There has been much humbug this week about the proposed Gambling Bill from people who really ought to know better. According to some, the arrival of bigger casinos will bring Britain crime, prostitution, addiction, divorce, the death of the first-born in Blackpool (if the Daily Mail is to be believed) and worst of all, American businessmen. I am not so concerned. It's rare that I find myself in agreement with Tony Blair on domestic matters, but this week he pointed out that casino gambling is only a small part of overall gambling activity in this country and went on to say 'It's very important that we modernise the regulation of gambling for today's world... [W]hether we like it or not, we have gambling in this country, but with a series of rules and restrictions which are completely out of date.... Ninety per cent of the gambling bill is about better regulation and protection for children, removing slot machines from about 6,000 premises where minors, children, might have access to them."
That's seems very reasonable to me.
However, there is one thing that I do think is outrageous about certain forms of gambling in this country and it's the artificially generated near-miss. When the reels spin on a slot machine and bring you two watermelons, don't start thinking that the probablity of getting the third one is determined by dividing the the number of spaces on the reel by the number of watermelons. It isn't. And when the lemon comes in, with a watermelon directly about it, don't think you've had a 'near-miss'. You haven't. The machine is programmed to give you the sensation that you nearly got there. I think that this is disgusting.
It's not just done on slot machines either. Last week, for the first time in well over a year, I bought a scratchcard at a newsagent. The game on this card was based on a noughts-and-crosses grid. You had to scratch nine squares and if you found three nines in a row, you would win #9,999. Wouldn't you just know it, but there were four nines in one corner of the grid on my card? Anyone who started scratching it from the bottom left (I didn't), would get the idea that he was drawing to the jackpot in three directions. This was not a near-miss either. The printers of these cards are permitted to generate a certain amount of near-misses above the number that would occur naturally in a genuinely random distribution. This does offend me. By all means, people should be allowed to gamble in this country, but let's have more transparency. The odds should be what they appear to be. Making people think they were 'close' to a jackpot to entice them to play longer should be banned.
_ DY
at 1:08 PM BST