Sean Graham Bookmakers

One of the three or four main bookmakers here in Belfast. The disgraceful thing about bookmakers is that it’s not a business that everyone can get into. You can’t just decide to open up a betting shop, even if you had the money. There’s some ridiculous law that you can only get a licence to be a bookmaker if your grandfather or great-​grandfather had a bookmaker’s licence (or something very similar to that sort of ludicrous type of restriction). That’s why I was glad to see the likes of Betfair starting up — bookmakers have had a licence to print money for years, with aspiring entrepreneurs barred from doing so, no matter what their credentials. What ever happened to competition?
Anyway, this is a small bookies with not a lot of seating, but they do occasionally have some attractive incentives for punters who enjoy a bet on the football (soccer). For example, they were doing a good offer on bets to predict the first goalscorer of a football match. If you correctly named the first scorer in a match and they scored again, they’d pay you double the odds, and if they scored a third time, you’d get paid treble the odds. Fair enough, the chance of that happening may not be very likely but, in the same way as doing the Lucky 15 in Paddy Power (see my review), even though it’s unlikely you might as well do the bet somewhere that will give you a big bonus if the event occurs.
The one thing that’s annoying in here is that on the day of the Aintree Grand National, you have to do all bets for that race on a docket that’s the same as filling in a lottery ticket. Many punters find this irksome.