British gamblers losing more than £1 billion a year

British gamblers are losing more than £1 billion a year on the highly-addictive Las Vegas-style slot machines rolled out under the last Labour government (yeah, like the Tories wouldn't have done it, Torygraph!)

Punters are staking up to £46 billion on the machines, officially called Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), which are popular because they have a higher rate of payout than ordinary "one-armed bandits," and players can stake up to £100-a-go.

Gambling addiction charities warn that the apparent ease of victory fools punters into continuing playing for longer.

And with the virtual roulette machines swallowing up as much as £18,000 a minute, with three spins of the wheel possible every 60 seconds, the result is that more money is being lost on FOBTs annually than the combined total for gambling on dog and horse racing and at casinos.

A study by the University of Birmingham estimated that gambling addicts are losing around £300 million a year, with young men aged between 16 and 24 the most likely to fall into this group.

The shocking figures about the consequences of the Gambling Act, one of Tony Blair's pet projects which was ushered into law under Gordon Brown and introduced FOBTs, are disclosed tomorrow evening in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme.

They show that just two bookmaking chains, William Hill and Ladbrokes, saw a combined total of £12.5 billion being wagered on FOBTs last year.

Since the law was changed to allow high street bookmakers to install up to four FOBTs per shop, 300 more have opened.

The programme will claim that these are concentrated in low-income areas, with 12 shops per 100,000 residents compared to five per 100,000 in more affluent neighbourhoods.

They include Deptford High Street in south London where there are 10 shops within three-quarters of a mile.

On the same programme, Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, admitted that the last government had ruined people's lives by allowing the spread of FOBT machines.

She said: “If we had known then what we know now we wouldn’t have allowed this, because it’s not just ruining the high street it’s ruining people’s lives.”

Last month, MPs on the House of Commons Culture Committee called for bookies to be allowed to install still more FOBTs, saying that gambling restrictions were harming local and regional economies.

A spokesman for the Department for Culture, which oversees the Gambling Act, said: “The Government has no plans to amend the gambling act unless there is clear evidence of a need to do so” (are you reading this the person who wrote the article?!).

Disgusting machines designed to fleece the gullible in society,they should be banned or destroyed .

Obviously they will have a knock on effect on families around the UK as many gamblers will use money they can't afford to gamble with which will leave partners,children,relatives and friends to pick up the pieces or suffer etc.I know some people will say it's the gamblers fault and these people shouldn't be so weak but being realistic and understanding what will happen is better than schadenfreude for society as a whole!

As far as i understand the law,shops are only allowed to have four machines in one shop at a time but bookmakers are lobbying to have more machines allowed as it's not enough for them (greedy gits).

Promoting gambling is all about selling a dream.

Do these companies pay taxes on these earning?most are registered in Gibraltar.

Disgusting machines designed to fleece the gullible in society,they should be banned or destroyed .
.

Quite a few of these appear to have sprung up in my local High Street recently, where once there were actual shops.

Sign of the times, I suppose.

*Gulp*

Re. each shop being allowed a certain number of machines, I'm not sure re. licensing, but there are a couple of those late-night 'casino' jobbies here too, and they're filled to bursting with the blighters. I really don't understand where people get the money from tbh, considering that this is quite a deprived area.

^I'm not sure if I should feel good about that fact or not Abs...
Ab Origine wrote:
Its exactly the same situation around here, inner-city deprived area, several more bookies opened in the last couple of years. There must be a dozen within a half a mile radius now. Its all about the machines....they couldn't survive if they were counting on the profits from horse racing alone. Glorified amusement arcades under the guise of betting shops is what they are.

I know a girl who works in one of the new ones. She tells me she's bored shitless in there, because apart from the odd old bloke putting a 50p bet on an accumulator, no-one is betting on the racing or the football unless its saturday. She spends all week doing nothing except watching people play the machines.

Back to virtual roulette machines in bookies. They're bent, fact. If that machine doesn't want to pay, whatever numbers you cover, the ball will always drop somewhere else on the wheel.

Unfortunately for me, the fruit machine game nowadays is something you have to be constantly upto date on....you have to have all the latest info on machine programming passed on to you to survive in it. There is now a network of organised professional players out there who pass this stuff onto each other. They cooperate with each other nationwide, have agreed 'territories' that they work without treading on each others toes, etc. You have to be 'in to win'.

The FM manufacturers and big operators know about this setup, and they hate it. So they constantly reprogramme the machines in an attempt to confuscate the pro players. They 're-chip' them. A machine that did one thing last week might not do the same this week, even though its apparently the same machine. Its an ongoing war.

Take for example a bandit that everyone who goes in a pub will have seen, 'Deal Or No Deal', themed on the TV gameshow with Noel Edmunds smarmy boat all over it. Its everywhere, huge machine. I'm reliably informed that there are over a hundred different programmes out for this one machine.

I could get into trouble from certain people for posting this stuff...

Any proof of this going on?otherwise it just sounds like an urban myth to me.

Can’t under­stand why peo­ple defend mas­sive com­pa­nies rights to rip off gullible une­d­u­cated people/addicts,so called anar­chists defend­ing LTD com­pa­nies hahaha the truth is out.

Can't understand why people defend massive companies rights to rip off gullible uneducated people/addicts,so called anarchists defending LTD companies hahaha the truth is out.

The bookies are opening as many new betting shops as they possibly can purely as an excuse to put these machines in, not for people to bet on horse racing etc. Virtual roulette and lo-tech bandits...guaranteed big profit.

'Lo-tech' machines are the Vegas-style slot machines without any skill involved btw.

I know a lot about this subject, I used to play 'high tech' fruit machines professionally around the pubs. To a great extent, luck is NOT involved in winning on these. Skill, and above all knowledge of the programming and features of the machine, is. If you don't know exactly what you are doing on a pub bandit, you WILL lose, because there is always going to be someone else on the case on that machine who does know.

The punter never wins overall, the professional player does. He takes all the available 'value' out of the machine (after its taken its own percentage), then waits for you to fill it up with your losses. Once the machine has taken enough back after his last hit to be in a good mood again (and he can tell by the way it plays if its in a good mood or not), the pro player hits again. And so on..

Back to virtual roulette machines in bookies. They're bent, fact. If that machine doesn't want to pay, whatever numbers you cover, the ball will always drop somewhere else on the wheel.

A tip: if you ever intend to play one of these roulette machines, cover just 2 numbers, betting minimum stakes. Do this a few times. If that machine is ready to pay, it'll hit one of your 2 numbers. That means you at least have a decent chance of winning if you then take it on for bigger stakes (but please bear in mind it ISN'T guaranteed).

humanspirit wrote:

diamondgeezer wrote:
How did you get into that?

I don’t think that’s true. A num­ber is dis­trib­uted from a cen­tral ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tor to all the machines at once. If you press the but­ton at the same time on two machines to spin the wheel, the same num­ber comes in.