Originally Posted by
The Lone Gunman
It can be a dangerous and expensive pastime if you get carried away, which has happened to me in the past.
I've gone through various gambling phases during my life. When I started visiting bookies (aged about 17 or 18), I'd bet on anything that moved and that was the case for more than a decade. I was hopeless and lost loads of money during that phase. Then I woke up and decided I either had to start taking it a lot more seriously or give it up.
I used to bet on the horses and devised my own kind of system based on the Racing Post form and speed ratings. I stuck to that religiously for around six or seven years and was very disciplined with it, starting each season with a betting bank of £250 and betting regularly but carefully. I won decent sums of money for five seasons on the trot and placed some big bets by my standard during that time. The most I ever put on one horse was £800 (Tumbleweed Pearl, it won a maiden at Bath easily at 6/4, so a £2,000 cash return on the day) and the most I ever lost in one bet was £500 (the horse was called Charnwood Forest and the one that beat it by a nose was called First Island - I'll never forget that). I shudder to think of placing bets like those now.
Then I had a disastrous season in 2000 or 2001 - my betting bank disappeared fairly quickly, as did the replacement sum when I tried to double up, so I decided to knock it on the head. When horses start falling for you on the flat (which happened to me twice that season), you know it's time to give up.
Since then, I've limited myself to small fixed odds bets and I've never bet much on football matches - it's always just a bit of entertainment rather than a genuine attempt to win proper money, and I almost always bet accumulators rather than individual games. I love it, though. The Racing Post football form pages are brilliant, I really enjoy reading those, so I'm looking forward to buying a copy again on Saturday. That'll be a little bit of normality at least.