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Enjoying gambling - who knew?? - Responsible Gaming - Stop and Step

Enjoying gambling - who knew??


hitopz1

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There is a lot of publicity now about the downside of gambling. I am an addict. I am in a lot of debt because of gambling. I gamble to avoid thinking how f***d up my life is and what a total retard I am. My gambling takes me off being isolated and suicidal - for a few hours. But, most of all, and the point of this post, I enjoy gambling when I get the chance. The fact that gamblers enjoy gambling - even if that enjoyment is short-lived and 'fake' never seems to get mentioned in all the chat nowadays. It's because it is enjoyable that it is hard to give up. There are a lot of triggers which drive me to the bookies - I have managed, finally, to get onto Gamstop - times of the week, the type of weather it is even. My brain associates those triggers with the pleasure of gambling. Am I the only one who feels this or am I talking a lot of bollocks?

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In my eyes no your not talking bollocks 

Everybody feels different about how they gamble.now on a Saturday I put 5x£2 bets on the football and probably £5 in a fobt but I still do enjoy gambling I look forward to it 

Now I probably wouldn’t enjoy it if I lost 5x£20 bets on a Saturday 

what triggers my gambling is boredom and when the football season ends I bet on other sports 

Men’s brains are wired to gambling drinking football and tits (sorry Darren)

i wish you all the best @hitopz1

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12 hours ago, Stepandstop said:

In my eyes no your not talking bollocks 

Everybody feels different about how they gamble.now on a Saturday I put 5x£2 bets on the football and probably £5 in a fobt but I still do enjoy gambling I look forward to it 

Now I probably wouldn’t enjoy it if I lost 5x£20 bets on a Saturday 

what triggers my gambling is boredom and when the football season ends I bet on other sports 

Men’s brains are wired to gambling drinking football and tits (sorry Darren)

i wish you all the best @hitopz1

Cheers m8 - will keep battling on and it will get sorted. 

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 I like the highly volatile slots and in my mind every spin could be a massive bonus or wild line, there is no logic to it. I have to limit my slots to once a week excluding free spin promotions and do sports bets the rest of the week, which are kind of fun and not compulsive for me. 

Moderation can work but depends on the person. Some things can't be. I had to stop drinking/smoking years ago because it was the only way. Lucky I can still gamble a bit and do other hobbies without wrecking myself.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 1/23/2020 at 10:50 PM, hitopz1 said:

There is a lot of publicity now about the downside of gambling. I am an addict. I am in a lot of debt because of gambling. I gamble to avoid thinking how f***d up my life is and what a total retard I am. My gambling takes me off being isolated and suicidal - for a few hours. But, most of all, and the point of this post, I enjoy gambling when I get the chance. The fact that gamblers enjoy gambling - even if that enjoyment is short-lived and 'fake' never seems to get mentioned in all the chat nowadays. It's because it is enjoyable that it is hard to give up. There are a lot of triggers which drive me to the bookies - I have managed, finally, to get onto Gamstop - times of the week, the type of weather it is even. My brain associates those triggers with the pleasure of gambling. Am I the only one who feels this or am I talking a lot of bollocks?

Well I'm a woman an I can totally relate to how you feel,I have joined gamstop now it's only been 10 days I'm not going to say I'm finding it easy cause I'm not, I've been gambling for ten years I've already lapsed went on to gamcare forum an someone mentioned national lottery doesn't belong to GamStop desperate for a fix went on an lost 50 pound in 10 minutes,I can't believe they don't belong to gamstop,the  thing is If i hadn't gone on the gamcare forum I wouldn't have found out,but it's my thought I know, I'm going to shut my account, slots are the only thing that gave me  the buzz a love hate relationship with them, it's going to take time,thing is I  have always felt a emptyness inside me a void an when I played the slots they temporarily filled that void but  once the money ran out the cycle would start all over again,an getting into debt going without so many things an effecting relationships is what made me join gamstop, I'm getting cancelling an hope this will help me fight my demons,I wish you well.

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I've been gambling since I was about 8,(I am 50 now) ,the local laundrette had two slot machines in them they changed now and then I was obsessed with Lineup , Hyper vyper, Super Bank etc etc, also used to go to arcades with my parents and have a go ,2 of my most visual childhood memories were around slots once when I won ,probably a quid or so and put it all back in and cried all the way home I was probably 9, and winning the 50p jackpot in a cafe on a bandit called pot Black walking away happy only to see a older boy put 10 p in and the 50p three black balls hold 3 times !! My Grandad was a big gambler he was a great bloke skint one minute going on cruises the next on his winnings on the gee gees, My 79 yr Mum has always liked a go on the slots too ,she  loves watching Darrens vids when she pops over to mine and will come in the bookies with me when I take her shopping ,she also likes watching me play online but if I win over a tenner she will say' now put it in your bank!' so I am sure it's hereditary, I am addicted I accept that and it has caused loads of crap over the years ,I have never been well off and probably have only gone 3 years without a bet in my adult life, but then I was doing coke and drinking, I have an addictive personailty ,I limit myself online to deposit amounts and I have self excluded myself from a few gambling sites ,I do have a problem but I have always paid the important bills before going to play slots etc but I often wonder how I would be if I had never gambled ,online gambling is the worst because you are not physilcally putting cash in a slot you're just typing your CVV number ,gambling is a illness ,but a very enjoyable one, since Novemeber I am about 5 grand up on slots ,its bought me a car, a fridge freezer,repairs on car, council tax up to date ,spoit my 3 yr old estranged son for xmas etc etc ,but I know I will have another bad run and I will be living hand to mouth again soon enough ,will it stop me gambling? will it fuck....

