Just seen an ad for an online casino/gambling shithole, with MiniMe from Austin Powers. The ad strapline was that you can’t beat the house.

That was the ad. You can’t win. They’re trolling the sad sacks who gamble online, and no one is stopping it. FFS, please ban any TV/Radio/Anywhere ads for online gambling.

They’re even telling you why – You can’t win.

Same with all casino / gambling places really.

Makes the government money though so no desire to stop it.

There’s people on here swear blind they can make money off it. Shame eh.

I never got why New Labour deregulated gambling 🙁

Makes the government money though so no desire to stop it

Pff, tin foil hats at the ready! Oh, hang on…

On a side note, the 1st time I saw a crack pipe, and a pimp putting down a ho was in the shadow of that very building.

That reminds me, I read somewhere that one of the main companies who make slot machines are also one of the 4 companies responsible for voting machines…

That said, it seems sometimes the house does lose; the Trump Plaza shut down:

Oops a daisy!!

It’s a challenge, isn’t it. “Bet” you can’t beat me!

But but but I want to be James Bond.

The ads are getting far too common, Sky Bet anyone 👿

I never got why New Labour deregulated gambling 🙁

Big business had them in their pockets. Blair and Co wanted to get away from being funded by the unions and went for big business, gambling being one of them.

Even worse was they ignored all the evidence about easy access and promotion of gambling (slot machines with big jackpots, ads on mainstream TV) increasing addiction.

It’s too late, it’s everywhere, every football stadium covered in advertising, ads at half time are all in match betting, teams sponsored by them, Christ I even see the bookies open at like 8pm on a sunday night! what’s that all about?.

It’ll never change now, they put too much money into the right pockets.

Never give a sucker an even break.

There’s people on here swear blind they can make money off it. Shame eh

I signed up for one a few years ago as I received £20 (that had to be used on site) for signing up.
Played Blackjack for a couple of hours and amounted £300. Took the money out and closed the account. Put it down as a freak occurrence.

There’s people on here swear blind they can make money off it. Shame eh.

A couple of friends of mine have, though only one in the traditional sense:

One wrote poker bots that sat and played online poker for him.

One makes a pretty steady income doing “matched betting” (i.e. signing up for the free bets and promotional offers and then offsetting them against counter bets)

And one is just good at poker and occasionally plays online when he can’t get to a real casino.

It’s a huge money maker for the Exchequer.

Can’t see any chancellor, looking to loose the 2.3bn a year in tax revenues it generates plus >1/2 bn profits for the industry

The curse of easy gambling could easily be one of the big talking points of the 2022 General Election, it’s got all the hallmarks of growing disaster waiting to happen.

You might have seen an ad about a security guard having a “cheeky flutter” whilst he watches the screens in a casino? It’s a fairly cruel ploy by the advertiser. Gambling in the workplace is a growing problem, it’s an instasacking with most employers and it was bad enough when they were browser based, but they’re all app based these days. I know of a few people sacked because they were gambling on their work computers, sneaking off the toilet every hour to play on their phone, even sacked for stealing from work to feed their habit, not small money either, flat buying money. Started off stealing a few grand because he KNEW he would win back £20k – pay back the company before anyone found out, and well you can imagine the rest. They’re on remand at the moment.

Has there ever been a more profound difference in the way something is portrayed – all James Bond and glamorous, and the reality – someone stood mechanically and joylessly shovelling inordinate amounts of cash into high stakes betting machine in some grim shithole high street, populated only by yet more bookies. Those high stakes machines are truly evil. You can lose thousands in minutes. And people often do.

Christ I even see the bookies open at like 8pm on a sunday night! what’s that all about?.

I read an interesting article on that very subject recently:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/31/big-gamble-dangerous-british-betting-shops

I don’t feel compelled to try and beat this guy at poker or blackjack……..

To be honest, I don’t like my chances at beating him in a bike race either. 🙁

Depends how high his saddle is.

It’s bloody horrible. It’s all become very normalised, at least in days gone by you had to step foot into a seedy bookies, now it’s on your phone and is far too easy for me.

What’s arguable worse is how the betting companies are worryingly close to the “news makers”, The Sun or Sky Sports will put “story” up about something that may happen in the coming weeks and will finish the article with a link to SkyBet or SunBets. 1 day later the story is gone but the gambling revenue has been taken already. Huge conflict of interest in my opinion.

Took the money out and closed the account.

I don’t think thats the norm though. Thats a bit like my “I beat Caesar’s Palace” story, cos I came out a dollar up. Doesn’t make me a successful gambler.

…and SCRATCH CARDS..!! Never bought one myself, but bloke in the shop in front of me yesterday “a number 6 please” £10!! £10 chucked away on a useless bit of card. Sad.

I don’t think thats the norm though

Definitely not the norm, if it was there wouldn’t be a gambling problem!

I also have an I beat Vegas story 🙂

It’s endemic

Perchy – very wise. He’s Macro Pantani’s younger brother you know.

