THE INTERNET – I JOINED THE IDIOT CLASS

I intended to spend a tenner on my first attempt at cyber-gambling, but the rules at the William Hill Online Casino state that a minimum of three and a half times my planned budget is required. Fuck it, I thought, I’m feeling lucky so I might as well go for it. Needless to say, I am now £35 poorer.

Here’s how they get you: they take your £35 but add an additional, virtual bonus of £50, making you think you’ve got £85 to gamble with. Then the very friendly unseen croupier sends you a message to make you feel extremely welcome and let you know she’s there if you need help with anything at all, but you politely dismiss her because you just want to get straight into the game.

My chosen game was blackjack. I was already fairly aware that the concept of playing pontoon with an artificially intelligent computer program is fundamentally ludicrous and very unlikely to spawn victory, but I was astonished at just how crushingly boring the all too brief experience was. I felt not the slightest hint of the fabled gambler’s rush that some claim to be more addictive than crack; my game was distinctly free of even the most vague little hint of buzz. There was no winsome background music to stir my enthusiasm, and none of the heady, rousing atmosphere you’d expect to find in a real casino, just cheap sound effects and a monotone robot dealer to inform me when I’d bust or very occasionally won.

Obviously, winning wasn’t a regular occurrence for me but once my £85 had reduced to around £20, I decided to quit while I was behind and just get some money back, having thought I’d spent only a little over the original £10 budget I had planned. But what hadn’t been made clear to me was that the first £35 I would lose would be the real, hard cash that they’d already removed from my bank account, and that the imaginary bonus of £50 was what I’d been playing with since. So when I requested my £20 refund, I was told that it wasn’t there because it was, of course, only virtual money and I could therefore claim back nothing at all.

In retrospect, it seems obvious now and I’m sure that many of you will read this and think I’m a bit of a moron, and you’d be absolutely right. That’s all I’ve learned from this abject little experience, that people who lose money through online gambling are idiots, and the more you lose, the bigger the idiot you are. And the biggest idiots are always the ones you’ll see on the news, saying they’ve been conned and duped and there ought to be tighter regulations on these sites because of course it’s William Hill’s fault they’ve lost their house and they’re forty thousand quid in debt. It’s always someone else’s fault, isn’t it?

AIDAN MOFFAT