I don’t gamble. Its not a religious thing, nor set in stone. I just don’t really enjoy it. So I don’t. Some do. Lots do. A few years ago on a ski trip we were having lunch discussing the forthcoming FA cup match between Manchester United and Spurs, being screened in a bar in Courchevel that very afternoon. There were 8 of us, all boys, all football fans, except one. He was a gambler. And piped up, excitedly: “Wow, Spurs, Man United, I wonder how many multi-corners there’ll be in that one!!!!”

Stunned looks. Confusion. Had we missed something? Was there possibly a facet of the beautiful game that in 7 lifetimes of intense study, we’d somehow missed?? What the f*** is a ‘multi-corner’????

Oh, he explained, its the number of corners won by one team multiplied by the number won by the other. Multi-corners.

Ahhhh, multi-corners. Like betting on raindrops sliding down a window pane. Multi-corners. I couldn’t understand (still don’t in fact) why Spurs/Man U. would, in such a context, produce more, or indeed less, ‘multi-corners’ than Orient vs Wrexham? Gedafe vs Villareal? The Dagenham girls choir 11 vs The All Girl Mud Wrestlers First Team?

Its just a vehicle for gambling. Like raindrops. Not relevant to anything, just a random event, hence worth a punt. WHAT’S THE POINT??? You might as well just go to the local bookies and hand them 300 quid and walk out again.

Which sort of defines all gambling.

But now a scandal. Online gambling is ripping off its punters. It is an industry worth £3.5 billion a year. That means that punters are losing 3.5 billion quid a year between them. Unless one very rich one is losing it all, I don’t know the statistical breakdown. And yet the bookies change the odds. After the race is run. You think your horse has come in at 7 to 1, but they only pay you at 4 to 1. Ahhhhh, its in the small print; we can do that. And the algorithms are so great now that successful online punters are only allowed tiny bets, like 10 pence at a time, in case they eat too much into that £3,500,000,000 annual windfall. And then they don’t let punters take out their winnings in big lumps. ‘Oh no, can’t do that; its against money-laundering regulations’. The same ones that they easily manage to circumvent when punters are paying in.

I’m not anti-gambling, if people wanna be stupid, its their right. Fine by me. But I hate the constant advertising of it during football matches, tennis games, rugby, cricket, encouraging and enticing mainly kids to start on a very slippery slope. One minute you’re using mum’s credit card to put a fiver on Liverpool, the next thing she owes BetFair 3.5 billion quid. Poor woman.

Happy Friday

A xxxx