GambleAware is the main site to help with addiction to gambling, and has a freephone phone number (or live chat) for help. It recommends software to block gambling sites like GamBan or GamBlock (the modern equivalent of asking the bookie not to serve you, if your willpower slips). The site also has information on self-exclusion (where with one phone call, you can nominate places not to serve you in the surrounding areas (betting shops, online bingo, arcades & casinos).
Gamblers Anonymous offers help for the addiction often only known by ‘the banker and the bookie’. It may help to look up welfare issues for greyhounds and racehorses, rather than just think of gambling in monetary terms. Playing the lottery is also a form of gambling (a silly one at that). You’re more likely to get killed by lightning on the way to buying your ticket, than to win it. Quakers refuse lottery funding, saying it takes advantage of desperate people. And order for someone to win, another person has to loses.
Bingo may seem like a bit of harmless fun at the pub, and it probably is. But many people today have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on online Bingo. This is not like the old ‘2 fat ladies, 88’ kind of Bingo that your grandma likely played at the community club to win a bottle of plonk, but more big companies advertising on TV, so vulnerable people ending up spending money they don’t have, to try to get themselves out of financially desperate situations. Campaigners want a ban to all gambling ads on TV (even if they do add a caveat to ‘be sensible’). It helps also to use free ad-blocking software online.
Coalition Against Gambling Ads wants a complete ban on ads. Of course this won’t happen, as TV companies and the Internet make too much money from them. So it’s up to us as empowered adults to make the decision to not watch or take any notice of them. Especially when they try to entice with ‘free bets’ to get people to start gambling, who otherewise may never have been tempted.
Any time you offer a big prize for a small amount of money, you encourage stupid behaviour, on behalf of those you’re appealing to. Warren Buffet
Gambling is a tax on ignorance. People often gamble because they think they can win, they’re lucky, they have hunches. That sort of thing. Whereas in fact, they’re going to be remorselessly ground down over time. Edward Thorp
