My Story Part 1

Hi there. My name is ...... (but you can call me CGR!), I’m 25 years old and I’m a compulsive gambling addict. After making repeated failed attempts to stop gambling and regain control of my life, I have decided to give it one more try and share my story with other people in the hope that this time, things finally change. Perhaps someone who is struggling the same way I have will see this one day and find it helpful to see that they’re not alone, so here’s my story and how I got to where I am.

(EDIT: this is a fairly long description of the background to my gambling. If you can’t be arsed to read it all, go to Part 2 where I describe my current situation and the aim of the blog)

My first experiences of gambling were from the age of 16 playing poker with my buddies from school. We used to hang out most weekends at a friend’s house, have a few drinks and smokes and play little £5 rebuy sit and goes. My friends were much better poker players than me and I never won, but it was cheap entertainment and a great way for us to all hang out and have a laugh.

When I moved away from home and went to university the poker games ended and I didn’t do any form of gambling until I was about 19. There were a couple of casinos in Brighton and some of my friends liked to play blackjack, so one night we went into town and decided to have a few drinks at the local Grosvenor casino before hitting the bars. I had never stepped foot in a casino before and was struck by the buzz in the air as I reached the casino floor. The drinks were flowing and the punters dressed up as they crammed around the gaming tables trying to get their bet in. I was young and it was exciting, but as a bit of a gambling novice I found the tables to be a little intimidating. I found myself an empty roulette terminal, stuck my 20 quid in and played low stakes for a about an hour. I can’t remember whether I won or lost, but I think back to this day sometimes and wonder how my life might be different today if I had never stepped foot in that casino. I may not remember the outcome of the evening, but I do know that I got a buzz out of it.

There were a few more occasions I visited the casino with my friends on nights out. I really enjoyed the buzz of being in there. My stakes stayed low and id gained a bit of confidence to play at the tables. The jostling around the table to get my bet down in time, the feeling of the chips in my hand. I loved it.

It wasn’t long before I was asking my friends if they wanted to go down there every weekend. But seemingly they weren’t as keen as I was, so I started to visit the casino on my own. But now it was maybe a couple of times a week, and I’d go during the week and during the day when it was quieter. I never took much money, and I’d had a couple of decent wins and started craving the buzz. Before I knew it I was a regular, joking with the croupiers and getting to know some of the other regular gamblers. By the time I left university I was gambling 3-5 times a week. I felt in control and didn’t get myself into any financial difficulties through my gambling, but I recognised that I had become kind of obsessed with it. I would lay in bed at night and try and think of new roulette bets to make to beat the odds and I was always planning my next trip down to the casino.

I finished my degree and left Brighton to go travelling in New Zealand. There were only 4 mainland casinos in the whole country at the time I was there, and as I was travelling in more rural parts of the country, I never really thought about gambling. It wasn’t until we made a stop in Queenstown, which is home to half of all the casinos in New Zealand that I was able to resume my favourite past time. The roulette table was a little expensive for my taste so I played blackjack instead. It wasn’t long before I was down $200 and walking back to the hostel feeling sick. If you’re reading this as a compulsive gambler you will know the feeling well. It was the most money I’d ever lost and I was travelling on a budget. I felt a sense of relief leaving Queenstown knowing that I wouldn’t be able to gamble for a while.

I rented a flat with the girl I was seeing in a town up North and didn’t have the opportunity to gamble any more as I was hundreds of miles away from the nearest casino. Even though I eventually split with the girl, I made some of the best friendships I’d ever had and have some of the very best times of my life. But eventually they all started to move away and I decided I’d do the same. My closest buddy was going down to Queenstown and I made the decision to go back down there and try to find myself some work. I only realise on reflection how big a mistake that was.

It was out of the tourist season and finding a job was proving hard, the money I had saved from my previous job was running low, and the girl I had gone out to New Zealand with and subsequently broken up with had started living in Queenstown and was making my life difficult. I was determined to stay as I loved the country so much, but my visa was running out and I lacked the funds necessary to extend it for another year. My Dad agreed to help me out and sent me £2000. But I didn’t go and get all my medicals done as I should have. Instead I completed part of my application and started to just live off the money having still not found a job. I was spending a lot of time drinking and smoking weed with my friend and started going to the casino again. It didn’t take long before the £2000 was running out, and I still hadn’t found work. I found myself getting increasingly depressed, but I kept gambling and before I knew it I was down to my last couple of hundred bucks. I confided in my friend, who being such a great guy told me I could crash on his floor as long as I needed to.

Eventually I found work but it was a crappy cold calling job and it made me miserable. I was good enough at it to make enough money to enjoy myself, but I was gambling most of it away every week rather than getting my own place to stay, and when I wasn’t at the casino I was getting drunk and stoned every night. After I couldn’t take working there anymore, I quit, blew most of my money and had to get my parents to buy me a flight home.

I was 23 now, and very soon after returning to England I got a decent job in the city. I was earning more money than I ever had, and while I had started betting on the football every weekend I could afford the £20 a week I’d put on the games and didn’t step foot in a casino for a good couple of years. But certain circumstances in my life were making me depressed again. I think that my tendency to get really down at times is probably related to my compulsive gambling. But then things got better. I met a girl and quickly fell in love with her. We would go out into the city every weekend together and after only a handful of dates we were in a relationship. My previous relationship was very toxic and damaging and I couldn’t believe that I had found someone who could make me so happy. For about the first year of our relationship I was as happy as I could ever remember being. We would go to museums, go out for dinner, go to the pub and get drunk together. I was saving money to get a deposit on a house and I felt really positive about where my life was heading. But something happened. I don’t know what triggered it, but I began to slip back into my own ways. Before I knew it, things had gotten bad. Really bad and really fast…….

