Don't Try To Win - Follow Our Ten Tips!

Mark is puzzled at the contradiction in terms shown by the Racing Post

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It's “responsible gambling week”. A leading national bookmaker emails to congratulate itself on its participation in this notable initiative and the Racing Post is on hand with its “ten tips to help keep your betting in check”.

These tips begin with a familiar chestnut: Don’t think of gambling as a way to make money.

“The venue (betting shop, casino, etc) is using gambling to make money. It’s not designed to work the other way around. Over time you will lose more money than you receive. Think of it as an entertainment expense – just like buying a cinema ticket.”

If betting/gambling is indeed to be accepted as a one-way ticket to profit for the proprietor and not the punter, we might wonder what the Post is doing filling so many pages with betting-related advice, notably in the flagship Pricewise column, let alone itself seeking to profit from expensive tipping lines, with a marketing spin designed to persuade us of their earning power.

What kind of “cinema ticket” are we being sold here?

What kind of entertainment might we expect to derive from our betting if the route to profit is actually blocked despite advertising spin to the contrary?

To be content perhaps with the fact that the bookmakers in question throw a few crumbs down from the table to help fund the horse racing industry, provided the sport designs a fixture list to further support and entrench the narrow and self serving interests of this increasingly discredited sector?

I was actually surprised to get that email from the leading bookmaker, given that I’ve long been restricted to a maximum stake of around £2.87 with them, having had the temerity to bet to a pattern displeasing to the firm (and to every other firm given that they all sing from the same tuneless hymn sheet).