A gambling story we like to hear

All too often when the news of an average punter’s gambling exploits hits the headlines it’s for the wrong reasons.

“Promising Young Athlete Commits Suicide over Gambling Debts”; “Bank Teller Steals Millions to Fund Gambling Habit”; “Children Found Locked in Car while Parents Gamble”; “Sports Star Files for Bankruptcy: Admits Addiction to Gambling, Cocaine and Sex”.

There is an ugly and tragic side to gambling that even Lance Armstrong wouldn’t try to deny. There’s also the occasional (but not so newsworthy) happy tale and set out below is one that I have had the pleasure of being quite closely connected with.

My good mate Cam

I’ve known Cam since we first met in the 7th grade, almost 30 years ago. A more likable bloke you would really struggle to find.

While most of his mates, myself included, took the well trodden post-school route of going to university then slogging away at very uninspiring but rather dependable careers in accounting, finance or law, Cam decided to take an alternate path.

His first career choice was to be a golf pro. Not as pie-in-the-sky as you’d think as he was playing off single figures as a kid and had this handicap down to scratch for some time while chasing the dream.  Golf”s a super competitive sport though and unfortunately for Cam the right results didn’t come at the right times, including one forgettable day at the Victorian Open qualifier that began with his caddie arriving at the course 5 minutes after scheduled tee-off time (sorry again mate!).

His second (and current) career choice is to be a movie star….perhaps the only profession more competitive and harder to reach the top in than golf.

Needless to say the past decade or so has involved a few TV bit-parts here and there, some commercials and plenty of low/no pay stage productions put on by fellow industry aspirants. He missed out on a role in the Twilight saga, was overlooked for the Harry Potter series of films and didn’t crack a part in the Lord of the Rings trilogy…not even as one of their 300,000 extras. His acting jobs to date haven’t catapulted him onto any of the Hollywood rich lists, and it’s probably fair to say that two decades chasing the golf dream and then the acting dream with no real ‘9 to 5’ job in between haven’t been kind to the bank balance.

Cam loves the horses

He always has. The sort of bloke who would happily go to the track just to see them run even without having a bet on the outcome. Not that he doesn’t like a bet mind you and he has taken on his fair share of bookies over the years, which isn’t necessarily a tussle you want to get into long term while at the same time missing out on those parts in the Twilight saga etc.

Back in March, I met him for one of our semi-regular coffee and chat sessions and got the sense that he was eager to tell me some news. He was, and the news was that he’d just won a quadrella.

For those unfamiliar with quadrella’s or quaddies, they are a horse race bet where you pick the winner of each of 4 races (usually the last four on the race card). The payout depends on the odds of each of the 4 winning horses and all other things being equal (bet pool, number of winners etc) the longer those odds the bigger the payout. In this particular case one of the legs was won by a horse paying 250:1. Another leg was also won by a roughie.

The resulting payout for a single $1 unit – $177,198. Cam’s collect (had 50 cents on it) a not too shabby $88,599!

happy days – phone bet account after win credited

The story doesn’t end there.

The above collect turned out to be the first of many quadrella wins. None as big as the above …but not insignificant either with at least one other 5-figure collect I’m aware of.

It seems bookies don’t like giving away money with monotonous regularity, and so it is with sportsbet.com.au, who today informed Cam that he is banned from taking out Quaddies using their service!

When he told me this I asked how many he’d won since the big one. His response:

“25…I got back to back $4,500 Saturday and Monday which must have been the last straw”

Whole thing brings a smile to my face quite frankly.

 

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