HOBART, 1980. If I got to the casino before midday I would head for the bar to play a game of Space Invaders.

The casino proper didn’t open till one, and that hour was amply filled, crowded, with Space Invaders. (Count 22 shots, then shoot the flying saucer. After that 14 shots. Reset count at the beginning of each frame. And be careful when double-redding. This machine is a robber.).

The afternoon was spent playing blackjack. The strategy I used was called Wonging, after Stanford Wong, noted blackjack player and theoretician, who wrote a seminal book on card counting, which was available for six bucks at the casino gift shop.

That strategy consisted of only betting when the count was advantageous, standing behind the punters, rather than seated.

This maximised my win (usually about $10 an hour at this point, with huge fluctuations) but also casino staff annoyance. They had to put up with me, and later in the day my cronies, rushing around all day and night searching for a high count. (An excess of tens and aces remaining in the deck, which meant an increased chance of getting blackjacks).

This would often go on until closing time — 2am through the week, 3am on weekends — pausing only for a meal at an inexpensive restaurant, usually Zeljko’s uncle’s restaurant, the Aberfeldy, or the Oriental, Chinese cuisine.

If we’d had a good day (usually our results were highly correlated, since we would often bet on the same boxes, enhancing the casino staff’s annoyance by clumsily reaching over seated customers, and each other, to ante up our wagers), we might stop early to go to the bar or coffee shop.

Except for Zeljko. He used all his time and thus did a lot better than me.

At first the casino tolerated us because they thought we were losing. Later the attitude changed. I remember being told of a conversation between the manager and a pit boss:

Manager: Can these guys really win?

Pit boss: How big were they betting a year ago?

Manager: Ten dollars.

Pit boss: How big are they betting now?

Manager: A hundred dollars.

Pit boss: Is that an indication of a diminishing bankroll?

media_camera David walsh, right, with gambling partner Zeljko Ranogajec.

We were betting bigger not just because we were winning but also because we had pooled our money.

Zeljko, of course, had the lion’s share of the pool. All of us betting on each other’s high counts led, naturally, to short-term deals, of the type, “If you get a decent count can you bet $10 on each box [we usually bet two boxes] for me? And I’ll do the same for you.”

These short-term deals became longer term, and then shared bankrolls.

The advantages of pooling wealth are considerable. Your money is being turned over more often, always with an edge, even when you’re not there. That could be across the world.

Of course, all this requires trust. Many of the people I trusted then I still trust now, and we still pool our resources.

But now it’s about distributing the workload, since our bet size is no longer limited by our bankroll.

And I haven’t bet on blackjack for years.

Interim. Got barred from Wrest Point Casino for reasons only peripherally involved with gambling. A few years later played blackjack in Sydney and Vegas with Zeljko, and expanded my interest in gambling mathematics at the University of Nevada’s Vegas gambling library.

Went back to Hobart for a year and wrote computer programs to bet on the horses (again, had first attempted that in 1981).

Moved to Sydney to bet on the races. Eventually, after a few years, and a few false starts propped up by blackjack winnings, started to win consistently.

GOLD Coast, 1989. We discovered that one of the big NSW tracks just over the border, Tweed Heads, paid big punters a commission, around 2 per cent.

Since by then we were turning over close to $100,000 in NSW on a Saturday, the potential extra $2000 was attractive.

My brother soon negotiated a deal for a good rebate on a Queensland track, Toowoomba, that bet on Saturdays also.

It had become apparent that we could be paid to bet.

media_camera Might And Power, right, holds off Doriemus to win the 1997 Melbourne Cup.

This prompted Zeljko to ask for a tax ruling on gambling (which we expected wasn’t taxable), and rebating (which we expected was).

The ATO ruled that rebates were a “mere variation of the odds”, and thus not taxable.

This became an important component of our argument that retrospective taxation was unfair, and may have contributed to a fair settlement.

Later, I learned that people overestimate the impact fortune and misfortune will have on their lives. Those few who win a lottery often become depressed when their lives don’t change as much as they expect.

I try to factor that in now, and I don’t “sweat the bets”. In fact, I usually don’t know about them.

Last year we won many millions on the Melbourne Cup. I didn’t know until two days later. A big win on the Melbourne Cup a few years before, in 2009, made headlines when I mentioned, in a television interview, that we’d bet big deliberately, to engage fluctuation, because I was short of the cash needed to pay MONA’s monthly construction bill.

The Melbourne Cup is the only race in Australia with pools big enough that we’re not already betting as big as we can. And Zeljko’s decision to go for broke made sense.

Building delays were coming anyway — the consequences of the difference between little and no money that month were the same.

