of the Scandies who dominated Ladbrokes at the time. I could barely believe it, they were all kids.

Tikay did you ever meet any of the scando high rollers who had ladbrokes over on an exchange rate coup moving their balances from their poker account to sports betting account depending on which way the $ moved against the £?

Not that I am aware of, but possibly, I met most of them down the years.

I first became aware of the tale via Keith Hawkins Blog, "The Camel Ruminates", which was in my Top 20 favourite blogs of all time. Camel broke the story, but if my memory serves correct, he later edited it down a bit, & perhaps with good reason.

For those not aware, a bunch of Scandies were transferring big sums every morning from Sports Betting to Poker or vice-versa (Ladbrokes always had separate wallets) on the Ladbrokes site - up to £100,000 I seem to recall - & re-transferring it later the same day. But Ladbrokes had messed up the Exchange Rates, & the Scandies had spotted it, & made a right killing. Not huge sums, but it was free money.

[tikay]

Strike that - here's Camel's version. Far more accurate.

Of course, this does not refer to Ladbrokes, no no.


http://www.camelpoker.blogspot.co.uk/


Just had a quick peruse of several entries - think I'll promote Keith's Blog to Top 15.

[vegaslover]

Ladbrokes was the first poker site I played on, primarily as I had a betting account with them.
Cutting them guarantees killed all the games, even at low stakes. Crazy that a bookie so big at the time, can fk up the simple stuff in running their business.

IIRC, they spent a good amount of time whining about Betfair and claiming they would use any legal avenue to get them stopped, sure worked out!!