2016 Challenge

Checking in day 2 again, same day count as last Sunday! Going to make sure that by next Sunday I can add 7 days to that day count!

Checking in on day 228

checking in 8 days thanks Alain

Checking in on day 126, had a great weekend, life is so much more rewarding without the gambling disease

Hi checking in day 145

Sorry for late check in, been away this weekend! 93 days free.

Great to see 31 people checked in today. Great to Krishan joing the challenge with 1046 gamble free days...he's taken time to write a brilliant update on post number 747; I'd recommend reading his story to anyone.

Congrats to anyone who has reached a personal milestone this week.

Personally I've had another great week in recovery and weekend in the sun; doing the right things and keeping it one day at a time. I'm away on a stag do in Portugal this weekend so won't be updating til some point on Tuesday.

Hope you all have a great week ahead.

Garyl1976 wrote:

Great to see 31 people checked in today. Great to Krishan joing the challenge with 1046 gamble free days...he's taken time to write a brilliant update on post number 747; I'd recommend reading his story to anyone.

Congrats to anyone who has reached a personal milestone this week.

Personally I've had another great week in recovery and weekend in the sun; doing the right things and keeping it one day at a time. I'm away on a stag do in Portugal this weekend so won't be updating til some point on Tuesday.

Hope you all have a great week ahead.

kchurch - 1046

triangle - 788

delboygolf - 781

Garyl1976 - 766

I Wished - 741

Glads Dad - 532

Balvaird - 391

Casey - 385

andy14 - 350

Oldhamktf - 228

Thegerman - 190

Samster - 145

FEB2013 - 131

tilly1976 - 129

johnlostmydo - 126

xmercx - 95

Tom_2015 - 93

thereaper - 89

onlyme - 57

Daz71 - 36

8thOct - 36

newbeginnings - 29

Stewart1982 - 27

LifeBegins - 26

Godoicul - 25

justwanttobenormal - 18

Argie100 - 14

claudroid - 9

alasmi21 - 9

Deano - 8

boxingdayfresh - 6

Liaison - 2

Well done to everyone from kchurch (new member, welcome) to Liaison and everyone in between. Keep working on your recovery using the challenge and all the support available to you!

Checking in on day 19 today, had a few urges today for scratchcards at the shop,.but just thought to myself that if I bought one I would buy more at the next shop, as that's how i roll... so bought my shopping and went home and washed my car and kept me busy...
Keep strong all
We can't win because we can't stop! Xx

Thank you Gsry for the update:))

Checking in on 743 days,

Have a good strong gambling free week troops, and keep winning for real:))

Suzanne xx

Thanks for the update Gary. Felt good to get past my first week without gambling once again. I've opened a new savings account and started to sort out my finances again for the next pay day. Checking in on day 8 and feeling quietly confident that I'm focused and determined enough to abstain this time. Taking one day at a time and fighting urges as they come along. Got two holidays to find spending money for and one still to finish paying for. With this in mind I cannot go back to it !

Congratulations to all those early birds checking in gamble free this week. I'm adding my gamble free celebration to yours. Would be great to see you on the Gamcare online chat anytime!

kchurch wrote:

Hi All,

I would like to join this thread.

Im Krishan and here is how its all began! It all started at 18 first going to university. Online gambling seemed so accessable and i thought nobody could ever know I was gambling. I was very lucky in the respect my parents paid my first year accommodation up front so i had no outgoings. Started with £5/£10 football accumulators and for the first year or so kept the stakes the same and probably broke even/made a slight profit.

Second year of university came, saved quite a lot from year one which I always vowed never to touch. Stakes started to increase over time and broadened my horizons to tennis as it was always a sport I loved so I thought a quick way to make cash was to bet on a player to win a service game, for example, set one game 5 winner. To me at the time seemed logical because I could back £80 on the server holding at odds 1/4 for example. With this stupid theory I thought I could easily make back what I lost on football accumulators. This got progressively worse and thought the more I staked the more I could have won. Also each service game could be over as quick as two minutes so saw it as easy money. This only lasted so long when all my money in my current account had gone. I started digging into my £3,500 savings which lasted me until the end of my second year. That summer I vowed to stop because my year in industry was coming up which was a well paid job so this was my chance of a fresh start.

