New way to lose your shirt: Betting on basketball

Like most people who have worked in the casino business – I had a short but lucrative career in the bingo business before my first journalism job – I have mixed feelings about gambling.

For most people, it may be a bit of harmless fun. The proportion of partakers who get hooked is quite small. But for them, the addiction is a life-wrecker.

Serious gambling also seems a terrible waste of money. The house wins in the long run. That means in the long run, you don’t.

I am suspicious of stories of “professional gamblers” who show a profit. But if they exist, this trick clearly depends on a lot of hard work and research. You might as well get a real job and do something useful with your life.

These thoughts surfaced when I read that the government plans to launch a whole new betting option. People will be allowed to gamble on basketball. A licence will be issued by the Secretary for Home and Youth Affairs.

Will the lucky recipient of this licence to print money be carefully selected? Of course not. It is going to the Jockey Club.

Our government’s affection for market forces and competition does not, it appears, extend to the gambling industry. The Jockey Club has a great deal of expertise in the highly technical and complex business of running horse casinos.

It also has a lot of influence where it counts. So whenever another gambling option comes along, the Jockey Club gets another opportunity to fleece the unwary punter.

We have been through this before. When the idea of legal football betting came up, the government said, as it says now, that of course it does not approve of betting at all. But a legal outlet for the public’s weakness must be supplied, since otherwise, unapproved and illegal betting will flourish.

The same arguments are offered for basketball betting, and this leads to the suspicion that something may be going on here that we are not being told about.

Why do people use illegal bookmakers when the legality and convenience of a Jockey Club account are on offer? Could it be because they suspect that the illegal bookies will be … more generous?

There will be “net stake receipts” from legal basketball betting, according to the official notice. I take this to mean that the cash paid out to lucky winners will be somewhat less than the receipts from luckless losers.

The “net stake receipts” will be shared on a 50:50 basis with the government. They will, clearly, be considerable.

Football betting was licensed in 2004, but this did not in fact result in the disappearance of the illegal version. Meanwhile, the illegal bookies went on to basketball.

I wonder if in 20 years we shall be reading that there has been an upsurge in illegal betting on something else – Indian cricket, Rumanian pickleball, the number of times a senior official can get “national security” into one speech – and the only solution to this problem is for a legal version to be offered by … the Jockey Club, naturally.

The club is rightly famous for its charitable activities, but there is surely something a bit odd about a private members’ club for rich people being given a succession of lucrative monopolies. Also a bit odd is the club’s progression from running betting on its own races to running betting on other sports taking place in other countries.

Will there come a time when the Jockey Club is offering a book on everything from athletics to yodelling competitions (I do not think there is a sport beginning with z) in every country you can think of?

And at that point, will someone say that running horse races consumes a lot of attention, space and water, most of which is wasted, and is a distraction from the club’s real business, which is running a lucrative gambling operation.

I am reminded of the story of the Eastern potentate who built a magnificent mausoleum around his wife’s tomb, but eventually decided the building would look better if the tomb were removed.