The Times Magazine 19aving driven around aimlessly for
three hours, I left my car at Slough
station and didn’t bother to pay
for parking. Instead, having earlier
smashed a porcelain piggybank
and taken what I thought was my
final £18.10, I bought a ticket to
London. In six minutes a train
would be hurtling through without
stopping. I was set on throwing
myself in front of it.
That day on March 23, 2018, I was due
to learn that a career I loved was over. At 31,
I was becoming a former teacher, and in a
shameful fashion. At 24, I’d become a former
insurance broker. And at 20, I’d become a
former professional cricketer. The loss of all
three careers, each more than the last, was
due to my gambling.
People knew I liked a punt. But gambling
had become the defining aspect of my
personality – and no one else knew. I gambled
at every opportunity. And because I gambled,
I lied, sometimes about unthinkable topics,
and I stole. I stole from those close to me
and from those I barely knew. I stole money
intended for charity. I always drank, but at
times, because I gambled, I descended into
alcoholism and dabbled with drugs.
It all began when I was at university in
Durham. Stepping into Coral for the first time,
I knew next to nothing about gambling. My
mates knew rather better what they were
doing, striding towards the corner to collect a
form for their “accumulator” and a tiny blue
plastic pen. I watched a middle-aged man
feeding £20 notes into a fixed odds betting
terminal to play online roulette. After
10 minutes, he hit the machine in a fit of rage
and, with a cigarette lit before he was out the
door, stormed towards the nearest ATM. As
I took my place in his still warm bucket chair,
I thought what an idiot he must be.
I found two £1 coins and put them into the
machine. On a roulette board, zero is green. It
had been the last number to come up, the one
that had forced my predecessor to march out.
The odds of zero coming up twice in a row
are 1,369-1, but so what? I was 19, privileged,
somewhere on the hazy border between
confident and arrogant, and very fortunate.
So my £2 went on green zero and I whacked
the big red start button like a US president
declaring nuclear war. Twelve seconds later,
a small silver ball-bearing nestled itself in the
bed of green zero. Those were 12 seconds that
changed my life for ever.
As time went on at university, I started
chasing losses. If £10 went into the machine,
£10 had to come out; £2 on a roulette spin
became £5 a time; and 20p on my favourite
numbers became 80p. The £1 pipedream
accumulators to become a student millionaire
became £10 strategic six-fold multi-bets thatI expected to happen, and when
they didn’t my reaction was anger,
rather than disappointment. When
I placed “the same” bets as my
mates, as we had started doing in
our first year, I would now have a
higher stake that they didn’t know
about. So, it mattered that bit
more. When they lost those bets,
they were irritated. When I lost
those bets, I was furious.
I became an insurance broker
after my promising cricketing
career at Northants stalled and
I was let go. I was devastated but my new life
in London, working in an industry fuelled
by large sums of money, surrounded by
opportunities to party and gamble, was a
distraction from the disappointment. There
were plenty of days when I’d go out for lunch,
get hammered, have one of my afternoons
in the betting shop, then off to the pub, the
casino and home to bed. I’d fall asleep in my
suit and leg it straight to the office wearing
the same clothes. Then do it all again.
When I made those trips to the casino,
I was gambling just as aggressively andexcessively as I was in the daytime around
work, just in a different environment.
I remember, on a number of occasions, going
to the casino cashpoint (the sort that charges
£2.75 for a withdrawal) at 11.59pm and taking
out my daily limit of £250, then returning a
couple of minutes later when the clock had
passed midnight to make the same withdrawal.
One memorable evening, following
receiving my first ever bonus at work, I settled
on a big accumulator – much bigger than
ever before – and a number of smaller bets in
case I was let down early. The accumulator
included all six of the evening’s Champions
League games, and a web of possibilities;
the odds were just shy of 70-1 and the stake...
£500. As I handed over the betting slip and
my debit card, the lad behind the glass
appeared shocked. I walked upstairs to meet
my mates – who were unaware of what I’d
been up to – and proceeded to get very drunk
with them. A couple of hours later, all six
results had gone my way. Over the course of
just one evening, £500 had become £34,977.61.
I was doing somersaults inside but I didn’ttell a soul. I just settled the bar bill
and left a hefty tip. My muted
reaction told the tale of my
developing addiction, but I now
had my hands on a life-changing
amount of money. I was just 23.
That win gave me some sort of
hero complex. Worst of all was
that my huge win gave me a buzz
I could only replicate by bettering
it. I would win £500 or £1,000 on
a horse, but it wasn’t £35,000.
Gambling was now something
I wanted to do all the time.
Online gambling meant that I could,
indeed, do it all the time. That I had 29 grand
just sitting around in my account meant that
my funds felt almost unlimited. It didn’t feel
like real money that I handed over to a
cashier, or placed in a machine myself. Pick
who to back, and click. Win or lose. Simple.
The upshot was that by the end of January
2011, six weeks after my big win, my winnings
were all gone, mainly on punts and pints.For 12 and a half years, I placed just shy of
£2 million in online bets, and probably thesame again in betting shops and casinos. At
my peak, I’d had 76 accounts in 65 different
names. I was a VIP member of seven online
operators; in most cases, I had to be spending
a minimum of £30,000 per year to qualify. I’d
received close to £110,000 in free bets.
Anyone can get a free bet. Since the
advent of online gambling – and with it,
casual gamblers getting involved more often- freebies have been used by bookies to lure in
new customers, especially around the biggest
events in the horse racing calendar. Thirty-
four per cent of gamblers say that adverts
prompted them to gamble. Free bets or money
to spend with a gambling company were the
most likely to prompt a customer to engage
with gambling. I was lavished with privileges
by the bookies: free bets, offers of hospitality
at big sporting events, and even a personal
“VIP account manager” – a direct contact at
the bookmaker for all my gambling needs.
There was nothing I wouldn’t bet on. I’d
always been passionate about cricket, football,
golf and rugby union – particularly when they
involved British players and teams. From
H
Playing cricket for
Northamptonshire, 2006THOSE 12 SECONDS ON A FIXED ODDS BETTING
TERMINAL CHANGED MY LIFE FOR EVER
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