The betting thread below has prompted me to post this

He lives with a new partner. He works full time. She looks after finances. He gets (his choice) 20 quid a day to spend. Travel, food,pint after work. Saves up for a Friday night out (pre lockdown). Only allowed (again his choice) to buy clothes etc online and she orders it. Fair play to him. Hope it works.

 

Many years ago, 1990/91ish myself and a few friends had booked a lads holiday. Everyone had paid except one lad who its fair to say liked a flutter. The lad who had booked the holiday received a call on his landline saying if this wasnt paid by the end of the week his holiday would be cancelled .Despite his assurances, the day it was supposed to be paid arrived and he hadnt paid, at which point he admitted he hadnt got the money has he blown it in the bookies. One of the lads lent him what he owed (think it was about £100, not much now but a fair bit back then) from the money he had saved for his spending money and sent him off to pay for the holiday. On his way he nipped back in the bookies and blew the lot. He lost his holiday and the money he had already paid due to a sure thing at the bookies..

 

I liked this but didn't really,we need a understand button or something for story like this ,bet the lad went through some anguish

 

5hit I am still betting, im doomed

 

Think I’m doomed get me near the 2p machines at the seaside and I’ll happily blow 3 quid in a day !

 

Online poker. I limit the stakes and only play tournaments - but can end up spending over £100 a month. The occasional win but overall I should kick it into touch.

 

Think I'm too tight to bet, money down the drain.

 

I do the Irish Lottery.

£12 a week. Call it 600 a year.

Thats for 24 draws a week.

Its fixed odds so you bet on what numbers come out. 1 number is X/1 and so forth.

Two bets are for two pairs of numbers and two are a pair of three number bets.

Least I win if they come in is £30. Most is 350.

Ive won £30 at least twice a month on average. Three times one weekend.

 

It is at the top end, but the amount of analysis etc. required means it's not a viable source of consistent income for almost everyone. That can be a problem - when people have a few wins and think they can upscale to pursue it more seriously.

There are very few forms of gambling which can be beat long term even with a good level of the appropriate knowledge/skill. Online poker used to be one, however I understand that the rake has been hiked in recent years to a borderline unbeatable level.

 

I feel pretty lucky because I can go months without putting a bet on if nothing takes my fancy but I know it’s an issue for others.

I know a mate who can be betting £20 on over / under number of corners whilst owing people money.

I‘ve done quite well over the last couple of years but I don’t bet big & I only started with £5 & have had £100 out so I think anything the rest makes / loses doesn’t really matter as it’s all winnings. I’m not talking thousands here either.

I’ve never won an accumulator, when I win anything it tends to be on boxing or backing a team at minus 1 or 2 when I feel like it’s going to be a hammering.

Boxing’s quite a good way to win money. Every so often you get a prospect coming through who’s not very good but has an undefeated record & they’ll step them up too soon against someone with a losing (or at least poor looking) record & get found out. However it doesn’t happen that often & I’ve not got the bravery to put on more than £20 which I guess is probably a good thing.

 

It's not my vice thankfully. I started an online account about 15 years ago and the original fiver is still in there. I think I've taken about £120 profit out but I rarely use it these days.
A mate of mine is a regular in the bookies though. Funny how these regulars never make their fortune. He had cancer treatment a few years back, was off work for six months with his head all over the place and lost six grand without even realising it.
went into a bookies with him a few years back and was genuinely shocked at all the schemes they have going in there to separate you from your cash. It's tawdry and borderline evil.
I'd love to see betting banned though that would just drive it back underground. At the very least all advertising should be banned and huge limits placed on the ability to bet big.

 

All this will of course be considered in the current DCMS consultation on the review of the Gambling Act 2005. The consultation is due to last 16 weeks after which the government will consider the responses with a view to publishing a white paper setting out any proposals for reform at some point in 2021. I could drone on about this all day, but my biggest hope is that the reviewing body will have the good sense to discriminate between betting on horses and other sports and betting on games of pure chance (machines and the like). The former offers the opportunity to exercise some skill and judgement in betting on outcomes, whereas the latter must inevitably lead to the punter losing due to the inbuilt bias in the odds. That's not to say people can't get into difficulty betting on horses - clearly they can. But for many it is a pastime which can involve long periods of interest other than the betting itself in regard to reading around the subject, studying form lines and watching re-runs of races in order to form judgments about future events. I hope the DCMS will find some way of properly evaluating the harmless, perhaps even beneficial aspects of this interest as weighed against the harm that can result when people act irresponsibly. After all, despite the grotesque harm that can come from a few people abusing it, the banning of alcohol is never seriously contemplated.

