Casino Confidential

Many of our city-working brethren have had their wrists firmly slapped of late for taking big risks, but forgive them, for they know not what they do. They’re simply behaving as man has behaved since the dawn of time; our love affair with games of chance predates recorded history. To play fast and loose with the bard: all the world’s a casino, and all the men and women merely players.

Have you ever wondered why dice have pips instead of numbers? It’s because the modern form of the die was fixed around 1300 BC. In other words, dice are older than numbers – by about 2000 years. The thrill of the bet has been, to put it mildly, something of a lifelong hobby for the Homo sapiens.

Gambling may be a one-way ticket to the hot coals if you happen to be a stockbroker, but for ancient religious types it was positively encouraged. In India, around 1500 BC, betting was a sacred pastime: anyone not having a flutter on Diwali, the festival of lights, was thought to be risking reincarnation as a donkey. Ritualised gambling was even used as the cure of possession by a dog demon, a complaint contemporary doctors would diagnose as epilepsy.

So, epileptic Hindus were fond of a wager, but what of us Brits?

Well our ingenuity knows no bounds when it comes to betting: In 1907, English rake and adventurer Harry Bensley accepted a most unusual wager. Harry, whilst wearing a two-kilogramme iron mask, was to circumnavigate the globe on foot without being recognised; push a perambulator across all 18 countries; begin his journey with just one pound and a change of underwear; and was to find a woman to marry him without ever seeing his face. He didn’t make it.

The fad for novelty bets enjoyed a resurgence in the 1960s, after a Mr David Threfall predicted at astronomical odds of 1000/1 that a man would walk on the moon by January 1, 1970. David was over the moon with his £10,000 pay out, until irony chucked a cruel spanner in the works: he was killed crashing the sports car he’d bought with the winnings. Bookies now take a bet a month that David shouldn’t have been paid at all, giving odds at 500/1 that the moon landings were a cold war hoax.

Where are we placing our bets these days? You’d be forgiven for thinking that Las Vegas spots are the most lucrative gambling destinations in the world, but that award goes to the Japanese game Pachinko, a cross between slot machines and pinball. Whilst American casinos take around $50 billion per year, Pachinko parlours rake in $300 billion from an estimated 20 million regular players.

You’ve missed the boat on the moon landings, a good cricket-tickling circle is hard to find these days, and the nearest Pachinko parlour’s a fifteen hour flight away, so where’s the best place to find the thrill of live gaming right now?

Our hot tip is SuperCasino.com, where professionally trained croupiers use casino-certified equipment live on television, taking bets on the phone and online. It’s as close as you can get to a real casino experience at home, and a foolproof recipe for dry-mouthed, heart-thumping excitement.

If your eye’s in on the roulette table or you make the right call at blackjack, you’ll become not only instantly richer, but instantly more famous – the croupiers congratulate winners by name, live on television. Quite a buzz, especially if you’ve got a few friends round to gloat at, and infinitely better than the tedious computer-generated games of other, lesser online casinos.

Journeys to work can be a terrible a pain in the cheeks, but fear not: help is at hand. SuperCasino.com are launching their mobile phone app this summer, which means all the world really will be a casino: winning a bundle on the roulette wheel certainly livens up the daily commute. Just bear in mind that loud whooping is frowned upon in the ‘quiet zone’.

Being far from financially inept, you are no doubt wondering what you stand to win. SuperCasino.com pays out over £50 million per month, and on particularly bad days for the house, players have been known to collectively win over £1 million in a single day. That’s £40,000 per hour, or about 7,000 times the minimum wage for the shelf-stacking masses.

We’re all genetically programmed to love a flutter, but now’s not exactly the best time to take giant risks at work, so it’s probably best to make your big calls with SuperCasino.com’s feverishly exciting live games. The value of your investment may go down as well as up – and that’s the thrill of it.