A bit of perspective

[DoubleEnder]

I happen to find myself at Excel in London for an exhibition called ICE. All about online gambling ( not gaming, just betting). Both huge halls jammed with booths, freebies, customers, people doing deals. Loads of free drinks! Very buzzy, busy, confusing for an old stegosaurus like me but clearly this is a vibrant, young, innovative growing business sector .
A bit different from the last LBS. It makes you realise just how very niche sailing and leisure boating really is. Gambling, that’s mass market and £€$€

 

[Poignard]

At least with gambling, you stand some chance of getting your money back

 

[Minerva]

Absolutely! There is an awfy lot of money to made out of online gambling - get the punters hooked and they'll be gambling for 18+ hours a day constantly on daft wee bets. These bookies are always open and the punters are no more than 2 seconds away from placing bets - regardless of where they are or what time of day it is.

So much money to be made in fact that the Bet365 head honcho got paid £260,000,000 last year...

 

[myquest]

At least with gambling, you stand some chance of getting your money back

So much money to be made in fact that the Bet365 head honcho got paid £260,000,000 last year...

That would suggest the only ones winning are the betting platforms!

 

[Wansworth]

Praying on people’s debility and maybe their genetic need,probably causing terrible pain to families who may have members adicted

 

[dunedin]

Similar to the British approach to the Opium trade in the 1840’s, lots of money to be made once you get poor punters addicted

 

[starfire]

Should be taxed to hell, am I the only one hacked off by non stop tv adverts

 

[DownWest]

Nothing new, just enabled by the 'net.
Apparently the native americans were also addicted. Only, if one literally 'lost his shirt' the winner would give him back enough to keep warm. That seems to have been lost now.

Nobody is in this to lose money, except the punters.

 

[DownWest]

Might have mentioned this.. The bloke we bought our Algarve house off was a compulsive gambler. Litteraly gave the bookies Millions. He was one of the most successful 'Swag Traders' so not too different.
I didn't realise quite how bad it was with him, until we nearly lost the house and our money... Quite a lot of people looking to get paid... He had been banned off every race course in UK. His wife kept it under control (sort of) but when she died, it went wild.

One of his friends scattered his ashes at Beecher's Brook.. Fitting.

 

[johnalison]

I expect that gambling is as old as cash. The Babylonians were good at numbers and no doubt they were heavily into camel racing. Personally, I’m not suited to gambling since the threat of losing weighs more heavily with me than the possibility of gain. I don’t in principle object to people being allowed to do what they want with their own money, and I have been known to splash a few pounds at a point-to-point, though not for many years. Gambling ought to be like alcohol, in that it s relatively harmless in moderation, but in the same way there are some who do themselves no service by having no self-control, and, as said, can also harm others. A good many aristocratic families were bankrupted in the 18thC at mere card tables, and in a way this seems natural justice, but today’s industrialised gambling, complete with its algorithms is simply disgusting.

 

[Stemar]

Spot on.

I'd say tax their profits at 60% or more and raise a few quid to pay nurses and teachers a decent wage, but that would only mean the {appropriate word deleted} would move offshore - if they aren't already.

 

[lustyd]

A bit different from the last LBS. It makes you realise just how very niche sailing and leisure boating really is. Gambling, that’s mass market and £€$€

You have it backwards. LIBS was laid back because sailing is a mature market that doesn't need to try. Sales event spending is inversely proportional to the desperation and/or greed of the sales people. At SIBS you can barely get them to acknowledge your existence*, let alone enter into sales talk - a clear sign that they have full books and don't need your money. With any luck, sailing will start to decline a bit and we'll see some effort again at some point.

*Mostly. There were two brands who were very engaged last year. One was an extremely niche performance cruising yacht at the upper end of the price spectrum who spoke to me for 30 minutes enthusiastically despite me openly saying I wouldn't buy one.

 

[Stemar]

For the sake of accuracy, Bet365 seems to be based in the UK and the chief exec and founder is resident in the UK.

Brownie points for that, but my Methodist ancestry still doesn't like gambling, especially at that sort of turnover, though as someone once put it, it isn't that gambling's against my religion, it's just that I never win

 

[Sandy]

Does gambling allow you to wave at dolphins, pass wind farms on a cold December dawn, and marvel at the night sky?

 

[Stemar]

No, but nor does it get you up at the crack of dawn so you can lie in the mud scraping barnacles in the rain...

 

[Daydream believer]

I used to think gambling was a fools game, until i realised that I had my own business since my early20's. Taking the deeds of one's house, to the bank for collateral is one hell of a gamble.
Now retired, I really miss it. I think that I was more addicted than I realise. Every contract was a gamble & they did not all win. My father used to say to me. Never take on a contract where you cannot afford to lose more than 10% of what you have. Pretty good advice. But tempting to go one extra now & then

 

[sfellows]

Gambling.

A tax on the poor.

 

[LittleSister]

Does gambling allow you to wave at dolphins, pass wind farms on a cold December dawn, and marvel at the night sky?

It does allow some to dream they could one day afford to do those things.

Not all of them are the preserve of the moneyed, though! -
'wave at dolphins, pass wind farms on a cold December dawn, and marvel at the night sky' [while peering over your cardboard 'blanket' from the pavement]

 

[Fr J Hackett]

I suspect not one of the posters has ever seriously gambled, either winning or losing. So they are puritanical views of the uninformed that wish to censure people for their own good as they don't have the wit to run their own lives. There are countless ways in which people can ruin their lives gambling is just one are we to forbid all activities that get some people into a mess.

A life long gambler.

 

[allanc]

A friend of mine (it's really not me) tells me that most betting shops have five or more ‘paying in' windows and just one 'paying out' window, where there is never a queue.