Most Ironic Case of Gambler's Fallacy?

From BBC News 4 August 2016:

Quote:

Ladbrokes profits up strongly on 'bookie friendly' results Ladbrokes has reported a £25.2m profit for the first six months of the year compared with last year's £51.4m loss. The bookmaker says this strong performance is in part due to "sporting gods" being on its side. It cites a run of "bookie friendly" results, like that of the European Championship, where England and Northern Ireland exited early. Ladbrokes, which plans to merge with rival Coral, says a run of "customer friendly" results will follow. The results show that customers are responding positively to the company's new strategy "at a time when the sporting gods have generally been on our side and we've enjoyed some helpful bookmaker friendly results", said chief executive, Jim Mullen. "History would strongly dictate that such a run of results in our favour would see customer staking suffer, but encouragingly these numbers firmly buck that trend and combine strong staking and a good margin." "However, 130 years of experience in sports betting has shown us that we will endure a run of customer friendly results and margins will normalise," he added. [emphasis added]

Notwithstanding the obvious incidental question over the integrity of reporting company profits seemingly subject to huge sways driven by luck, has Mr Mullen ironically fallen foul of a logical fallacy that forms part of the bedrock of bookmakers' [long term] success? I suspect the 130 years of experience that he refers to may well demonstrate that Lady Luck will look equally favourably on both booky and punter over that period, thereby 'normalising the margins', but I'd bet the farm (if I had one?!) on it not showing that a run of customer friendly results will necessarily endure.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2ayZG7M