The problem with my gambling, Caroline has always maintained, is not the fact that I nearly always lose. I only ever bet on QPR, so that’s inevitable. No, the issue is that I might pass on the habit to my children, particularly the boys. My bets rarely exceed £25, but my sons might have less self control. What if they become addicts, she wants to know? It will ruin their lives. In her eyes, gambling in front of them is like snorting heroin off the kitchen table.
Well, it pains me to say it, but she was right. My youngest recently celebrated his 18th birthday and the first thing he did, at one minute after midnight, was open a bet365 account. The fact that his becoming an adult coincided with the start of the World Cup didn’t help. His older brother told Caroline the 18-year-old has taken out a £200 overdraft from Monzo and stuck it all on England to win. I think he’s joking just to wind her up, but it may be true because he’s so convinced it’s our year he wants to get a tattoo on his arm, consisting of three lions and the words: ‘World Cup Winners, 1966 and 2026.’ Persuading him to wait until the end of the tournament – ‘just in case’ – has not been easy.
Not that his older brother is any better. His first ever bet was on the last World Cup and, disastrously, it was on Argentina. The fact that they won has persuaded him he has Nostradamus-like gifts and no amount of losing since – and there’s been a lot – has dissuaded him. He’s particularly fond of accumulators, or ‘accas’, where you get superficially attractive odds by betting on a series of results instead of just one. He hasn’t quite grasped that the reason these bets pay out so much is that your chances of winning are vanishingly small.
I think the penny may have finally dropped when they found an online betting app offering odds of 60/1 on England to win or draw against Croatia. ‘Look at that, Dad,’ said the youngest, jabbing his finger at his phone excitedly. ‘Even Mum couldn’t deny that’s a good bet.’ I looked at the small print – and by ‘small’ I mean unreadable without taking a photo and enlarging it – and discovered the maximum bet was £1 and any winnings over and above that amount had to be banked in the form of credit and could be used only to pad out accumulator bets. In other words, it’s a scam designed to get you to put money on the most unwinnable bets in the bookmaker’s repertoire. ‘So should I avoid accas in future?’ he asked, doubtfully. ‘Yes,’ I said, glaring at his older brother.
I know it’s not an excuse but the gambling companies are past masters at luring naive young men onto their platforms. Another ‘irresistible’ offer that my boys got excited by was £30 worth of free bets – again restricted to accumulators – if they could get someone else to sign up to an app using an email link. This led to a furious bidding war between them to tempt me into signing up, with more and more extravagant offers to do odd jobs around the house. I took the high road, telling them I didn’t want to encourage them to enrol on yet another gambling platform, but they pocketed the £30 anyway, having found willing co-conspirators in their friendship groups.
Bookmakers are past masters at luring naive young men onto their platforms
Part of the problem is that small amounts of money mean so much more at their age, so on the rare occasions when they turn a £1 acca into a £25 win, they are absolutely over the moon. The bragging goes on for weeks. Unfortunately, they don’t bank their winnings to offset their losses, but immediately spend them on industrial quantities of fried food from Chicken Cottage. I’m reminded of a Christmas card I joked about sending 15 years ago featuring my children, then aged eight, six, five and four, smoking cigarettes, chugging malt wine and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the caption: ‘Greetings from Acton.’ The idea was to ridicule the pretentious Christmas cards of my posh friends, featuring pictures of their kids looking like something out of a Boden catalogue. But the joke’s on me because my children have become the people in my imaginary card.
In truth, it doesn’t bother me that much. Given that the graduate labour market has been wrecked by AI, I’ve more or less given up hope of my children ever getting well-paid jobs which means they’ll probably never leave home. So it’s nice to have some shared hobbies, such as gambling. We disagree about what is and isn’t a good bet all the time, but the satisfying thing about these arguments is that there’s usually a clear winner – or, more often, three losers. And if we fancy a day out together, we can always take a trip to Gamblers’ Anonymous.