Bullet Business

London, UK-based The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned GameAccount Global’s TV campaign.
 
A TV ad for an online gambling service showed a serious-looking man and woman joining a casino table and playing Blackjack. The voice-over said , “Everyone loves to play Blackjack. But if you play against the casino, it’s the casino that always wins”. The couple were shown looking increasingly stressed as the croupier took all of the chips from the table. The couple where then shown again looking happy and confident while they played each other without a croupier. The voice-over said, “At casinorip.com, you play Blackjack against other players so a real person always wins, guaranteed!” The ad stated one can play a real person at casinorip.com.
 
The complainant objected:
 
The claim “if you play against real people, there’s less chance of losing your shirt” misleadingly implied that players were more likely to win with the advertiser than with a typical casino; and the claim “if you play against the casino, it’s the casino that always wins” was misleading because he believed that at a traditional casino, the house did not always win in the short run whereas at casinorip, the house took a percentage of players’ stakes (between 2.5% and 7.5%) on every single game.
 
For its part, GameAccount said the ad related specifically to their online multi-player blackjack game where one of the players would always win because they were only playing against each other and not the house or the dealer. The company also said that in a typical casino, a player was always expected to lose in the long run, but that with Casinorip.com, because of the skill levels in player-to-player games, the experienced players would win in the long run. They said that with typical casinos the house had fixed margins on stakes, with the typical margin on a Blackjack stake being between 1% and 2%.
 
The ASA accepted that skilled players would be more likely to win against a table of weaker opponents, but considered that Gameaccount had not supplied evidence to show that the average player was more likely to win against other players than when playing against the house in a normal casino as implied by the claim “if you play against real people, there’s less chance of losing your shirt.” It was concluded that the ad exaggerated the chances of individuals winning blackjack games through Casinorip.com.
 
Also, whilst the ASA accepted that one of the players on a Casinorip.com multi-player game would always win, the Authority considered that Gameaccount had not shown that the house consistently won in most hands of casino blackjack and concluded that the ad misleadingly implied that the service offered greater rewards over traditional casinos than were actually available.