The point for me is, if you got lucky on some mad NFL accumulator and won 20 grand youâd probably pay off some mortgage, get a new kitchen, upgrade the car, whatever.
Some lads would win 20 grand and it would literally be the worse thing that ever happened to them. Iâm not talking about everybody but that is true,
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So many people make money from the bookies 
Yes, the bookies.
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100%
Itâs a sickness
Sure you can say the exact same about some lad winning 20k in a club gaa lotto and pissing it away.
There was fellas during the 00s making money till it came out their ears and they blew it all.
Your ignorance is outstanding.
Hidden problem is not discussed enough in public discourse
Malachy Clerkin, Irish Times, Monday 13 March 2021
Cheltenham week. Money down, bets on. The one week in the year where it feels like no big deal to gamble on seven races a day. And sure maybe, late on with a few in, a few quid on the all-weather come teatime. Ye donât have to lash into every race, lads. Yeah, whatever, Captain Sensible.
For the last fortnight or so, this column has been getting ready. Listened to all the podcasts, read all the features and stable tours, devoured the streams of all the digital preview nights. Plans hatched, ante-posts guessed at, account deposits made. All set for Tuesday lunchtime.
Somewhere towards the end of last week though, I happened across The Cheltenham Survival Guide. Itâs an episode of The Problem Gambling Podcast, hosted by addiction counsellors Tony OâReilly and Barry Grant.
OâReilly is the author of the incredible gambling memoir Tony 10 and although horses were never really his thing, he and Grant had some chilling insights into what this week of all weeks means in the gambling community.
If youâre in recovery from gambling addiction, Cheltenham is a week-long trigger for all your worst inclinations. Itâs the one week in the year where the thing you used to do obsessively and in secret becomes normalised.
It becomes a real and present thing, out in the open, in your WhatsApp groups and on your Facebook page, in newspapers and on telly and on radio. There is literally no shame in it.
Grant and OâReillyâs survival guide was eye-opening in so many ways. In normal times, theyâve known clients who have gone so far as to book a foreign holiday for Cheltenham week, taking themselves off to a country where there is no chance of coming across the festival in any shape or form. With that option not open this year, they advise making a specific plan for each of the four afternoons, to give themselves a project for the week, to be busy, whatever they choose to be busy with.
It feels like we hear a lot about problem gambling. Every bookie advert tells you to gamble responsibly. Thereâs any amount of slogans around the place telling you Be Gamble Aware and When The Fun Stops, Stop and so on. Every couple of weeks, a news story bubbles up about the latest move on some bit of political legislation to tackle it. If you want to, you can gerrymander all the various initiatives and campaigns into one amorphous bloc and point to it. See? This is how weâre dealing with it.
But the truth is, we donât hear anywhere near enough about problem gambling. Relative to the devastation it causes, it leaves a minuscule footprint on the national consciousness. In many ways, this is completely understandable. It might not be very helpful but itâs easily explained.
To begin with, thereâs a natural reluctance to talk about addiction of any sort. In that perfectly Irish way, we know in our bones that there isnât a family in the land that has escaped the experience. And yet we still cloak it in embarrassment and shame. We still zero in on the perceived weakness of character at the root of it.
When we do talk about it, we talk mostly about drink and drugs. Alcoholism and drug addiction are public-facing diseases. They can be hidden, of course. Denial is a very strong shield but it only works for so long. Eventually, the truth becomes obvious. Society canât not talk about it.
Problem gambling doesnât have that outward-facing aspect so we donât see it as such a serious societal problem. We donât see it at all, really, which makes it so insidious. It is, by nature, a private pursuit. Self-contained, unspoken, ignorable. Loved ones only ever get a sense of the size of the problem long after itâs too late. Nobody has to be carried out and put in the back of a taxi because they backed the wrong horse. If only it was that simple.
But thereâs another reason we donât talk a lot about problem gambling. Part of it, yes, is the secretive aspect that obscures it from general viewing. But part of it too is that plenty of us like a bet. And we find it hard to talk about something we enjoy in terms that portray it as a menace to society.
