I received an unsolicited email last week giving me a “surefire way to beat the casinos”.

All I needed to do – and if I told anyone the author “would kill me”, apparently – was place £2 on black and then after every loser raise the stake 2.5 times, and then stop at a winner and start the process again from £2 to be guaranteed profits every time.

“Be careful, though, because after a while the casinos will start barring you. They hate winners, mate,” my new virtual friend warned.

“They hate winners…” It’s been said enough times about bookies, too. No oddsmaker likes a winner.

It’s so not true.

Hating winners makes no business sense to the bookmakers: how can they justify gambling as a pastime if the ultimate aim of gambling’s purveyors is to extract every penny for no return.

To sell nothing for an unlimited price. It’s no model for business.

Bookies love winners. They parade them in the media like prize cattle as proof that successful gambling is an achieveable goal.

And it is, if the bookies bottom lines are anything to go by. In general, a bookmaker makes a gross profit of between 15% and 20% on all bets placed. That leaves very little on the bottom line to pay for everything else: the overheads, staff, technology, rent, advertising, sponsorship (a huge outlay), the horse racing levy etc…

So, what gets them through the year?

Volume. A net 5% margin is much the healthier in hundreds of millions than just a few millions.

It’s the reason why they love a winner. Each winner breeds more volume, breeds more on the bottom line.

And they’re off…

Take the Grand National as the ultimate example of their love of a winner. It is a little known fact that the Grand National at Aintree in May is an annual disaster for bookies. Every year they all lose millions – and yet every year they fight tooth and nail, spending millions on advertising, to grab the biggest share possible of grannies’ each-way fancies.

Why would they do that if they hated winners? Because every winning bet sets up a legacy, a relationship, between the bookie and the winner. That relationship is a subtle contract – a very delicate one – that will grow in fits and bursts. It will wax and wane with the seasons, but the bookies can count that relationship in burgeoning volume, and eventually profit, however small.

Volume. It all adds up.

This May, if you have any contact with a bookmaker – online or in a high-street shop – around Grand National time, you can witness the subtlety of their craft at first hand.

A good bookie will be pushing (very quietly) the fact that their biggest market (football) is about to reach a four-year peak. Football and, in particular the 2010 world cup in South Africa will be 1,000 times bigger than the Grand National.

And every Aintree winner will be made aware of that. Many won’t even realise.

“They hate winners…” So who perpetrates this myth? The likes of my new virtual friend do. For, if it were common knowledge that the bookies are generally nice people who are not trying to “diddle” their customers, who is really set to lose?

Only those who prey on the weak. Those who try to claim that the bookies “hate” them because they are so successful.

In six years in the trade, I met very few people who were barred from bookies. The people who do get barred tend to be cheats, or those who do not pay their gambling debts.

Buyer beware

Which always make me wonder about those who claim to regularly “beat the bookies”. They probably don’t, but they’ve realised that perpetrating the myth is like gold dust in a world where a website built for peanuts can be the gateway to literally millions of ill-informed people worldwide.

A few quid here and there for advice can add up to millions – money they probably never would have made gambling.

The best way to bet has always been to gamble within your means and accept a profit when it comes. You can make money, but you cannot do it overnight with little or no work.

Like everything in life, you reap what you sow.

And the reality is: the bookies aren’t the ones doing the beating, you only do that to yourself.

Sean Smith is currently a journalist for the Financial Times, who has the unique experience of being a manager for a major international bookmaker for six years, a football jounalist for UK regional and national newspapers, and a football tipster for ESPN.