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iv been at it since i was 12 , an ex school teacher used to send me to the local bookies with his bets , it didnt take me long to realise i could hand in my own as well , 38 years later im aware that sometimes its not just loosing thats a problem when you win it can be just as bad ,  as when i had loads of money i started drinking like a fish and doing drugs , mary jane mostly but when your doing both 7 day a week its not good especially when you have young kids  , i remember waking up all happy as i knew id got a big  football acca up , then the horror of logging in and seeing the dreaded 0.00 balance , id spunked it on a basketball game that i had no memory backing , this happened more times than darren got a bonus 😞 ,   my nan used to say a fool and his money are soon parted and by christ i know she was telling the truth . be careful out there people , back in the day the bookies closed at 530 pm , now with the internet there is no closing time unless your balance says zero . i think im the same as rob with the addictive personality , we are all hardwired for some kind of destruction that left unchecked can be devastating . good luck out there 

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I think the first question you should ask yourself is, am I a good person? Just because you gamble does not make you a bad person. If you can look in the mirror and honestly say that you are a good person then that is the most important thing. If you are not a good person, a thief and a cheat or whatever, then you need to put that right first. 

Being any kind of addict is an illness not a nasty part of you or your personality. Even addicts are entitled to have an illness. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I was gambling when it was £.s.d, when the bet was 1p and the maximum win was 10p.  No kidding.  Still doing it 50 years later.  I’m an industry leader, I have six sets of letters after my name, loads of money but I’m an addict and it still makes me ‘king miserable.  Losing a few hundred still impacts just as much as it used to, years ago.  I’ve never stolen and I don’t gamble online but over the years I’ve missed out on friends, appointments, meetings, god knows what, not to say how many endless, endless hours I’ve spent in bookies and arcades on the machines when I should have been out with family, friends and loved ones.  The financial loss, which by now must be very substantial indeed, is completely overwhelmed by the endless waste of time spent in front of a glass screen when I should have been doing much more rewarding things.

There’s no doubt that some of us are more tilted towards certain addictions than others.  I can’t drink alcohol to save my life, smoking makes me ill but I can play slots for ever.  My partner hates and detests gambling but loves a few glasses of wine.  That’s life.

I’ve seen many arguments as to why we gamble.  Someone once said about fruit machines ‘it’s not that you lose every spin, it’s that you nearly win every spin’.  There stuff about unhappy childhood, bad memories, when you’re in front of a machine you’re in another safe and happy place, and something about endorphins being released more in certain individuals when we win.

All in all it’s pretty shite but I’ve learnt to hide it and manage it, big time.  Possibly a nice person but a bloody good liar (‘had a flat tyre’, ‘meeting went on longer than expected’ etc.).  On my deathbed one of my many regrets will be the years and years wasted in front of machines when it could have been spent doing much better things.  I won’t regret losing all that money because, like all gamblers, I can convince myself that it was acceptable.

If you’re young and gambling I would say you’d better stop.  You can’t beat it, you can only try and manage it, or at least try to convince yourself that you can manage it.  It will make you introvert and unhappy in ways that you can’t imagine and one day, maybe, you’ll look back and think ‘I wish I’d stopped….’.  Don’t let it be too late. 

All the best to everyone trying to stop, please keep on,  watching Mr Stop may actually help (or at least, I've convinced my pathetic gambling brain that it actually helps) but I've certainly been slowing down these past few months.

On a lighter note, my favourite gambling quote 'You're born with nothing so if you die in debt you've made a profit'.

End of Sermon.

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Superbly put, I'm 63 and all of the above applies to me, two peas in a pod, apart from the letters after my name😁. I know that over the years I have lost in excess of £1million. I have never ever thought "why me?" I've just accepted that it is me and its part of what makes me what I am. Tomorrow is another day. 

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  • 6 months later...

Mentholdan, I've only just see this thread. I am also addicted to gambling in it's many forms. Fortunately I have a decent job such that my losses represent luxuries not massive debt. 

I read a lot. There was a book on supermassive resonances in nature which I won't get into but it also mentioned humans as being 'loss adverse'. In other words if we lose something say £100 the response is a lot worse that if we found £100. Reason being, if you lose all your food you die. So we are engineered to have a bigger reaction to losing things than gaining. 

Gamblers, and especially hardened gamblers have overridden that response. You see it with Darren also. We are happy to put in £700 and get back (often only a chance of) a jackpot at £500. We blank out the losses and only remember the wins. We have overridden our natural programming. We are able to ignore the three losses and concentrate on the two wins. We only remember the good times. Strangely in life if you remember back it's normally the other way round. We are programmed to remember the bad times, food shortages, as we could starve, not abundant times.

We all know that on average we lose, but we keep doing it. The wins are happy times that we are prepared to work for. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/24/2020 at 12:50 AM, hitopz1 said:

There is a lot of publicity now about the downside of gambling. I am an addict. I am in a lot of debt because of gambling. I gamble to avoid thinking how f***d up my life is and what a total retard I am. My gambling takes me off being isolated and suicidal - for a few hours. But, most of all, and the point of this post, I enjoy gambling when I get the chance. The fact that gamblers enjoy gambling - even if that enjoyment is short-lived and 'fake' never seems to get mentioned in all the chat nowadays. It's because it is enjoyable that it is hard to give up. There are a lot of triggers which drive me to the bookies - I have managed, finally, to get onto Gamstop - times of the week, the type of weather it is even. My brain associates those triggers with the pleasure of gambling. Am I the only one who feels this or am I talking a lot of bollocks?

You may be addicted to gambling, but at least you realize it. That's the first step. Have you tried any kind of therapy? You'll get over it eventually, step by step 😉

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