[hpsourcey]

I am 21 years old and for the last four years I have been gambling on the machines and online, my main focus of play has been roulette. I started out playing online as I was not old enough to go into the bookies as my fresh face caused me to get ID’d regularly. In the early days i only used to put in £10-20 max and never more. In the first week or two of playing I once managed to turn £10 into £980 roughly, and being young and naive did not withdraw and ended up blowing the lot. This is where my problem started, seeing that it was possible to transform a small ten pound sum into nearly a grand gave me that first buzz. And since then ive been chasing similar prizes, except I have started pumping in a lot more than £10. I regularly go into the bookies and lose hundreds, just yesterday I lost £300 and maxed out my overdraft to its £500 limit.
I did have a £2000 overdraft limit at one point which i regularly maxed out due to roulette, but I have managed to slowly get that down to £500 but the last month or so I can see myself spiralling out of control again and want to get back on top of it and hopefully rid myself of this addiction once and for all. I get paid weekly which doesn’t help as I developed the attitude of "oh well get paid next week" towards my losses. I earn £500 a week so i can clear myself out my overdraft at the end of the week and get rid of it completely, and then I can start to battle the demons of playing roulette.
I often find myself lieing to people about my addiction, claiming not to have lost, lieing about how much ive put in etc. I have blocked myself from all the major online sites a while ago so I can no longer play online as I often found myself playing at work during the day. I am at the point now where I go into the bookies feeling sick knowing that I am about to play it, but I just cant help myself. I plan on self-excluding myself from the three local bookies tommorow, but not sure what that actually achieves?
I have been reading through peoples posts on here, and its scary to see how badly things can spiral out of control, thankfully I am not in thousands of pounds of debt, don’t owe money to anybody etc. but it is easy to see that I could head down that path if I don’t get on top of things now.
I am grateful for any advice or pointers anybody has with how to conquer this addiction.
Thanks
Luke

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