Sam Badcock was 23 when he lost \u00a3100 \u2013 a birthday gift from his brother \u2013 on a gambling machine.<\/p>\n
\u201cI sprinted back to my room, grabbed the rest of the money and sprinted back to that machine as fast as I could,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Back then, Sam was playing \u00a3100-a-spin fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs)<\/a>, which offered digital roulette.<\/p>\n Described as the \u201ccrack cocaine of gambling\u201d, uproar about their addictive nature led to FOBTs being effectively banned in 2019. Sam migrated to the immersive graphics and catchy sound effects of \u00a32-a-spin slot machines.<\/p>\n Arcades featuring these machines have flourished on Britain\u2019s high streets, replacing their higher-stake FOBT cousins. There are now almost 30,000 such slot machines in Britain, packed into bingo venues and \u201cadult gaming centres\u201d (AGCs). The stakes may be lower but the opportunity to rack up huge losses remains: slot machines allow a spin every 1.5 seconds, meaning players can feed in hundreds of pounds an hour.<\/p>\n The Guardian has documented how this explosion in slot machines has been fuelled by favourable planning and licensing laws, allowing AGCs to open disproportionately in the poorest areas, whether local people want them there or not.<\/p>\n On Thursday, in response to mounting concern, the government announced plans to give local authorities more power to stop \u201cunwanted\u201d gambling premises opening.<\/p>\n But, as addicts, shop workers and customers tell the Guardian, Pandora\u2019s box is already open.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything is gone [when playing] and you\u2019re in your own little zone, your own world,\u201d says council worker James*, who lives in Bath.<\/p>\n During one recent session, broken only by a mad dash to pick up his child late from school, James lost almost \u00a33,000 on games such as Doug\u2019s Nuggets or 777 Burn \u2019Em Up.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m in a massive mess. I\u2019ve got bills this month and I can\u2019t pay it, I don\u2019t know what to do. These machines \u2026 I just can\u2019t escape them.\u201d<\/p>\n Feeding on desperation and addiction<\/p>\n Louise is no anti-gambling prohibitionist: she has worked in casinos for decades and plays slot machines regularly.<\/p>\n But she feels increasingly queasy about the scenes of human misery unfolding in her local slot machine shop.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s this guy \u2026 he begs outside for 2ps and 5ps, then goes in and changes them for 20p so that he can have a single spin,\u201d says the 45-year-old.<\/p>\n \u201cAnother time, a guy was spitting at the machine because he\u2019d lost so much.<\/p>\n \u201cI made eye contact with one of the girls [staff]. She just shrugged and wiped off the spit.\u201d<\/p>\n She is one of several gambling workers who spoke out about a corner of their industry that is growing fat on desperation and addiction.<\/p>\n Combined revenues at the two largest companies, Admiral and Merkur, increased by 12% to \u00a3479m in the last year for which accounts are available. Figures from the Gambling<\/a> Commission suggest takings across the sector have hit record levels and are likely to keep growing.<\/p>\n The number of B3 slot machines, which offer a maximum jackpot of \u00a3500, rose by 15% to 27,600 in the two years to March 2024. Punters\u2019 losses increased much more steeply in that time, by 67%, to \u00a3751m.<\/p>\n The majority of slot shops are open 24 hours and they now number 1,451 across the UK. The number rises to 2,398 when including bingo-licensed venues, many of which are so heavily weighted towards slot machines that they are AGCs in all but name.<\/p>\n Admiral is one of the UK\u2019s biggest operators of adult gaming centres. Photograph: allanbellimages\/Alamy<\/p>\n In early May, Baroness Twycross, the government minister responsible for gambling policy, visited the London borough of Brent to hear concerns raised by councillors and the local MP, Dawn Butler, about the number of AGCs popping up on the high street.<\/p>\n During her fact-finding mission to Brent, Twycross did not set foot in any of them, according to people familiar with the visit.<\/p>\n But the workers who keep AGCs running through the night give a flavour of what she might have seen.<\/p>\n When the fun stops<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a lady who would feed in about \u00a3200, in probably less than an hour, and then she\u2019d just cry,\u201d says Josh, who worked at a small chain of AGCs in Portsmouth.<\/p>\n \u201cThen she\u2019d smoke a joint, go to the cashpoint, come back and repeat the whole thing. I asked her not to come back.\u201d<\/p>\n Josh was doing what AGC employees are supposed to do: looking out for customers\u2019 safety.<\/p>\n When players become visibly agitated, licensing rules state that companies should initiate \u201csafer gambling\u201d interventions.<\/p>\n In theory at least, the most effective of these is self-exclusion, where a gambler volunteers to ban themselves from playing.<\/p>\n The number of self-exclusions from AGCs has soared in recent years, rising more than fourfold in two years to almost 14,000 in 2024-25. That, according to the AGC trade body Bacta, indicates that the schemes are working better than ever.<\/p>\n But earlier this year, a BBC investigation raised questions over the effectiveness of such schemes<\/a>. Gamblers and staff who spoke to the Guardian have expressed similar concerns.<\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure where the [self-exclusion] forms were,\u201d says Jess, who worked at a branch of a small AGC chain called Shipley\u2019s in Corby in 2023.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were mentioned in passing once on my first shift. Training was mostly just leaflets.<\/p>\n Jess says she was told to scroll through headshots of excluded customers on an iPad and commit them to memory.