Please explain Pinnacle
I love Pinnacle Sports, over 60% of my bets are placed there and apart from the Australian specific sports and the lower English soccer leagues, I can always get my bets fully matched. They are known as the best sportsbook out there and a lot of their advertising is centered around the fact that “Winner are Welcome”. Here is a blurb found on Pinnacles site.
What happens to successful players elsewhere?
If you are a consistently profitable player at other online bookmakers, you will find your stakes limited, or in some cases your account closed. Clearly everyone who bets aspires to be profitable, so there is a huge disincentive to opening an account with a bookmaker that operates this policy. Crucially, you won’t find this advertised alongside their sign-up incentives.
Pinnacle Sports is clear on these issues: winners are welcome, and our high limits apply equally to all customers.
I have bolded the last sentence and once again bring it to your attention. “our high limits apply equally to all customers”
This website has allowed me to meet a vast variety of professional and part time bettors and we do talk on a regular basis. A sort of sports betting brains trust.
The new NBA season is upon as and we were talking about some new strategies and by pure chance we saw that Pinnacle is in fact limiting some players. I asked the players to send me a screenshot and you can see below that one of them is limited to win $10,000 and the other has a raised limit and can win up to $14,000. My personal account also has a 10k max win.
As is clear here, their high limits DO NOT apply equally to all customers. After talking some more we came to our own conclusions. The account with the higher limits is a long term loser with Pinnacle while the lower (or what looks like the line that the majority of people get), has been a long term winner. It is 100% clear that Pinnacle does do some sort of profiling of their players and do change the amount they are allowed to bet. In this case it makes no difference as the limits are so high, but the bigger issue is that Pinnacle’s advertising is also misleading.
After some more looking around, all max bets on all sports and bet types are different for these accounts. I think Pinnacle has a lot of explaining to do.
This isn’t good, but at least I should have some higher limits due to recent performance.
haha, yep, I’m amazed they haven’t upped my limits yet. I wonder how bad you need to be to get the nicer limits.
I know that their limits for the same market change over time, they increase as the event gets nearer. Could that explain this?
Hi Soneub,
Nope, these images were taken at the exact same time.
i think you are taking out some of your footy anguish on pinnacle.
they are a good book.
gl this weekend pal, makes for painful reading.
haha, Soccer has been dreadful and just lost another $4,000 this morning, but that’s not the reason for the post.
Pinnacle is a fantastic book, and I want them to stay that way.
But they have lied and it’s clear to see that some users have higher limits. I have no issue with them doing this, but they shouldn’t advertise the opposite.
You can always bet again and again at the reduced odds – say you wager 10 k on miami minus 4.5 against bulls @ 1.952 and then the odds goes down to 1.937 which you can wager 10 k again – Pinnacle allows multiple wagers even @ reduced odds and the odds wont be cut down from 1.952 to 1.60 for example. Just making my point.
Hi Chris,
That’s correct and again, I LOVE PINNACLE, they are the best out there, no other agency comes close. But that isn’t the point I’m trying to make.
My point is that they have stated that they never limit people and everyone is treated the same.
Let’s use your point to show how this isn’t the case.
after betting the maximum the price will usually drop by 5c, so 1.952 will go to 1.909.
So using the images above, say they both want to bet $30,000 on the game.
The one with the higher limit will bet 15k at 1.952 and then 15k at 1.909. Potential return is $27,915.
The lower limit will have to bet 10k at 1.952, 10k at 1.909 and 10k at 1.86. A potential return of $27,210.
That is a $705 difference.
Pinnacle held a Twitter Q&A back in August (6th). One of the questions was do you limit players. The answer was no:
https://twitter.com/PinnacleSports/statuses/364807274088235009
However I remember a Twitter conversation prior to the Q&A, maybe in June, between Pinnacle and other industry types. That conversation I’m sure implied that they did profile players and offered higher limits to less successful punters.
Anyway, I can forgive them some marketing hyperbole for what is an excellent book.
In this instance when you’re talking 10k limits I don’t know how realistic a problem it’d be. Surely if you’re betting those sort of stakes your using a broker and getting better prices from multiple asian books. Otherwise you’d be losing a fortune.
Great blog!
Thanks John,
Yep, I agree the limits are so high that it doesn’t make a difference in the example above.
But for me on Soccer bets it does. I have very few books I can bet at and usually have to bet at Pinnacle and then wait for the lines to rebound (if they do at all), while it seems others would be able to bet the full amount in one go.
I just feel bad for the bettor who had the raised limit who has now been taking some grief from the rest of us for being a “losing” bettor.
yep, Pinnacle replied to my tweet about this with.
“We don’t limit, but sometimes extend limits. Some players have been given increased limits due to internal algorithm use.”
I still have an issue with the wording on their site, as everyone does not have the same limits.
Please explain how they have the highest limits when Bet365 and Will Hill have almost (Pounds)2m and Pinnacle have $30k limit?