Betting Forum Sports: New Book focuses on internet gambling

Betting Forum Sports: New Book focuses on internet gambling
The future of sports broadcasting encapsulated, on to gambling. A fine book has just come out (and if there is one thing that you need to survive The Crucible it is a fine book) called Free Money by Declan Lynch in which the author details, bet by bet, a year spent gambling on the internet. Like many brought up in the days when betting shops were required by law to be decorated like a circle of hell, Lynch has not lost his "sense of wonder that something so brilliant and so potentially catastrophic can be available in his own home to every man who can get himself an internet connection and a credit card".
Interleaving his bets with entertaining anecdotes on how he became a keen gambler, and what that means, Lynch's book cracks along at a merry pace. But it soon reveals its remorseless side in the sheer accumulation of bets that are made in order to win or lose increasingly insignificant (in terms of time spent to secure them) amounts. That is often the downside of gambling, not the amount one loses but the amount of time wasted limiting those losses. Lynch closes his book with a quote from Girolamo Cardano, author, in the 1560s, of Liber Di Ludo Aleae, "the greatest advantage in gambling lies in not playing at all". Easy to say in the mid-16th century when the incitements to play were limited by there being neither internet gambling nor red-button viewing.


Betting Forum Sports: New Book focuses on internet gambling