#21

OH JAPES DID I DO A BAD GRAMMAR

10 Likes
#22

generally dislike betting unless its poker, and even then I play very rarely (about once a year with friends) and for small amounts.

betting on sport tends to ruin the occasion for me since I’m just worried about making the money back. and this is on the 1 quid accumulators I did a few times.

1 Like
#23

u bet

#24

also, its genuinely terrifying how modern sports (mainly football tbh) coverage is aimed at promoting the betting market.

14 Likes
#25

Did used to really annoy me when people (usually ladsladslads) would be much more interested in their accumulator than the result of the team they actually support and sometimes actively want them to lose. I’d take an Argyle win over winning £30 or 40 on the game.

2 Likes
#27

i remember doing this with a snooker match where it was first to 10 and one guy was like 8-1 up. was then convinced the other guy was going to stage an amazing comeback once i’d done it, obviously didn’t.

#28

I can’t remember whether it was the last world cup or the one before but my mate had budgeted £50 for a bunch of small bets over the course of the tournament but thought he’d be clever and put the whole lot on Spain to beat Switzerland to get off to a good start. That went well. As people have said: no such thing as a sure thing.

I’ve just checked and it was 2010. Can time slow down a bit please? I feel old now.

#29

Seconding all the people saying it’s a really bad idea (as someone who has a cheeky flutter from time to time)

#30

My old boss put £300 on Brazil to win the 2014 World Cup. Watching him watch the QF penalty shoot out was quite an experience. Unfortunately I wasn’t there for the semi final :joy:

#31

i used to do bets on fairly safe stuff, start with like £5, bet on something that’ll happen, turn it into £5.05, then bet that on something, and just try and see how much i could build it into. very slow going though, would eventually get bored and put it on something dumb and go back to square one.

don’t think i’ve ever bet more than £20 on anything though, hate the idea of losing money more than i like winning it tbh.

#32

Have read some interesting articles about point betting in tennis - where people working for someone else will go ‘under cover’ illegally in tennis stadiums with a little machine that lets them record points back to a gambler - who can then make bets faster than the system gets updated with the score. Imagine that was your job.

#33

Huge favourites are priced accordingly and a market with those odds leaves the bookie with everything to gain and you everything to lose. They will happily keep paying out £100 on those big wagers, because sooner or later one won’t come in and then its net profit to the bookie.

If/when there’s an eventual upset, you’re then going to have to wager £3,300 another 33 times at similar odds without another upset just to break even again (so cumulatively £109k in total).

#34

I’ve never bet in a shop or online, and I reckon the prevelance of them in current sport is a sham and a time bomb waiting to go off.

#35

i put £100 on Liverpool to be up at half time but losing at full time in the CL final last year

i was essentially able to lose the money in the sense that it didn’t cause me any issues but it was pretty stupid. then again it was my housemates birthday so if happened and i’d suddenly won a couple of grand it would have been a hell of a night

i put £40 on brexit at about half midnight and made £80 profit - funilly the thing that pushed me to thinking ‘yeah this is definitely gonna happen’ was a facebook update from a DiSer

that’s still the second highest bet i’ve placed

think i’m just lucky to be overall very boringly sensible with the odd moment of madness (like, done small bets for 12 years now with only once doing something silly, at a point in life where i could afford to do so)

#36

I used to have a colleague whose brother’s job was setting odds for Coral’s obscure sports betting. He got paid a fucking shitload to watch stuff like Icelandic volleyball and the Hungarian ice hockey league.

#37

yup, guaranteed we’ll look back at betting adverts now the same way we look at smoking ads from a few decades ago

2 Likes
#38

I used to work for Coral whilst at University and during the summer holidays. The amount people would risk and lose on dead certs was more common that you’d think.

My dad was a betting shopping manager for about 25 years (William Hill), he took very early retirement due to his MH when they bought in the fixed odds machines and opening all hours. The amount people would waste on those machines was ridiculous, he always tried warning people when they had bet too much and should take a break. His bosses didn’t like that obviously, and made his life difficult, so he retired on medical grounds.

#39

Like the win/lose/draw market for City - the end of season run they and Liverpool went on was ridiculous and if you’d backed them every game you’d have come out on top by virtue of not dropping any points in the end. But…the odds were so short that just one unlikely draw somewhere along the line and you’d instantly wipe out weeks of profit.

#40

That’s awful - I was only ever a temp/ relief manager for most of my time so didn’t really form any kind of relationships with customers but it’s really irresponsible of them to expect staff to stand by and watch vulnerable people maxing out savings and credit cards.

#41

At this stage in my life i basically do whatever Ray Winstone’s, big, bulbous, dismembered cockney bonce tells me to.