Saturday's Grand National was predicted to see £300 million collectively staked by over 10 million punters. Per capita that is less than a cheap ticket to a Premier League Football match - and the winner I Am Maximus came in at 7/1, very nice for those who got it right.
But that merely is the tip of the wagering iceberg.
Some years ago I watched as an elderly gentleman checked his wins on a handful of Lottery tickets at the newsagent's. When I congratulated him he told me that over the years he had lost a total of £30,000.
He could afford it at his steady rate but there are others much less fortunate. My in-laws recently used a plumber who had retrained to escape from working in a bookmaker's because he couldn't stand seeing men come in crying for their wages back, and hearing of customers' suicides.
The gaming industry excuses itself by pretending that the gambler is exercising his free will and it wouldn't dream of interfering with his liberty. Instead it offers friendly reminders ('when the fun stops, stop') and a helpline (GambleAware, founded 2002), so that absolves the organisers of any responsibility, doesn't it? But in fact if we were completely rational and self-controlled there would be no need for such advice nor any restrictions on the gaming industry's activities.
Instead the former chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on betting and gaming has recently resigned his seat over an undercover journalistic sting by The Times in which he offered to take money for privately influencing Parliamentary colleagues and asking questions in the House.
A lot of temptation is down to availability. Betting shops became legal in 1961 and at one point there were 15,000 of them. The National Lottery started in 1994 and now there are some 30,350 terminals selling draw tickets; and in 2014-2020 their sales of instant-result scratchcards averaged over one billion items, annually. Online gaming - accessible not just via computers but on the smartphones that virtually everyone carries around - now accounts for nearly 30% of all non-Lottery income. Overall, the industry's revenues exceed £15 billion p.a.
Is it freedom to let businesses exploit people's weaknesses on this scale?
