Gamblers tell their stories: Life patterns of gambling

child but she only placed a bet directly herself when she was 17 as the legal age was 18,
`you had to look eighteen’. She only placed very small bets at that time. Her mother also
bet on horses again only small bets. Between the ages of 18 and 30, she only gambled
about every six weeks and almost exclusively at the racetrack. She said this was because
she did not have much time as she was working long hours and was earning relatively low
wages. However, she listened to the sports channel on the radio everyday to follow the
races.
By the time she was 30, she was married and had children. She and her husband had a
friend who was a professional punter and gambler, and they socialised with people in racing
circles, `it was glamorous, it was fun’. She mentioned that her husband liked to go to the
race track and liked horses as well but was not as interested in placing bets as she was. For
her gambling was integral to the experience of horse racing while her husband could
separate the two. At that stage she often went to the race tracks on Saturdays and once a
week to the TAB if she had `some good information’ from her friend who was a professional
gambler. She had regular work and was earning better wages at that time as she had more
spare time. After the professional gambler retired, she gambled less than before because
she `didn’t get as much information’.
After she had worked as a nurse for several years, she went to university to study law. She
was a student while caring for three small children but she was still able to follow horse
racing and to place bets at the TAB about once a week,
`I would pick up whoever was at the carer, come home, put him into bed, you know,
have lunch, put him down, and the radio would be on and the races would be going..
. I placed enough of the bets though so that the children thought there was the State
Bank, the West Bank and the TAB Bank! They thought it was a bank [Laughs]. Well,
because I was able to listen to it, and because I was able to keep track of it, I was
very successful’.
At that time, she was only placing small bets, for example of $2 each way, as she did not
have much money. However, she still won money regularly `extra $25, extra $30 every
week, it adds up to money in the end’.
When she started working in a legal profession, earning a very good income, she increased
the bets that she placed on horses from $200 to $500. About 15 years ago both her
husband and her father had told her `you’re gambling too much’. This made her realise that
she needed to find a system to control the amount that she spent on gambling,
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