<\/p>\n Merkur Slots in Warrington, Cheshire. The company has more than 200 adult gaming centres around the UK. Photograph: Mark Waugh\/Alamy<\/p>\n Bacta said: \u201cOur members operate within one of the most tightly regulated licensing regimes in the world. Venues are regularly inspected, must comply with strict conditions, and can have licences refused or revoked where licensing objectives are at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n Badcock says AGCs\u2019 actions do not live up to Bacta\u2019s promises.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Business Today<\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been into this one place about six times over the years and asked them for a ban. They always say you have to wait for the manager to come in but he\u2019s never there.\u201d<\/p>\n Sam, who is now in gambling addiction recovery, wants AGCs to be forced to issue all players with a membership card, without which they could not play.<\/p>\n That way, he says, losses could be more precisely logged in the way that they can be online, with unsustainably rapid losses flagged up as they happen. More importantly, self-exclusion could be properly enforced.<\/p>\n In the meantime, when protective measures fail, he fears customers with a gambling problem could end up down the path he took when he first started gambling about 15 years ago.<\/p>\n \u201cI started shoplifting DVDs and pawning them. I got caught within the first month, went to court and got a 12-month suspended sentence and a \u00a3500 fine.\u201d<\/p>\n The consequences of his spins only ever hit him once he\u2019d stopped.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t become money until you step outside. You feel physically sick, super low. You contemplate darker thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n The lady from the Rotary club<\/p>\n Mike, a repair engineer who worked for several AGC companies, has travelled the country fixing machines damaged by angry punters or people trying to steal from them.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I started it was a family business but later, it was remorseless. They started going 24 hours, catering to addicts.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a woman, an OAP who was the chair of the local Rotary club.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was on the high-stakes machines from the minute they opened until the evening. She\u2019d bring in cakes for the girls and everybody loved her.<\/p>\n \u201cOne day she came in and said she\u2019d done all the Rotary club money and her husband\u2019s severance. Just bawling her eyes out. Nobody said \u2018Do you think you\u2019ve got a problem?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The human stories started to get to him, even after years in the job.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the misery, the absolute misery,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Last year, Merkur was named by the government among 50 companies that had failed to pay the minimum wage. Photograph: William Barton\/Alamy<\/p>\n AGCs do everything they can to keep customer from walking out. Big chains such as Merkur and Admiral offer incentives ranging from free food and drink to \u201cfree\u201d spins. One chain, Little Vegas, runs a half-hourly raffle to win 10 spins.<\/p>\n But pay in the sector is often low, raising questions over whether staff are sufficiently well incentivised to intervene with difficult or potentially dangerous customers.<\/p>\n Last year, the German-owned Merkur was named by the government among 500 companies that had failed to pay the minimum wage. It was forced to repay \u00a366,811.73 to 2,008 workers. The company said the matter related to the \u201cunintentional\u201d impact of a policy on the provision of company uniforms, which it had since amended.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d be working 10-12 hour shifts and if you were lucky they\u2019d let you have a 10-minute fag break,\u201d says Jess of her time at Shipley\u2019s.<\/p>\n Managers would monitor staff on security cameras, she says.<\/p>\n \u201cThe policy is that you\u2019re not allowed to sit down. If you so much as lean against a machine, they\u2019d ring you up.\u201d<\/p>\n Interactions with punters can be terrifying or dehumanising, particularly when customer \u201cplay to extinction\u201d, an industry term for losing all of their money.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a guy who won \u00a31,500 and put it all straight back in,\u201d Jess says.<\/p>\n \u201cHe started smashing up the machine. It was me and another woman and we didn\u2019t feel like we could do anything about this big burly guy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe machine had been replaced the next time I went in.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier this year, an employment tribunal judge heard a case of unfair dismissal brought by a former employee of the Game Nation chain, owned by an investment fund managed by Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley.<\/p>\n According to a witness statement submitted during the case, a customer who disliked the staff member once paid a homeless man to defecate on the floor of the shop toilet, so that she was forced to clear it up.<\/p>\n Game Nation was ordered to pay the staff member \u00a36,598.44, albeit for a technicality related to its dismissal procedure rather than the incident. Based on its \u00a332m revenues last year, the company made the money back in less than two hours.<\/p>\n Bacta\u2019s members said its members\u2019 venues were \u201csafe, welcoming, and alcohol-free entertainment venues where people can enjoy low-stake gaming in a controlled environment\u201d.<\/p>\n The Guardian approached Game Nation and Shipley\u2019s for comment.<\/p>\n *Some names have been changed at the request of interviewees<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Badcock was 23 when he lost \u00a3100 \u2013 a birthday gift from his brother \u2013 on a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-169937","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}