Moving on

I have recently made the decision to self-exclude from all gambling sites and walk away for good.

Here’s my story:

I first got sucked into the world of gambling through a cashback website, I deposited £50 in a betting account and I would receive £30 cashback from the cashback site. This was great I thought, I'll easily get my £50 back and a nice £30 profit from the cashback site. At worst I would lose all my bets and be £20 down, not a big deal. This is where everything went wrong. I won a few bets and turned £50 into £200 that day. At that point I should have withdrawn it, bought myself something nice and walked away forever. But no, that is the day I became a compulsive gambler!

I lost that £200 over the next couple of days and was gutted. The logical thing to do would have been to walk away and accept the £20 I’d lost overall but no, I spent the next year chasing that £20 loss which has now become a £2,000 loss. Having not had much luck from my own bets, I turned to twitter to find some so called experts that would help me win again so I deposited another £50 and started following some tips. By the end of that day I had £100 in my account, I’d doubled my money. The second day, I made another £50 and remember thinking to myself, if I carry on like this I’m going to make a fortune! Things soon went downhill though, the winners started drying up and the deposits into my betting account started becoming more regular.

Like many compulsive gamblers, I won plenty of bets and learnt a lot about horse racing but I became too focused on winning back everything I had already lost to the penny, no win was ever big enough. There were numerous times throughout my journey that I could have and should have walked away and accepted that I was never going to recover all my losses but I didn’t. I just kept thinking to myself, that one decent bet is going to come my way any day now and I’ll have enough to cover all my losses and leave with a decent profit. Obviously this defies all logic but when you are a compulsive gambler you just keep believing it will happen.

One of the key parts of my downfall was joining Twitter. For compulsive gamblers, twitter is an absolute nightmare and in my opinion should be better regulated. One of the worst parts of twitter for compulsive gamblers is the huge gambling community that exists. Twitter gives us a platform on which to showcase our big winning bets and get praise from random strangers whilst all the time keeping our losses a closely guarded secret. You could hit a £500 win from a £10 bet and suddenly you’ve become a “legend” and gained hundreds of followers asking you for tips. You then start thinking to yourself, I’m going to keep winning like this forever, I need to prove to these people (who I’ll never meet or have any meaningful connection with) that I am indeed a “legend”. The reality however is that you got lucky once or twice, no-one keeps winning those sort of bets. I fell victim to this and started gaining a lot of false confidence, I would only ever tweet my winning bets but all the time I was finishing the day with very little profit or even at a loss. I didn’t care though, I was so focused on my next big winner and feeling a sense of belonging amongst the other helpless gamblers on Twitter that I wasn’t keeping track of how much money I was losing.

A lot of people blame tips given out on twitter for their losses and I was the same. I recently posted a number of tweets expressing my negative opinion of certain tipping accounts that operated as affiliates for bookies and thus made 30% commission from peoples losses. At the end of the day, these people do have a vested interest in you losing but ultimately your losses don’t always come from backing their tips. As compulsive gamblers we are very good at losing everything without their help. My only gripe with these twitter accounts is the wording they use on some of their posts such as “keep the faith” and huge “BOOOOM” tweets with winners whilst completely disregarding losers as well as a lack of transparency in terms of their profit figures and the way they operate. It is easy for people to get sucked in and start their journey on a destructive path.

My biggest regret isn’t actually the money side of things. Sure that’s a big part of my recovery and it will probably take me at least a couple of years to pay that £2,000 back but gambling has affected me in much worse ways. I kept my habit a secret from my wife, my family and my friends, people who have given me their complete trust for all of the years I have known them and there I was lying to them on a daily basis. It also increased my anger and anxiety. The whole time I was gambling I would be on edge, there would be days or even weeks where’d id be on a high from winners but when I was losing I was a horrible person to be around. I would constantly lose my temper with my kids and abandon any sort of fun activity with them such as trips to the park as I fell into a state of depression. I’ve fallen behind at work and missed out on career progression opportunities and become obsessed with social media. I know I won’t get back this year of my life that I have wasted but I am thankful that I have had the confidence to bring things to an end. I still have a long way to go before i'll be able to completely forget about everything but ’ll be making good use of these forums to help me and hopefully bring my own advice to anyone else that is struggling.