The UK’s betting shop operators came under an unexpected attack on Friday, 3 October, when an advertisement appearing in the Financial Times from a hitherto unheard of organisation called fairandopengambling.net, attacked what it called the “unfair practices of betting shop machine terminals”.
The anti-fixed odds betting terminals  (FOBT) advert was paid for by one Derek Webb, founder of a company called Prime Table Games which is currently involved in litigation in the US with machine supplier Shuffle Master regarding a patent dispute pertaining to three-card poker.

The advertisement says that FOBTs are “wholly unfair when compared to the casino versions of the games” and goes on to claim that the “theoretical amount per bet that players lose on many bets is higher”, that the “actual percentage of player cash-ins that players lose is higher” and the “probability that players lose all their available cash on a session is higher”.

Widening the remit of its attack, the advert goes on to claim there is “inadequate age verification and sobriety verification of players” and that there is “often no easily accessible cash-out button”. It then suggests that “terminal fantasy races… [fix] the results so that there are more lower-pay-off winners than by random distribution”. Finally it claims that bet maximums and minimum are both too high.

Speaking to GamblingCompliance, Webb suggested the advertisement and the campaign were being funded solely by himself. He said he had “only gone public today” and that the gambling industry should “come forward it they think I am wrong”.

Webb went on to suggest that he did not think FOBTs should ever have been licensed in the UK in the first place. “A lot of people think like this,” he claimed. “I’m just the messenger. The regulator has been asleep at the wheel.”

Webb suggested the prevalence of problem gambling in the UK was worse than was being reported by the various surveys. “We don’t need further research,” he added. “We don’t need experts to tell us. Just visit a betting shop and observe people playing these things”. The research, he added, “didn’t show the full impact and the future impact”.

Webb said he would be writing to members of parliament.

He said his experience in the industry came from his 15 years in the 80s and 90s as a poker professional. He also claims he invented the three-card poker game on behalf of the “industry” in the mid-90s. This is the central subject of the case that has been brought in Mississippi against Shuffle Master.

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