Progression (2009) Starring Chris Sharma

For various reasons this week, I've been needing to work through my history of gambling and the progression hence the film title

For me it all started as a child and playing a card game called Newmarket with my parents. It was for pennies and a pot reward game rather than staking. We only played at Xmas and Easter. Although I was desperate to play again my parents kept a strong lid on the amount of games.

Around about the same time, maybe aged 8, my dad would ask my younger brother and I to do some chores like wash the car and then would allow us 50 pence on the grand national and he would be the bookie. My mum would rarely take part and my brother had no interest as he would rather keep the money and just pointed blindly at a horse in the paper. To my knowledge he's never bet more than the odd lottery ticket. I however couldn't stand losing. I would read the paper for an hour and pick ten horses to try and get a payout with 5 pence on each

On to the age of 12 I found arcades and these amazing machines that took all your money but I loved it.

That carried on until 15 when I made a friend at school who loved horse racing. The perfect situation created two people going to the bookies and I added this to arcades.

A year later I went for the trifecta and started going to pubs and playing their machines so now it was pubs, bookies and arcades. Many instances I got caught by my dad and his reps , pulling me out of venues so I tried to hide in them where I could see the door and dash into the toilet 

Quiz machines were added via pubs and then I let a new girlfriend who had been to a casino before.

That was a bad two years of the fourfold, bookies betting, arcades with machines, pubs with machines and now late nights at the casino.

Dropped the casinos at 23 years old and never been back but carried on with everything to 28. At 28 I was fed up of playing machines and being seen so stopped that and not played again.

So now I was concentrating on horse, greyhounds and football betting. But only for a few years as FOBT machines arrived in bookies. So I'm down to one carefully selected venue but FOBT was the crack C*****e of gambling. Losses started to escalate 

This modus operandi continued until around aged 35 when I started to use web betting as well. At 41 this became apps on the iPhone and I did physical and digital betting. Finally aged 46 I went solely online and I received the fatal offer. I wasn't playing slots online at all, just betting. I received an email promotion that if I placed a bet on the football for every goal scored in the premiership I would receive a free spin. Rather than these spins be used on any game it would only be one of the most highly addicted games on their site which I won't mention. Then I was done. Ten more years of increasing pain, losses and time spent. I would guess I wasted three whole years of time playing slots as it was 8 hours per day. I couldn't stop. I carried on betting as well so losses were out of control. My brain was chaos. I dreamt about slots and wins never losses. It was the first thing I thought about in the morning and would wake up at 6am and play straight away. I would fall asleep playing them and every spare minute was spent on them. Literally killed me as a person until I finally stopped last year.

Would love to hear if you can point to the history of your own gambling and how it escalated