Perchy – very wise. He’s Macro Pantani’s younger brother you know.

Micro Pantani?

It’s not too late. Cigarette ads used to be everywhere – TV, F1, even the signs above newsagent doors.

We should take the same approach – ban advertising, health warnings but leave it legal rather than drive it underground.

Two experiences I’ve had:

1. Many years ago there was a promo on one of the sites that had an offer that could be exploited. Something like credit £100 and they give you £100 extra to play with. You then had to gamble it something like 5x over before you could withdraw it. Their blackjack game had an “autoplay” feature that had odds of just under 50%. So you’d set it to run @ £1 per game and leave it. You’d end up with slightly less than £200, but a lot more than the £100 of your own money you’d put in. Withdraw your profit.

2. I have no interest in, or knowledge of, football but for one of the big events (Euros, possibly) I decided to have a flutter. Not using a special promo from the bookies. I put £50 into a Betfair account and for each game staked £10, spreading it across win/lose/draw in a weighting roughly mirroring the odds. No strict rule, just a gut feeling based on the look of the odds. Once I’d made £50 profit, I withdrew it so that I’d guaranteed breakeven. At the end of the tournament I had £40 profit. Maybe I was lucky but it was over a dozen or more games and it wasn’t all down to one big win. I should really try it again some time.

You know Perchy sometimes auto-correct is funnier than I am.

In fact often.

😆

There’s people on here swear blind they can make money off it. Shame eh.

There are people who make a living from it. I used to live near a relatively large racehorse training town (not Newmarket) and knew 2 people who bet on geegees for a living. I think it might be easier for them these days, as a lot of it was using the right bookmaker for any particular bets (they were, quite obviously, very well known to the bookies). You can win at gambling vs. the bookies, but the bookies will always win vs. the net gains of all their customers. It’s like insurance companies.

I don’t oppose gambling in absolute terms, but the way it has been encouraged by the State over the last 30-ish years is APPALLING.

In Winnipeg, there used to be one, upper end casino. It was on the 7th floor of a beautiful hotel, and it had a dress code. It was also owned by the Manitoba government.

Then, when its success was obvious, the same government opened two more ‘casinos’. Only they weren’t really casinos. They were quick-fix industrial-sized slot machine places with very glitzy decor.

These were built in the two poorest parts of the city, and had cheque-cashing facilities on site.

Yes, you read that right. WTF?!?!? 👿

I’ve encountered _one_* very successful professional gambler, who runs a small group from his office – all they do is research and place bets on sports, but they’re pretty successful.

His small team are each experts in a few niche sports, and they’ll scour the bookies’ sites for cases where they think the odds have been miscalculated, usually by the hard-worked few professionals who are employed to calculate the odds. (incidentally, that’s why he recommended you never bet on the big sports, because there’s so much expertise in the odds calculations – the house always wins). His few experts spot the rare odds in things like badminton, archery, windsurfing, or other less well-known sports, where they think they know the odds better than the bookmaker’s calculations, and place big bets.

They basically spend their lives looking for loopholes, and he said sometimes they can win incredibly big amounts. But he said it took a lot to get to where they are now, and they have to have big reserves to risk because they’re frequently gambling £35-50,000 a DAY.

Edit: * I emphasise “one”, because we’re based just down the road from a very busy bookies and we see a LOT of the much-more-common other end of the scale, people who have blown their week’s earnings on misplaced hope. The desperate-looking guys clutching the morning’s paper, waiting outside in the mornings to get in and place their bets as soon as they open. The house always wins.

There’s a guy I know in my local pub who considers himself a “professional gambler”. Not sure of the markets he works, though the comment that Pierre makes above rings a bell. The way he works though is that he has to make £300 per day and stops as soon as he does. If it takes him 10 hours then so be it, if it’s 10 hours then he finishes early. His reasoning is that it’s easy to chase your losses but even easier to get carried away with a win and turn that win into a big loss.

He gets no pleasure from it though and sees it entirely as a job and nothing more

I reckon I’m up from gambling, I had a day at the races once and finished £50 up, thanks to an £80 win, bet £30 on the U.K. Gettting 0 points (25/1) and or coming last (18/1) in Eurovision the other day. Stupid Europe…

Played a bit of poker with mates for £10 entry a time a few years ago, won as many games as didn’t, so up from that too.

Only play the lottery when it’s worth winning, say £80mil plus…

I can’t see the attraction of gambling outside a couple of infrequent quid on the lottery tbh, if I win it’s not going to change my life at the amounts I bet, but if I lose I’ll be pissed off ive chucked the money away.

I went to uni with a guy who paid his way through years one and two with gambling wins. Third year he dropped out after he lost his student loan entirely in the first week of the academic year and nobody would loan him enough to “get his money back”.

Aside- see that picture of Trump Plaza after it closed down? After Trump ran it into the ground and it went bankrupt, the board took over and kicked Trump out- he immediately sued them because the run-down abandoned building he’d overseen was damaging his good name 😆