Betting is central to the ongoing funding of the sport in most horseracing jurisdictions. Research will show that where betting on horses is centralised and state-controlled, more money tends to be returned to the racing industry itself, which is a very sizeable contributor to the economy and a source of much employment. The BHA estimates that the industry is worth £3.45 Billion to the UK economy (over four times that of fishing!) and is responsible directly or indirectly for the employment of around 85,000 people. Whether horserace betting should be limited to a state-controlled monopoly might be one aspect worth examining, although I can't see a Tory government being attracted to that level of state regulation. Both Priti Patel and Matt Hancock are very close to the UK racing industry.

Finally, I agree with much of what Mansfield Red says above. Profitable betting on horses can only come with much study and also a thorough analysis of stakes and returns over a period of several years. I agree that 'upscaling' from your normal stake is not a good way forward because the increased amount staked is likely to affect your judgment when making selections. It is only viable to achieve profitability in the long run (in my view) if you are prepared to accept a very small percentage profit on stakes invested. Thus if you select correctly in only 33% of races you are fine so long as your average returned price is greater than 2/1. The tricky bit for many is that you therefore need to be comfortable with losing 66% of the time. A mindset which takes some time to acquire!

 

Sorry yes, I'm not suggesting it's a viable source of income. Merely that when you're betting on an outcome where skill is involved and odds are then open to interpretation then you are at least using your perceived skill to win.

But the roulette machines are an utter disgrace. You can lose £100 a spin every minute until you've lost everything. The current limit in shops is a start, but it's not enough - they should be banned. They then should be set fire to in a massive bonfire. All the stories you hear anecdotally are caused by these things. It's always a family member or friend or whoever lost their lives to them - it's very rarely to sports betting (apart from one or two famous cases).

FOBT's need to burn in hell.

 

I try to stick to small stakes and place 5 p yankees etc . I do like to study form and treat it as any other hobby / pastime . Expect to lose small and do it for fun I try to do .

 

Very sensible. I rarely put anything over £10 on and a hardly had a bet since I stopped going out. You mentioned the key thing, when I do put a bet on I see it as money spent rather than a gamble of making money.

 

There is too much to bet on now. Instead of just results its time the ref first blows his whistle or how many corners there'll be in a game

 

I can’t understand all these tales of woe. I’ve made a small fortune from gambling.
All together now! ............

 

Things I took bets for when I worked in the bookies:

I'm a celeb winner
Big Brother winner
X Factor winner
The colour of the queen's dress at Cheltenham
Local election results (some for parts of the UK I'd never heard of)
Pig racing (it was a special one off sideshow at a Greyhound meeting)

And there was a guy who'd have £60-£200 accumulators on anything that was massive odds on, foreign football (usually Swiss and Czech), non televised snooker and tennis tournaments, NFL, NBA, rugby league etc etc. He'd pick about 15 things, and rotate them across 10 slips. So he'd have a 13 'team' £100 acca on one slip, then swap a couple of the 'teams' for others on another slip for £100. The returns on them were never more than about 2/1. He'd occasionally get 6 or 7 of his slips up and win fairly big, but he'd often get one result wrong, which he'd had on all of his slips that cost him up to £1000 usually. I'd seen him doing the same in another bookies around the corner.

He once had a few slips up, worth about £1,400. He was only waiting for Denmark to beat Armenia at home, they were 1/7. They had an early red card, and found themselves 2-0 down at half time. At half time, he came in, frantically writing out his next set of slips ready to chase the money he'd lost on that particular set of fixtures. Denmark lost 4-0.

 

I once met someone who was 100% convinced he had a foolproof system to beat roulette and wouldn't be told otherwise. Poor bloke, he wasn't just addicted he was deluded.