My Story Part 2

Trying to figure out how I got to where I am now is kind of hard. I know how it happened, but not why.

The first time I stepped foot in a casino since I returned from New Zealand was with my old school friends on a night out. One of us had come back to London for a month after moving out to Canada and he wanted to go to the Hippodrome casino in Leicester Square. We drank in a pub nearby and headed to the tables. I took out £200 and my numbers were hot. I was up £800 in 20 minutes and my friends wanted to leave so I cashed out and headed home. But I didn’t really feel that happy about it. In fact I felt mentally drained from the experience. It wasn’t more than a couple of weeks before I decided to go back after work on my own. I lost £500 in no time and left with that sick feeling in my stomach. I’d never lost so much in one session before and it hurt for days. I went back the next week to try and win it back and lost another £500. In a moment of desperation and despair I called my girlfriend and told her what happened. She was pissed off at first and I went over to her place to talk about it. When I told her my previous experiences with gambling and feeling like I have a compulsive gambling streak in me, she was sympathetic and supportive but told me never to go back to the casino on my own and of course I told her I would. I think I believed it myself, but the bug had set back in.

It was October. I won a small football bet at some point in the weeks after. I decided id put the £70 I won on online roulette and I got it up to £600, so I withdrew £500 and played with the last hundred pounds. Over the course of the next few days, I got that £100 to £5000. I was buzzing so much having never won so much, but I was having trouble verifying my account so I wasn’t able to withdraw. I kept playing and the inevitable happened, I blew the lot. I don’t think I slept properly for a week after that, but eventually consoled myself that I had actually profited from the session if not as much as I should have. This was my first experience of gambling online on anything other than sports and I was hooked.

The £4000 I had saved up that year didn’t last long. By Christmas I was overdrawn by £4000 and the savings were gone. By this point I was in a really bad way and had confessed it all to my girlfriend. She was horrified and let me have it for a while, but again she supported me and told me she would help me get past this. I feel guilty at how understanding she has been. I see the hurt on her face but all she wants to do is help me. I decided it would be helpful to tell my parents, and they were equally supportive. They gave me money to buy presents for everyone and gave me some money to help ease my overdraft situation. I think you can guess where most of that money went…

Things kept spiralling, I was so desperate to get my money back that I couldn’t stop. My life was consumed at this point. I wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t really turning up to work and when I was there I wasn’t doing what I needed to do. All I could think of was how badly I had fucked up and how I was going to make it better. I realise this is a mistake that I continue to make. The money side of things is the inevitable outcome of a problem gambler, but it shouldn’t be what we focus on as we try to recover. If anything it is what has been holding me back from getting better.

I was majorly depressed and took a couple of weeks off work. I was feeling suicidal and my self esteem had completely disappeared. Despite the love and support I was receiving from my family and my girlfriend, I felt completely alone and unable to properly express how I was feeling and started harming myself.

Eventually I managed to get some sessions with Gamcare but I didn’t find it particularly helpful. I enjoyed being able to say everything I wanted to say to someone who isn’t personally invested in my recovery, but the gambling didn’t stop and it still hasn’t. That’s when the lies you tell your loved ones start to grow as you can’t face telling them about your repeated failure to stop doing the one thing that you know is ruining your life.

I became distant. I stopped talking about it with them all and pretended things were getting better. By this point I had amassed some considerable debt on loans and credit cards, which in turn just fed my need to gamble more and more and try and get it all back. As the months went by, the feeling of desperation that had been haunting me every day started to be replaced with numbness and an acceptance of my problem. It started to feel futile to even try and get better, all the while trying to mask the misery I was causing myself to the people I love who had no idea that things were still as bad as they had been at the previous Christmas. The only positive thing about this time is that I was unable to get into much worse debt than I was already in. But that isn’t entirely positive, as the only reason my debt hasn’t been able to get worse is because I have completely fucked my credit rating.

And here I am now. A year later and nothing is any different. Only I’m more distant than I was. Rather than open up to my loved ones about my situation I keep it all to myself. My girlfriend has stuck by me but our relationship has suffered. I don’t ever have any money any more to go out with her and have fun, spending time gambling rather than spending time with her. The feeling of guilt gets pretty overwhelming at times, knowing that she deserves better than what I can give her until I start to get myself right.

If this seems like a sob story or that I’m looking for sympathy, I’m not. I don’t feel sorry for myself anymore, I just hate myself, and its hard to look at myself and see that that’s what I’ve become over the last year. I could go on about this forever, but I think I have made my point and chances are that if you’re reading this, you know the feelings I’m talking about for yourself. And that brings me to why I’m writing all this…

I’m sick of what my life has become. It’s November the 10^th 2017 and I have had enough. I don’t want to spend another Christmas unable to buy the people I love a gift for Christmas because I spunked the lot on the slots or a roulette table. I don’t want to lie to them anymore about being okay. I don’t want to lose everything I care about before and realise that I left it too late.

So I have decided to start this blog to chronicle my recovery. With any luck, other people will read this and be able to relate. Gambling addiction is a lonely thing and if reading this makes someone feel less alone, then it has done something positive. And if you have read this (it’s a long fucking ramble so pat yourself on the back for getting this far!) I’d love to hear from you. If you are struggling or you have recovered or want to share your story, I think the people who suffer from this addiction can really benefit from the support of like minded people.

I’m no professional when it comes to addiction and recovery, but I feel like my experiences have given me a pretty decent understanding of the issues gambling addiction can cause. I’ll try to update the blog daily and discuss my progress and talk about the things that compulsive gamblers face and my own personal issues with the way the gambling industry operates in the UK.

I last gambled 5 days ago. This time I’m not going to fail.