Patrick Foster

Gambling wasn't part of my life really at all until I was 19 when I went to university and got introduced to it by a group of mates who basically one Saturday morning going down to the bookies as they called it to put some bets on the football.

I'd never been into one of these shops before really.

I walked in.

sort of didn't know what I was doing, stood there clueless.

I spent most of the time I was in there watching this guy play roulette on one of the fob team machines.

I watched him feed a wodge of 20 pound notes into this machine for about 15 minutes.

He eventually sort of punched it, kicked it, stormed out the shop and I'd laughed at him and thought, what on earth is wrong with that bloke?

Little did I know.

I sat down in front of the chair, had two quid in my pocket, left over from the night before.

So being an arrogant, slightly naive person,

19-year-old boy that I was at the time, my first thought was two quid.

Who cares about two quid?

My second thought was there's only one number on a roulette machine that's different.

It was actually the last number to come up that the bloke had lost all his money on.

And I thought, what the chance of it happening twice in a row?

Put two pounds in the machine.

Twelve seconds later, two pounds became 72 pounds.

And as I always say, my life changed forever because not a moment went by for the next 13 years where I didn't have a bet.

Yeah, definitely.

And I think the fact that my first bet, and hindsight's a wonderful thing, but I think the fact that my first bet was a winning bet had a massive impact on me as well because as somebody who's ultimately fiercely competitive, gambling's like a drug for competitive people because it's all about winning and losing.