Long overdue introduction!

Hi everyone, this is going to be a long one as I've kept most of this bottled up for far to long and need to unload. I should have joined a few years ago but I thought I had this under control when I self excluded myself 2 years ago but life events got in the way and I've been gambling again since last summer

Aside from the odd lotto ticket, I never really did much gambling in my youth because I never really had much money and also because I never made a habit of going to casinos.

All this changed after I lost my mother to cancer at a very young age. I suddenly found myself relocating back home and being responsible for the care of my sibling who has health problems and dealing with my late parents estate which has left me with more money then I knew what to do with. Long story short, I have squandered an obscene amount of money, enough for most to cover a mortgage on a house, a huge chunk of which was due to compulsive gambling.

It started off with boredom and going to the only place I could be lonely without feeling pathetic, which was the local casino. From there I started playing roulette, googling betting systems and before I knew it I had lost several hundred pounds. Being a bad loser and perfectionist, I could not accept this loss so set about chasing it in a reasonable manner by setting up realistic targets which I was achieving in terms of winnings. At this early stage I was only able to access a small amount of money so my gambling was quite limited.

Not long after, a woman that I used to see was settling down with someone else which I treated as another loss of a significant person in my life and this tipped me over the edge. I responded by going to the nearest big city seeking the ultimate distractions I could find. I soon discovered that under the cover of nightfall, the only places that seemed safe and welcoming to the lost and emotionally vulnerable were the bright lights of the casinos so I ventured to the local casino and developed the habit of gambling hard, feeling the thrill of where the ball would land and whether I would get my money back. I lost a few thousand pounds in the process and remember checking into a cheap hotel, soberly talking to the receptionist about the damage I had done nonchalantly, before retiring to my room for the morning. From there I thought about how my mother would have felt, how disappointed in me she would have been and how much I was letting her down and this set me off on an emotional outburst.

After gathering myself together, drying the tears from my weary eyes, I decided to google gambling addictions and came across what must have been this site and called the helpline. I ended up speaking to someone who listened to pretty much what I have written above and when I told her about losing a few thousand pounds, an amount I could never have comprehended doing at the time, she gave me an almost patronising ticking off, to paraphrase “well you've learnt your lesson now so hopefully you won't be making the same mistakes again". Perhaps the loss of a few thousand seemed trivial compared to the damage a lot of other people have done but I felt like I wasn't getting a lot of support or understanding at the time.

Moving on I had avoided gambling for a couple of months, but then a significant event had happened which I was not prepared for as I received a very large sum of money which was our inheritance. At this point in time I felt flush with cash and didn't know what to do with it so did what most idiots who come into money do and spent it on useless c**P and experiences. I was still leading a very lonely existence where I didn't really have the time to work due to family responsibilities.

As the saying goes, the devil makes work for idle hands, and sure enough I was spending more and more time in the devils playground playing on that table where the numbers amount to the number of the beast. Having the ability to withdraw thousands of pounds in a casino was a recipe for disaster for such a bad loser as myself that I ended up losing 5 figures in the space of less than a year from constant chasing. It was this sad desperate cycle of always wanting to chase my losses combined with the distraction of the casinos from the emptiness of my life that lead me to lose such a large amount. I remember one particular day when I managed to loss 4k in the space of about 10 minutes, thinking that I could just bet bigger and bigger after each successive loss until it eventually came in. It never did of course, not only because of the house edge but also because I was a rubbish roulette player, always covering far too much of the wheel. This in a nutshell is why I've never experienced any truly big wins as I've always bet conservatively, effectively losing small bets that amount to large totals and eventually making stupid massive bets that don't really pay off.

One year on and I found myself progressing to making 4 figure bets which led to them giving me a gold card, a poxy piece of plastic which rather pathetically, gave me a misguided sense of self worth. Initially it was paying off as I won a few thousand which I then used to fund an indulgent trip to the original sin city of Las Vegas for one weekend. I managed to lose several hundred pounds gambling but the rest of the damage was on drinks and partying. Looking back, this was probably one of the best things I could have spent the money on, rather than just hand it all back to the casino in the vain hope of recovering all my losses. But after coming back I made the naive mistake of thinking that betting big is the way to win in casinos. In the space of a fortnight, I had nearly doubled my total gambling losses!

