![]() ![]() Yet, if anything, gambling was my first love. So I could comprehend with an appalling clarity that, for the man who is overly fond of gambling, to have round-the-clock online-betting facilities under his own roof was the equivalent for an alcoholic of living in a fully functioning pub - a pub with a great atmosphere and a band playing. I had a bit of 'previous' in the area of addiction. Though I will concede that I gained a further perspective on the global gambling phenomenon due to my work on the Irish drink phenomenon. And, as a result, he has almost no chance of turning out as well as I have. The young man in his bedroom, with his credit card and his laptop, betting in the middle of the night on the American football on Sky Sports, has not seen such terrible things. They gave any young man who went there a clear vision of where he might be going, a living exhibition of misfortune and failure. Such was the forbidding nature of these dives, they brought you into direct physical contact with the raw realities of winning and losing, and losing and losing. There was no Paddy Power on the radio with his "fun bets", no bank of TV screens, no water coolers and no coffee, and definitely no toilets or anything that might encourage you to linger or to have a pleasant experience in any normal sense. So I started writing about this thing, from the perspective of someone who had started betting in the days of dirty realism, when you actually had to go to a bit of trouble to get to some side-street bookie's office, and to stand there in the company of deeply damaged men, handing real money across the counter. 'Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich - something for nothing' ![]() The result was swift, and it was decisive - a third office opened, a branch of Boylesports. Which suggested that there would be a fight to the finish between Power and Ladbrokes, to see which of them could survive on this little street. Which was situated a few doors down from an established branch of Ladbrokes. I described the first moment in this newspaper, a few years ago - it was the occasion of the opening in the village of Rathfarnham of a branch of Paddy Power. ![]() I learned that you can be talking all night about the dark sides of gambling, such as the bankruptcies and the suicides and the insidious ways in which betting corporations have been making themselves respectable, and that while some people will be adopting a mature position, taking it all in, others will just be thinking: "When can I start?"īut that reaction in Waterford to internet gambling wasn't the first shoeshine-boy moment I had in relation to the gambling boom in general. In the mind's eye, I could see half the room abandoning their literary journey for the time being, and adjourning immediately to their computers, to get hooked up to this new magic that they had found. And if you start winning, you can withdraw your winnings instantly to your credit card by pressing a button. You can bet on anything from football in South America to the winner of Celebrity Big Brother - the range of markets is kaleidoscopic. If you have a functioning credit card, you just need to google the name of any well-known betting corporation, you get on to their website, you supply them with your credit-card details as you would in any internet transaction, and you start betting. In fact, as I described the process by which you can open an online-betting account, and start betting immediately on anything that can even vaguely be called sport, it seemed to me, and to most others in the room, that few things in this world are easier or simpler. Because there was a certain mood of wonderment in the room, about the ease and simplicity of online gambling. I got through the reading, somehow, but it was the post-match discussion, as it were, which brought enlightenment. Which gave me the opportunity to test drive a few sections of my new book, Free Money, which is about gambling. I was asked to give a reading in Waterford recently, at the annual Sean Dunne Writers' Festival. Instead, as he says in his new book, 'Free Money - A Gambler's Quest', with his first-hand knowledge of addiction, the ability to bet all day and night on any obscure sport just scared him. A betting man since his youth, internet gambling should have been tailor-made for Declan Lynch. ![]()
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