“Life’s a gamble.” so they say. Every little thing about life is a gamble, choosing the right partner is a gamble, spotting areas to study for the forthcoming papers. It wasn’t difficult to convince me to try my luck. I would not amount to anything if I didn’t take risks so he incessantly said. “You simply have to sacrifice a meagre 1000ugshs, choose a few teams and bet on them winning their soccer games.” advised Tim, my roommate.
I picked my roommate’s photocopy of fixtures of the weeks’s games; six pages of fixtures from Lucky Sports Betting. I choose 5 teams and gave the fellow 1k. He went and returned with my first betting ticket. My stake of 1k had a win amount of 65,000ugs. The next morning I’d won the amount. Wow that was easy, I realised I’d be fully preoccupied minting quick money from betting.
It was the trap called beginners luck. Every betting addict has been enslaved by ‘beginners luck.’ I was no different. From that point, there was no turning back. Every little amount I managed to lay my hands on was invested in the “Indian man’s” business.
The prospects of spending so little and gaining so much pushed me on; deeper into the abyss of addiction. There are always baits. There are the nearly certain bets called sure wins. Those are the key killers. Especially when a big team is playing against an average team; say Barcelona against a lowly Levante, they’re such games that prompt big sum bets, they’re quite safe. The betting syndrome engulfs you, tempts you, probes you.
Before you know it, you’re borrowing money only to bet it with financial prospects. It’s why students lose out tuition on sure bets. Unexpected twists can change the fortune of any big team, a red card. A small team might decide to play a heavily defensive game to the frustration of the other. Betting is deceitfully lucrative, loads of betting sites give tips, Betway, WinDraWin, soccervista, all offer possible wins.
I’d spend sleepless nights studying the previous records of teams in Brazil, China and even teams in the English 3rd division. And spend sleepless moments checking my phone. It’s not hard to tell a betting addict, just check their bookmarked websites, Livescore will definitely be one of them. The near misses are a curse, out of the 6 bets, 5 might win and one might lose, cancelling out the entire ticket.
Near misses further the addiction as much as the occasional win. It’s not unusual to win four times in a row before going months without winning or with just the near misses. But the mere hope of winning temps and taunts one. Betting is not for the faint at heart. It’s about risking the little you have on an unlikely result, the bigger the risk the bigger the win. And certainly often the big risks result into really big losses. Big risks coupled with blind luck often result in winning big amounts say 1m on a 2000 shs stake.
When someone in your betting circles announces his luck, all circle members secretly try to risk big, make nearly unreasonable stakes called ‘chapters’ whereby a ticket has about 10 teams with big odds on a dismal stake with a crazy win amount say 8M. ” Well, it’s not just soccer, there are other sports we stake on; horse racing, the famous Mayweather Pacquio fight and tennis and athletics too. Remarks Otim Jack, an economics finalist at Makerere. Betting is highly addictive, it’s deceptively immensely beneficial but it’s consequences on one’s financial life are quite devastating. Before I quit, I’d borrowed from friends to bed. Luckily for me, Mzee banks my tuition himself. I believe I’d fall the bait any day, the prospect of staking 1M on a sure win is very tempting. Adds Joseph, 2nd year law student at KIU .