Nevertheless, since we only win, on average, on about one race in four (but we win a lot), I was one very lucky punter.

media_camera David Walsh used hi gambling winnings to fund his Museum of Old and New Art at Moorilla Winery.

SPEAKING of lotteries, we won one of them once.

Some mates who have a winning system on some peculiar poker machines approached Zeljko telling him that a NSW state lottery, which had jackpotted a few times, was a big advantage bet.

They couldn’t afford to take it themselves — too risky for their relatively small bankroll.

They wanted 10 per cent for the information. Zeljko did the deal.

In this lottery a ticket consisted of 40 numbers, of which four were chosen at random.

The winning ticket needed these same four numbers, in the same order. The number of people who entered regularly meant there was about an 11 per cent chance of us sharing the dividend, if we got the winning combination, with another winner.

We were always going to get it, because we took all the combinations. If we shared it we would lose money. But we were an 89 per cent chance not to share it.

It was a huge logistical exercise for Zeljko. Heaps of his mates filled out tickets all week, and he organised a newsagent to stay open 24 hours a day so he could get the tickets on. Fortunately, by then I’d moved back to Hobart, so I avoided all that mindless, menial labour.

While I’m on the subject of lotteries, a quick tip. Actually, two tips. Don’t buy lottery tickets. The return is less than 50 per cent of the ticket price.

The ads say, ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it.’ What they don’t say is the chance of winning it if you’re not in it is only infinitesimally smaller than if you are in it.

But if you do buy a ticket in a Powerball or a 6-from-36-style lottery, take a few numbers bigger than 31. It won’t make you win more often, but if you happen to strike it lucky you’re less likely to share your dividend with others.

media_camera Blackjack was Walsh’s game of choice at casinos.

Many people choose the birthday dates of themselves and their families as their numbers. Numbers chosen that way will be between 1 and 31.

On the night of the draw I went to a restaurant for dinner. I’m trying to track down what year it was but I remember Zeljko called, so it was in the age of mobile phones.

We held the only winner. I would have ordered a bottle of champagne to celebrate but it wasn’t the kind of restaurant that had champagne.

It was, in fact, the Oriental, and I was returning for the first time since the heady days of Wrest Point 10 years before, when I had dined there several times a week.

Our win was a bit over $1.2 million, $1.1 million after we’d paid the spotter’s fee. My share was about $400,000.

Dinner at the Oriental ran to about $10 a head. So if this dinner was in 1991, as I suspect, and they didn’t put their prices up, and I had no other income other than that one lottery, I would next have to do a runner in the year 2100.

And if it was in 1991 that we bet on the lottery it was also, and much more importantly, the year my brother died.

It still hurts when I remind myself, as I did when I wrote about it that year. But not often.

As I said, we overestimate the impact that wonderful and terrible things will have on our lives. Even things this terrible.

BY 2000, our gambling was characterised by its sheer tediousness.

Zeljko would probably not agree. He very reasonably would point out that we were always short of money.

Years later, our solicitor chastised Zeljko and me for not having taken care of our legal affairs more appropriately.

He said: “If you’d hired me 10 years ago, you’d both be ­billionaires by now.”

Zeljko ­responded, “Nah, I’d still be broke, but David would have a five-times-bigger museum.”

He had a point: I do tend to find a way to consume all available cash.

But the tedium didn’t come from wealth. It came from a lack of uncertainty. It’s great to scheme about ways of ­improving our win rate, and to plan our next place or sport to bet on, but I’d stopped caring about the bad days. And the good days.

Melbourne Cup day was, most years, the only day I bothered to find out which horse we’d bet on.

I remember watching Might and Power being almost run down on the line. His ­holding out made us a million.

I know we lost more than that on each of the Makybe Diva cups, but I didn’t watch them, except, maybe, the first one.

And by the late noughties the ‘Race that stops a nation’ didn’t stop me. I didn’t even watch it on TV, with the ­notable exception of the one we needed to win on to pay the bills. I watched that day.

Oddly, I’d always watched the Cup before I became a serious gambler.

Back in the days of 24-hour radio, I heard a song by the Barron Knights that I haven’t been able to track down (probably because it isn’t by the Barron Knights).

A father tells his son a bedtime story of a man who gives up a stable life and job to pursue his fantasy, a music career.

This guy gets ridiculously lucky and makes it big. The father asks of his son, “But with all his money, his yacht and bikini babes, is he really happy?” “I don’t know,” the young boy replies in a squeaky voice, ‘Is he really happy?’

It may be that we overestimate the enduring effect of the good things that happen to us. But fortune has been relentless in my life.

So if you ask those who know me well the same question, they’d give the same answer: “Course he’s f...ing happy!”

Edited extract from A Bone Of Fact, by David Walsh. ­Published by Pan Macmillan. RRP $55.