So much of sport is tethered to gambling now precisely because of this. Mug punters like me and you and all the rest of us like a bit of sport and like to have a few quid on here and there. Weâre easy marks for the bookmaking firms who see that thereâs money to be made in portraying the sport and the betting as one and the same experience. All a bit of fun. A bit of an interest. No big deal.
This creates an awkward dynamic, whereby you can back a weekend football accumulator but still feel uneasy the prevalence of gambling sponsors on so many English soccer clubsâ jerseys. You can read Aaron Roganâs piece in the Business Post yesterday showing that the Irish gambling industryâs trust that was set up to support addiction services is 39 per cent short of its donation target but it still wonât stop you having a bet on the golf.
The Cheltenham Survival Guide was a difficult podcast to listen to precisely because of this. This is going to be a strange kind of Cheltenham because the betting shops are closed and so are the pubs. There wonât be that feel of it in the air as you walk through towns and cities across the country.
It will all be so much more internalised, with everyone betting online, conversing (if at all) from detached silos, nobody to truly know how well or badly theyâre getting on but themselves.
Hereâs who we do know is doing just fine. Bookmakers are. Flutter, the parent company of Paddy Power, announced a fortnight ago that its revenues had increased by 106 per cent in 2020.
Think about that - in a year when global sport came to a complete stop, it didnât take a pick out of the gambling industryâs ability to grow. In fact, it almost certainly helped - or at least the increased level of boredom among the general populace did its bit.
Cheltenham might feel like the wrong week to be wringing our hands about all this. But if not now, in the week where so many of us are temporarily transformed into the kind of gamblers weâd worry about the other 51, then when? It is obvious that society is storing up a world of pain for itself. Better we talk about it now than gnash our teeth about it later.
Itâs actually out of control to be honest.
There are lads involved in the Racing Game that love the sport regardless of gambling.
Then you have lads who claim to love the sport but are continually looking at the game from an odds perspective even though theyâd claim they love the game without punting.
These lads would then have threads where they Tip up animals etc.
These lads wouldnât be hypocrites though.
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Thereâs a few people making a living from it⌠But 99% are at nothing. Of those maybe half can control it or bet within their means . The other half are in all kinds of trouble, living to bet . Trackies point is bang on, the advertising strategy of the big bookies in recent years going after younger and younger people, itâs sick shit.
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Have gambling TV ads not been banned or pushed till post watershed? My 4 year old was laughing away just now at the Peter Crouch Paddy Power ad which is all kinds of wrong
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That analogy would hold up if the lad went back and bought 40k worth of tickets for the next club draw
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Iâd agree. The advertising of the gambling does need to be addressed and controlled.
It was a sickness when they came back last year and spread covid all over the country. The gamblers gambled with our lives and weâre still in lockdown a year later.
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So youâve admitted your post about nobody being able to make money from betting was a nonsense?
Thank you. If you donât know about something you shouldnât make sweeping generalisations. It comes across as being very arrogant.
Iâd imagine more people can make money from betting than most assume but obviously still a relatively small number of people.
Is jibberish a sure sign of being rattled?
Theyâre on all day as best I can tell.
You going to retract your comments and your attack on kids with special needs and their parents any time soon and apologise?
Too busy playing the hard mad glorifying gambling.
I havenât time for this, I donât believe anything I posted would lead you to believe that I admitted anything.
Iâd say thereâs a few criminals who make big money out of racing, maybe a tiny handful of lucky souls who the bookies havenât fleeced yet but theyâll lose as well.
Donât get so defensive about what others think, be careful of your own gambling though,
No I didnât attack kids with special needs.
I attacked your lies and double standards about health guidelines but it is very unedifying for you to use your kids with special needs as pawns in argument after you have been caught out lying but then again you idolise a woman beating racist.
Gambling advertising should be banned. Thereâs no justification for it.
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Youâd got fairly defensive a few months back when a few lads dismissed teachers as being lazy. You shouldnât making sweeping statements about things you donât know about.