Lee Davy continues his confessions series with a deep delve into his personal gambling habits.
My name is Lee Davy and I am a gambling addict.
Like most young kids in the UK, my first gambling experience was The Grand National – the greatest horse race in the world.
My Dad allowed us to choose one horse each. I would always pick Grease Paint. The fucking donkey never came anywhere.
But I was hooked.
During trips to Blackpool most of the children would play the two-penny shuffle machines. A horse racing game called The Derby got my attention. The bet was 2p on either the red, blue, green, yellow or white horse. If red or blue romped home you won 4p, but a win for white would earn you 50p.
I always bet white.
I never won a penny.
I loved every minute of it.
When I was 11 years of age, I moved to Wales and stole money from my parents so I could play a game called SPOOF. It was a fruit machine inside the chip shop. The owners didn’t care if you were underage.
Things escalated during my first visit to Las Vegas. I learned to play the table games and had just begun to play poker. I lost money playing poker but won playing the table games. When I returned home I had an itch. I wanted to be a professional gambler.
It’s never been about the money. It’s always been the buzz. But there are other benefits that really gravitated me towards it. I loved the thought of having a job that made me happy. I had a good job but I would have preferred staying at home watching TV than going to work.
Gambling made me happy and that was important. Life was good when I was happy and it was shit when I wasn’t. I also valued the ability to wake and sleep on my terms. Gambling also promised me that.
I started visiting the casinos more frequently, started playing online poker and also became a regular in a local live cash game. I was winning in the live cash game, doing my bollocks online and breaking even in the casino.
Then I found sports betting.
For the first time in my life gambling didn’t just make me happy – it also made me sad. I was betting on absolutely everything. I used to love recording the bets on my spreadsheet – even when I lost. I still do and I have no idea why?
The beat was always the same.
I would start with a system. I would withdraw a chunk of change from my credit card and promise that I would only bet 2 percent of my bankroll on each bet. Then I would lose. The bankroll would shrink. The fun dried up with the money and to make me happy I would break my rules. I would lump everything on a sure thing and cross my fingers, hoping not to die.
I would get lucky.
I would lose all my dough and then place one huge bet on the outcome of anything in a bid to get it back, and I would always get out of jail. It happened so often it never occurred to me what the consequences would be should I lose?
Then I lost.
I quickly moved up from making £1 per bet to winning, or losing, more in a day than I was earning in a month. It consumed me. When I was at work I couldn’t concentrate because I was always checking to see if my horse, dog or team had won.
This was also about the time I started to lose my family.
I would lock myself away in my bedroom and multi table NLHE cash games, whilst simultaneously betting any sport that flashed up on the screen. I started to buy a lot of get rich quick sports betting schemes. I had more strategies than Napoleon.
Then one day I lumped a ton of money on England to beat Croatia and I couldn’t stop. The in-play market killed me. I just kept placing huge bets on England to win, and in the end the Croats broke our hearts and at the same time my bankroll.
That night I placed a few grand on a random NHL game in a bid to win my money back. I went to bed. When I woke up I didn’t kiss my wife. I looked under the bed and pulled open my laptop to check my account balance.
ZERO.
I placed a few more grand on a horse. I went to work. I listened to the race. I lost. I came home and decided that I would place a lot of money on the favorite in a greyhound meet. If it lost I would keep adding more money onto the next favorite until I eventually won.
I reached race five and none of them had won. I went to place a humdinger of a bet on race six to recoup my losses. The site told me that I had reached my betting limit. The dog won and I didn’t have a penny on it.
In the end I ran out of places to hide my debt. I had to come clean and tell my wife. I was in the bathtub when I told her. I think she must have thought I was confessing to an affair. When I told her I broke down crying. Blubbered like a baby.
“Okay…how are we going to get out of this?” she said.
She never once asked me how much we had lost. I will always love her for that.
At that time, I had decided to quit drinking alcohol so I coupled together gambling as well. I would banish the two from my life but would continue to play poker. People who don’t play poker will say that’s being hypocritical but the skill element of the game makes it different.
Or did I just create an excuse to continue gambling?
I didn’t place a bet for years, and then in the past two I started to get that itch again. Like all addicts I told myself that I could control it. This time was different. I had learned from my mistakes. I could moderate.
I started my spreadsheet again, gave myself a bankroll and started to gamble on sports. After a while I started losing. The roll started to dwindle, as did my enjoyment. I broke a rule. I bet more than I should of and I lost. Fortunately, I caught myself and stopped.
This week I decided that I was going to bet on Glorious Goodwood. I had finished fourth in the $8.80 H.O.R.S.E Micromillions event on Stars, and so I had a mini roll ready for the races.
On the first day I lost…but something changed.
My son was visiting me for the day. We were both in Cardiff shopping for some new clothes, which was my treat after winning $1.9K in the poker. We were having so much fun but all I kept thinking about was getting home so I could place my bet on the last race of the day.
What a mug.
For the first time in my life I am debt free. In the past 12-months I have saved £12,000 in an emergency fund, and am now saving for my future. July is the first month that I have started to give 2% of my gross earnings to charity.
I have never been in such a great spot financially.
Gambling didn’t get me there. Working hard did.
Gambling is one of the most interesting and exciting pastimes the world ever produced, but it can also be a bad bastard in the wrong hands. When your happiness turns to sadness you are playing with money than you cannot afford to lose. When that happens it’s time to quit.
There are millions of people who can moderate. I’m just not one of them. The fact that I write about gambling is difficult for me. I am caught in the cross hairs. I can’t pull away from the buzz, because I need to be immersed in it. The food on my table comes from the very business that nearly destroyed me.
Am I happy with that?
Not really.
But I will survive.
I didn’t bet on Glorious Goodwood today. Instead I declared that this was Day 1 of my sobriety, and I took my son to the beach instead. He asked me if we could go into the arcade and play some games.
Standing in the center of the arcade was The Derby. It looked just like it did all those years ago.
“You have to play this, son,” I said.
“I don’t want to play it. It looks crap,” came his reply.
In the end I forced him to.
“How do I play it?” he asked.
I explained the rules. How red and blue were more likely to win because the odds were shorter, and that white never wins.
Then I put my money on white.
My son put his on red.
We both flatted our nose into the glass, as red and white were neck and neck heading to the wire.
I couldn’t believe it!
White had fucking one!
“Number One,” said the machine.
Number one was red. My son had won 4p.
“You were robbed, Dad,” said my boy before handing me half of his winnings.
“You wanna another go?” he asked.
“Sure do.”
He put his money on red.
I put mine on white.