Placement year came where I secured a job for a chemical company for my year in industry, based in Frankfurt. Lasted about 3 months before I started to gamble again. I was stuck in a bad place mentally, didn't speak German, had no friends at all I'm Frankfurt and didn't feel I had anywhere to turn. I gambled every evening to pass the time. Again I was lucky as my rent was free as I lived on site so again had no outgoings whatsover so really I thought I had nothing to lose as I had a roof secured over my head. Payday would come and I would buy a big shop so I knee I would have food in the cupboard however the rest of my wages would be gone in hours. I went through a period of then thinking when next payday come if I just make £10 a day that's at least £300 a month..how hard could that be. That's when I started taking out payday loans to fund my habit. Managed to take out £2000 of payday loans in a month and thought I could make a profit and if not I could just withdraw what I deposited and pay the interest from my wages. Some months this was fine when I had a good few days so came out of the end of the first month with a profit. Next payday arrived, same story lost all my wages so turned to payday loans and was entitled to more. Lost all that and was at an all time low. Set up a payment plan with the lenders and paid off a bit a month however every payday would come where I ensured I still hand funds to gamble.

My year placement was over and just about paid off all my debts that I owed. Arrived back to my original home in Wales in July 2011 and first thing I did there was secure two summer jobs, one working at a 5* hotel and other working nights stacking shelves at sainsburys. In total I would earn and £1500 a month and did that for three months. I then quit the hotel job and got transferred stores with Sainsburys to the Huddersfield store where I was studying. With the money I had saved that summer not gambling I managed to pay for my first two rent installments and still had some saved for a rainy day.

This was my final year of a Chemistry could so i knew this was going to be tough! So my first term student loan came and went about a month without an urge to gamble..so far I had gone 121 days a thought this was it now..I'm never going back to the place I was in. I was exhausted working two jobs all summer and thought all that hard work must count for something. Slowly the work load increased, pressure from fellow students for my help increased and felt increasily stressed to keep everyone happy. I made absolutely no time for myself and got to the point where I couldn't face the world so locked myself in my room for days on end. This is when thoughts creeped into my mind about gambling as I would complete and submit work early so had evenings completely free. Unfortunately I returned to gambling with initial small £10 deposits then same old story , stakes increased, losses increased. What drawn my to online gambling was the secrecy about it all and the fact I didn't feel I was physically losing as I never saw the money I had lost..to me it just seemed like a number..almost as if it wasn't real. Went down the same route of payday loans/ payday wages being lost on gambling..maxing out my £5000 overdraft and £1500 credit card. I was at an all time low..managed to stay focussed and graduated with a 2:1 in the end but I wasn't happy within myself. All income I had would go straight in gambling. Again payment plans were set up and then I secured my first job relating to my degree and this was the boost I needed. Still I gambled every day but a little less as I ensured all my outgoings were paid and the rest I had would go on gambling. Got to the point in June 2013 where all my debts were paid off but was still gambling. I opened up to my current girlfriend at the time, my family and friends and told them I had every intention to stop.

This was when I first made this post. From that day, 27th June 2013 I didn't turn back! Been through a lot since..I was living in Cardiff and met my girlfriend in a queue at the killers gig 5th November 2012 and she was behind me. We got chatting and one thing led to another. She lived in Plymouth and I was living near Cardiff so one weekend she would come up and one weekend I would go down. Opened up to her about my gambling problem a couple of months in (June 2013) and have managed to be gamble free since. Life was going well and in March this year we decided time was right to find our own place together. I secured a job in Plymouth and made the move in April. A month in and she ended the relationship with me, stating she wasn't ready for this after all so I was renting a house for us which had stay in for a minimum of 6 months and rent wasn't cheap. Times were tough, I had no connections down here and thought its only a matter of time before I turn back to gambling. The 6 months passed and thought I would move to a shared house where the rent was almost half the price and was an opportunity to meet others. To this day I still live in the shared house, made new friends, taken up new hobbies and most importantly stayed motivated and didn't gamble.

Every day I feel more like my old self again before gambling was ever an issue and have never looked back but only ever forward. Day 1041 but forever treating it like day 1!

Well done all!

Krishan

Hk Krishan, thanks for posting and joining. Its great you have so much gamble time. Can you tell us some of the strategies you use to stay gamble free. It would be great to learn something from your undoubted success.

Checking in on day 17; life's good, gamble free, weathers awful... 2 out of 3 isn't bad!

Checking in 133 days gf