Euro 2004 and Online betting

I closely watch Euro2004 (there is hardly a game I missed on TV) and my betting passion shows signs of revival. A friend of mine, recently opened a William Hill account, so I wanted to place a bet there. The coefficients are pretty high compared to Bulgarian monopolist Euro Football and the variety of games is huge. The first matches I wanted to bet were ENG-SWI 1 and CRO-FRA 2. I planned to bet 5$ on the first match and reinvest all on the second. That’s how I would double my money or loose them all. As I predicted, England punished their opponents 3:0 (2 goals by youngster Rooney), but France made a disappointing draw with Croatia. No problem for me though, my friend did not make it on time depositing money in his account, so no loss here.

The next day was the very important match BUL-DEN, and my patriotic feelings prevailed over the reasonable part of my brain, and I was eager to waste 5$, betting for my country. Half-time it was 1:0 for Denmark, but I still wanted to support my team (or probably WillHill J ). I watched the game together with my friend. On half-time he tried to deposit money with his MasterCard and VISA credit cards. Surprisingly a “Your transaction can not be processed” message appeared both times. So my friend contacted WillHill support team which told him that he should have a special permission to use these cards for gambling. He dialed the (free) phones written on the back of the cards and he was informed that the policy is not to tolerate usage of credit cards for betting purposes (an example of wise risk management). Didn’t WillHill know that their customers can not deposit with those credit cards? Probably they did, so why did they leave this payment options on their site? Wicked!

The second half of BUL-DEN started so there was no time to waste with deposit problems. After the final whistle it turned out that, I had saved another 5$, because Denmark scored another goal through Gronkjaer, while the Bulgarian team was far from its best form.

The next match in the group was ITA-SWE. My friend and I tried to find a way to deposit in WillHill or anywhere else before the match start. I was planning to make 3 bets (a) Sweden wins (b) final score 2:2 (c) Ibrahimovic will score. Though (a) and (b) are contradictory, I wouldn’t mind just one of them to happen (especially 2:2 has return rate of about 1:20), but in fact only (c) turned to reality. It was a wicked goal by Zlatan. Unfortunately no benefit for me, since no workaround for depositing was found on time. I was helpful to use my VISA Electron debit card at Eurobet, because it was listed as a payment option there. But it didn’t have a 3 digit code at the back that was required in the payment details form. So I gave it up (and btw I think I would not have covered the 25 Euro minimum deposit J ).

Well, Euro 2004 continues. Let me make a prediction for today’s most interesting match Holland-Czech. I am with the Czech, Holland are just a bunch of uncoordinated stars. And in football, teamwork really counts. I guess in a software project team with 11 people it will counts as great J…