It’s the middle of a third set tie-break on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, and 15,000 tennis fans are clapping to their own beat, whipping up anticipation for a crucial line call. Hawk-Eye, the automated line system the tournament uses, the tennis equivalent of a Roman emperor’s thumb – able to overrule the traditional lines-people with their ostentatious crouching – flashes on to the big screen. The clapping reaches a climax: Jannik Sinner, a wiry, 21-year-old Italian has hit a backhand long by a few centimetres of the All England Club grass. A few minutes later, he loses the tie-break – and I lose £800 ($940).
In the preceding two years, I have lost much, much more betting on tennis. I have lost £40,000. I didn’t see it coming, the gambling addiction. Even now, I wince a bit at the word “addiction”, though that is plainly what it is. “I really wish there had been a warning that gambling was addictive,” I joked to a friend, though neither of us was laughing – at that point I was worried about paying rent and bills. I had lost all of my savings. I’d “spent” an entire book advance.
Along with many people, I still imagined gambling as the preserve of bored middle-aged men in rundown high-street shops; Ladbrokes and William Hills nestled among kebab joints and pawn shops. Stubby pencils, receipts littering floors, rising voices as dogs with prominent ribs raced around a track on a TV screen. Often, that’s not the way it is any more. Nowadays you can bankrupt yourself via an app on a mobile phone, or a never-closed browser tab.
How did it start? I ask myself that a lot. Usually when I’m looking at my bank balance. Until a couple of years ago, I had never so much as put 50p on the Grand National. I’d never bought a lottery ticket; entered a raffle; set foot in a casino. I didn’t understand odds. Gambling held zero appeal. Then, a few things happened. The first was the pandemic. It is probably not surprising that more than a third of problem gamblers relapsed during the pandemic. Housebound, there was nothing to do. Those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs had more disposable
