I must admit, I don’t have a long experience of gambling. I have gambled probably as many times as I have fingers, and I’m glad about it because every time I do gamble it does feel like I am cutting off a part of me and will never get it back.
In the past few weeks, I had a look at free spin offers for gambling websites and guess what… they did exist and there were many of them. Surprisingly as I found, there are multiple types of free spin, but I made sure to pick the ones with no deposit and no wager requirement. In effect this meant that after I had spun my free spins (without putting any money on the table) I could withdraw all my winnings immediately.
Two free offers I found were Sky Vegas (where I got 70 free spins – £0.1 each) and Paddypower (100 free spins – £0.1 each), so I set up my betting accounts and had a go. Immediately I hated it, the animation, the music, the instant spending of ‘money’.
Everything was made to seem like it was ‘fun’ but really it was a place to throw all your money into the bottomless pockets of these massive betting companies. Now of course I wasn’t going to lose every spin – that wouldn’t make people come back thinking they could win. Overall out of £17 of spins I made roughly £15, so not bad right? For a few personal details I had made £15 for nothing?
I realised that is not the right mindset. What I had actually done was lost £2 while feeling as if I was winning, and obviously once you feel like you are winning you are more likely to have another go, and another… until you start throwing your savings at the gambling companies, just waiting for that ‘big win’ that only happens to the few.
The worst part of making this money was realising that these gambling companies were happy to give away this much money to try and attract a few gamblers who may not have self control. These gambling companies have earnt enough money off people to allow them to give money away for free just to increase their userbase. Now that is worryingm
Concluding Point
What I’m saying is not that we shouldn’t gamble. Gambling is fine if you see it as ‘paid’ entertainment, not as a way to make money.
What I am suggesting is that gambling companies want to make you spend your own money, and to get you to this point they are willing to dangle a carrot in front of you. They give you one bite of it, and then dangle it just close enough that you put some of your own money down, until you are paying them rather then them paying you.
I will end on this statement: the casino never loses.