The battle to stop clever people betting

Everyone loves a winner, goes the saying. Sports-betting firms don’t. Indeed, they dislike winners so much that they deploy complex tools to stop them from wagering more than a pittance—as your correspondent discovered in 2018, when Ladbrokes, a British bookmaker, told him he couldn’t bet more than £5 ($6.50) on the winner of the National Basketball Association’s Most Valuable Player award. For skilled players, or “sharps”, such “stake restrictions” are common.