How old were you when you started gambling?

[lucky_scrote]

6-7 years ago when I was at 6th form and very few people knew how to play poker I played someone heads up over a couple of days. I had never played for more than 5p 10p with my friends but this was serious business!

I think I was 16 and the friend I was playing was 17. I borrowed chips from my step dad and Krunal, my opponent brought in the cards. We played sit and go's in our free periods for 2-3 days. I remember our study hall had these big blue boards that you could move around for privacy so we bombarded ourself with those. By the second day we must have had about 30 spectators because everyone knew we were playing for £5 or £10 a game, quite a few squid for a 16yr old. When the dust settled I had taken £60 off him which was basically all the money to my name. He was pretty awful and there were a few occasions where I purposly lost so that he wouldn't lose interest.

[PetersApprentice]

Well i was around 11, i had played poker with my dad before and he aloud me to play some sit and goes from his 888 account, i was ok and actually held his own, my greatest achievement to date in poker was when i came 5 out of 12000 to get a spot at the wsop for my dad, unfortunately he passed away, so my dads best friend took it. I now play online regularily but i sometimes feel as if the real excitement has gone as i am now old enough to play legally.

[rfph1]

Dunno, but I do remember putting my £10 pocket money on Ben Nevis in the Grand National in 1980 (and it won at 40-1), so I was deffo gambling before I was 10 years old.

[tfeilding]

Growing up we used to play Pontoon (essentially Blackjack with no house) for money. It was only pennies and to finish 50p up was a pretty good result. I consider that to be playing rather than gambling though and the money as just a means of keeping score. What I consider to be my first bout of proper gambling took place each September at the West Midlands Safari Park. They had a small arcade which had the 2p shuffler things where you drop a coin onto moving plates in the hope to dislodge some down the shute. I remember winning the first time. My friends used their pocket money for an ice cream but I had enough money for two ice creams. The next year when we went back to the Safari park my friends were all interested in riding the Cobra rollercoaster or seeing the lions but all I cared about was feeding my 2p coins into the machine.

Aged around 12 I went to my first point to point. A friend talked me into betting on a horse rather than using our money for ice cream. We combined our loot and had £2 on Back in Business. I remember the name cos I looked at it and thought all the bookies had been off on break. The horse lost.

My next school was in North Yorkshire and we were surrounded by racecourses. We weren’t allowed to go, but we’d just get a taxi across on a Saturday afternoon (it was a boarding school). In my group of friends there were several with racing connections (the son of the trainer Tom Tate, and another guy’s mother was JA Camacho and another guy was the great nephew of the Queen Mother so he had grown up in the racing world). We did pretty well with the tips and would often be there slugging champagne with our winnings, aged 16 or whatever.
At university things went downhill and I’d be the boring guy who would go out with mates only to spend the night on a fruit machine. I also would play roulette in the bookies and bet on horses without knowing what I was doing (I’d almost always just pick the 2nd favourite). I then learnt poker and found myself in casinos where I’d cap my poker losses only to blow several times as much money on Blackjack / fruities / whatever.

Nowadays I don’t mess around with any of those other games and I just play poker. If I have time to kill during a break or whatever then I might drop a couple of quid into Deal or no Deal but that’s about.

[lucky_scrote]

good stories

[Ice25Man]

if poker is a gamble then i started playing when i was 15.
we were playing for cigarettes.

good old days

[homerecher]

Wow, I think my grandpa taught me how to sports bet when I was 9 or 10 years old, and we would play 7 card stud and draw poker on family holidays