The Godfather: Peter Corris on gambling
I’m not what you’d call a gambling man. My betting amounts to participation in an AFL tipping competition – $30 per season – an occasional $2.20 lottery ticket and a couple of small each-way bets on the Melbourne Cup. My total gambling outlay in a year wouldn’t amount to much more than $50.
I was prompted to think about this when waiting to meet a friend in a pub recently. He was late and, with nothing else to do, I paid some attention to the television coverage of greyhound and trots racing. I was amused by some of the names, such as ‘No Smoking’ and ‘I Like Candy’. I was only half attending but I did notice that favourites seldom won. That is, the punters lost and the bookies won.
I think it’s this sense that the odds are stacked against gamblers, rather than parsimony, that accounts for my lack of interest. I’m happy to spend money on recreational things like drinking and eating out, unnecessary purchases like clothes that appeal to me and CDs and DVDs I could just as easily borrow or hire.
I never learned to play cards so games like poker, 500, blackjack and others that people wager on are a mystery to me. I don’t think anyone would want to bet on Snap, which is the only card game I can play.
Years ago, influenced by a friend, I tried to take an interest in horse racing and betting but couldn’t sustain it. Back when I played quite a lot of golf I met players who bet on who would win a hole or who could or couldn’t make a shot. It never appealed to me; I had enough trouble trying to play competently without thinking about money.
I’ve been in only two casinos – Wrest Point in Hobart, when it was a novelty, and one in Monte Carlo that was no doubt a tourist trap. Probably the high-roller rooms of the kind frequented by the late Kerry Packer and James Bond are different, but these two struck me as tawdry and sad, with the gamblers more enervated than energised.
So gambling fever never struck me, but perhaps my indifference was reinforced by an evening I once spent at the Journalists Club in Sydney. Jean and I went there for dinner with science fiction writer Damien Broderick and his then partner, and Jock and Kath Hector, the parents of a former boyfriend of Jean’s with whom she’d remained friendly.
We had our dinner and sat over our drinks talking. Then Jean got up to play the pokies. She hit a streak and beckoned to me to come and collect her winnings. I was soon shovelling fistfuls of coins into the pockets of my jacket as her luck continued. Before long she’d won enough to pay for our dinner and a taxi home and I suggested she stop.
She didn’t and soon I was handing back the money to go into the maw of the machine. It didn’t take long before she’d lost it all, plus whatever she had in her purse, and I declined to feed the one-armed bandit myself. In the end she was almost on the verge of touching a fellow player who was much the worse for drink for a stake before she decided enough was enough.
Ever since Jean has played the pokies to a strict stake limit. I don’t mean to sound po-faced; people are welcome to gamble if they want to as far as I’m concerned, but I always have in my head the lines from an old popular song:
Horses don’t bet on people
And that’s why they never go broke.
