Hawk I'm just wondering why you bet with what seems like an independant, small scale bookie? If you win big how do you know they're going to pay up in full? I mean it doesn't seem like a large company like William Hill or Paddy Power who would have to pay up. What would be stopping this guy from keeping your money and voiding your bet for some silly reason?

I don't bet at all these days, I've done it a handful of times when new customer offers were involved and won all of those bets, so I'm in the 4% (I think) who are in the black. I would only ever gamble with a well known bookie if I had another bet.

Yeah, I understand, but come on. If you don't have the money to buy booze you do without. Hawk keeps losing hand over fist and yet he won't, or can't, stop.
The key words here are "if you win big", which so far, sad to say, he doesn't seem to have done. Is it true then, the old adage that gamblers (we gotta call him a gambler now don't we?) don't play to win, they play to lose?

Note to Hawk: I'm not trying or intending to be preachy here. I'm genuinely worried that you're going to go so deep in you'll never get back out. You need to stop now.

Not really, depends on the gambler. The odds are in the bookies favour of course, they reflect the likelihood of an event happening with a bit of overround so they can make a profit. But for infrequent bettors there are some ways you can use new customer offers and other things to reduce the likelihood of a loss so you're not actually betting to lose. I suppose its still gambling in a sense but if you know what you're doing you'll get the win as they are loss leaders and bookies do it all the time to get you signed up with them. Those bets have max stake limits (usually £10) so you can't win too much.

Also for the pro bettors it is about whether there is value in the bet you place not whether you actually win the bets. This sounds silly, but for example if you bet £10 on Real Madrid to win every one of their games this season in the league, that's 38 bets, you will obviously win the majority of those 38 bets but you won't be in profit at the end of it because the games they drop points will outweigh any profits you make and there is no value in those bets. But if you bet on value regularly you will be in profit.

Then you have the people who bet a lot but don't know or care where the value is or are addicted to the buzz of gambling and they end up chasing their losses. That is when it's a problem and you're just playing to lose.

I mean if you can't physically buy booze then yeah but that's no accomplishment, but you'd be surprised about the mental gymnastics to go ahead combined with the dissolution of reality to make you forget that maybe you shouldn't. It's kind of a whirlwind to encourage you to do something you know you shouldn't until it feels like the world is conspiring against you even though it's just your desire to do it. But that's not what it feels like. It feels like something taking your will away from you and petting you on the head to make you okay with the idea.

Well I’m not betting again until September and my Sept bills are paid.

He pays out. That’s no problem.

Detroit won today lol.

$300 was more than I should’ve risked :/

Sports betting is now legal in the U.S., although it will take a bit to get it set up in all 50 states. In the future you'll just use an app and won't even need a bookie is my guess.

http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/watching.gif

I'm not in a position to comment obviously. Booze has never interested me. But I'm also willing to bet (sorry, bad choice of words) that you wouldn't spend, let's say your comic book money on booze, that you'd only buy it if you knew you could afford it, no? Gambling when you really don't have the money to do so is, in my very humble opinion, crazy, unless maybe you have some inside info. I've laid the odd bet in my time, won big once (betting against my country bought me a new fridge!) but usually I lose, and I don't have any real compulsion to keep betting after that. Of course, when some big upset happens (like Leicester winning the Premier League, paid out at 5000/1) I always think "I wish I had" but that's different.

It used to be illegal???

Yes.

We're a conservative Protestant country. We don't like that ****. We have horse racing in Virginia and the state lottery (and didn't even have horse racing when I was a kid) and that's it. Never forget that our country was partly founded on intolerance of the intolerance our founders' religious intolerance.