Gambling
EVERYONE'S A WINNER?
Bright lights. Fun. Friendship. Clever marketing has made everything from bingo to slots feel more like a game than a gamble. But we are in the midst of a crisis. Jordan Page meets the young women who lost everything
Stacey slips her credit cards out of her purse and places them under a pillow. Her phone, now on airplane mode, joins them. She won’t touch them until morning. The pillow these prohibited items are hiding under is her girlfriend’s. They ’re about to go to bed, and Stacey needs a physical barrier to stop her from reaching them in the night.She carefully follows this strict routine at the end of every month. Why? Because tomorrow is payday, and payday for the 29-year-old looks and feels worlds apart from that of most women her age. She’s addicted to gambling. The influx of money makes her anxious and transports her back to the ‘eight years of hell’ when gambling ruled her every move.
I’m not alone as I learn about this rigorous routine, though. Adopting the inside of her fridge as a makeshift ring light, Stacey also shares it with her 83,000 TikTok followers, who know her as The Girl Gambler. She’s using her platform to highlight a growing problem that few outside of her following even recognise: the UK’s female gambling crisis. Research by GambleAware has revealed that up to one million women in the UK could be at risk of gambling harm – but unless you’re one of those suffering, it’s likely you haven’t noticed it unfold. That’s because it’s rarely found in busy betting shops, but on mobile phones, hidden from view until it’s too late. So what do these addictions really look like, and why are so many women suffering? More importantly, is there anything that can be done to stop it?
Clutching her phone underneath her desk, Sophie scans the office before tapping a twinkling green button, reading ‘SPIN’. Yesterday, her manager warned that she spent too much time on her phone. A few weeks back, a business-wide email alerted that an employee was gambling on the company wifi when they shouldn’t be. But for Sophie, none of that matters. As she deposits her fourth £50 of the day on to the online slot machine, her heart races. She needs the cartoon leprechaun to tell her she’s won.
She’d first started gambling at 18 years old, when her ex-boyfriend gave her an introductory code for an online slot machine. ‘I feel awful blaming him, but that’s how it started,’ Sophie, now 29, admits. One of the most popular forms of online gambling, slots have the highest average losses per player of all digital gambling methods, according to research, while being one of the easiest to play. From the moment she entered that code, Sophie’s life was consumed. ‘It was easy to deposit £100, then another, then another,’ she says. ‘I thought the higher I bet, the more I could win.’
Over the next few years, So