I felt like s**t, like I had hit absolute rock bottom, I knew I couldn't carry on like this and after much painful deliberation, I decided to pull the plug on this disgusting habit that become my distraction from the pain and misery I was feeling, and got myself self excluded.

I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders as the burden of chasing had finally left my consciousness and I thought I was free to move on with my life. That would be the case for the next 18 months at least.

During which time I was still wasting cash, just nowhere near as much or as fast as in the casino. I bought a flash motor which turned out to be a money pit with repair bills left, right and centre, I filled the emptiness with going to strip clubs if I didnt have anyone to spend time with. Sadly enough, I managed to waste over 7k in one night at one of these sad pathetic clubs after one of these dancers shoved some C*****e up my nose, which being a person that doesn’t do drugs, I reacted quite badly to by losing all sense of self-control. Needless to say it’s not an experience I’ve repeated since.

Moving on, I developed a relationship with this troublesome person who I had been seeing casually at first, but developed real mutual romantic feelings for, but unfortunately she has a lying manipulative side to her personality which thinks nothing of using other people for her personal gain. Long story short we broke up and in the ensuing heartache I ended up going to a non member casino and had a smallish flutter. Before long I had a conversation with the manager who discovered I was on the sense list and asked about taking myself off the list, which I had contemplated before, mistakenly thinking I had overcome the worst of my compulsive gambling.

I took myself off the list and was now going to more than one casino chain. I decided not to play roulette after reading about house edges and tried my hand at blackjack, losing almost 1k in one day on pure blackjack while all around me players were winning massively on these super side bets that kept coming in. I decided to play these side bets the next time I went into this casino and before I knew it, I had won almost 4k. I thought I had stumbled upon a eureka moment, thinking this was the answer to winning my money back. Little did I realise that I had just hit upon an incredible fluke of landing the big side bets one after the other, something that was incredibly rare. Naturally I ended up losing 6k during last summer chasing these stupid side bets.

I tried to reconcile with my ex, but looking back it ended disastrously with amusing consequences. Naturally I turned to gambling again to fill the void after we once again ended on bad terms. I hit upon a streak of always landing the big blackjack side bet in this one particular casino which was a bit of a drive away.

It almost became ritualistic, I would fill up at the same spot at the same petrol station and drive at near enough the same speed listening to the same playlist on the way to this “lucky casino”, hooked on some kind of superstitious ritual in the false belief that it would deliver me redemption from my past losses.

I managed to slowly over the space of a fortnight claw back around 5k, having set realistic targets of 500 a visit. I had reached my target for the day but I made 3 fundamental mistakes. Mistake one, I didn’t leave having reached my target, mistake two, I walked in with the 5k that I had previously won in my coat pocket, and mistake three was to go chasing after losing all that money in one really bad sitting. In total I lost 12K that night! What’s more remarkable was that this other punter that I occasionally chat to while playing roulette was actually up by 12k at the exact same time that I was losing this much! I was looking at his big fat stack of chips thinking how could he be this lucky and win pretty much exactly what I was losing? Was this some bizarre way of the universe maintaing a sense of balance?

I left the casino feeling almost like how I felt the last time I decided to self exclude myself, only I didn’t which would be a big mistake as over the course of the next 4 months I would more than double this 12k loss, effectively doubling my total gambling losses since the very beginning.

What's changed is that I inadvertently got myself exluded by one of these casinos after having a frank discussion with a night manager about my losses after a really bad night and he must of felt sypmathy for me and a responsibilty to stop a problem gambler. I've also been told how much I lost in a particualr branch which brought home just how much damage I've been doing to myself over these few years since my mother died.

I guess, like most people on here, I’m looking for help and advice from people who know how destructive this disgusting habit can be and help me overcome this before it’s too late. To those that read this very long overdue introduction, thank you for your time and patience.