Gambling for Girls

In all of my eight years of being legally able to gamble, I must have spent hundreds of quids on scratch cards, lottery tickets, dog racing stubs, sweepstakes at work, Grand National bets, online World Cup fantasy football entry... I don’t know the first thing about football, so who knows why I wasted five of my hard earned pounds on that last one. And to add insult to injury, I came bottom of the league.

And that’s not to mention the countless ill-advised booze drenched pub bets. We’ve all been there; a couple of pints too many and suddenly you hear your own voice slurring away above and beyond the pub’s sound system.

“I bet you… I bet you, right…,” finger jabbing into thin air, one eye half shut. “I bet you that you won’t go up and sit on that old bloke’s lap, yeah, that one over there with John Smiths dribbling down his chin, hairy nostrils and a limp…hurhurhur!”

Stick a monetary sum on that sentence and you’re on. And we all know a bloke for whom the bet is made that much more attractive by adding on a clause about having to drink the contents of the ashtray in the dregs of someone else’s drink. Personally I’d have to draw the line there. I’m happy enough to finish someone else’s drink for free.

Is this type of pub bet just a symptom of boozed-up pack mentality, wanting to prove ourselves as the most daring, bravest member of the group? Is it a drunken attention-seeking tactic? Or is it just that we’re skint and need the money?!

It’s certainly true that you have a much better chance of making money by acting like a tit in front of your mates than you do battling the odds of the National Lottery.

Clutching a Lucky Dip while Dale Winton reads out, er, none of your numbers on a Saturday evening only seems like a surefire way to put the dampers on a night out. Or alternatively, a good reason to try your luck at beating six blokes in a pool tournament and make yourself the empty-pursed object of ridicule all night.

Greyhound racing is kinda ethically worrying, but at least the adrenaline lasts longer than the ten seconds it takes to scratch off the silver in a blustery car par to find that oh! I haven’t won £100,000. Again. What are the odds!?

Willing your sweepstake-decided racehorse to victory by the power of mind beams, even when it’s running in the opposite direction, is foolish but unbeatable fun. For those five minutes, it’s your horse, dammit! Even when it loses you a tenner, it’s better than losing it to Party Poker.

And frankly, it would have been rude not to have gambled (and, of course, lost) £200 on roulette on holiday in Las Vegas last year. I just wish I could remember it.

But from now on, I’m sticking to more grassroots betting, thanks very much – no more impulse-purchase scratchcards at the cigarette counter, or dithering about trying to remember the sixth of my weekly lottery numbers. Standing up on the bus on my own and freestyling a rap including the words ‘Jeremy Kyle’, ‘Winalot’ and ‘N Dubs’ on a Friday night for fiver from each of my mates sounds like a win-win situation to me!