It was difficult to sympathise with bookmakers as they wailed over last month’s announcement that the maximum stake per spin on fixed-odds betting terminals will be cut from £100 to £2. “Won’t somebody think of the betting shop staff?” they pleaded rather disingenuously, considering a Campaign for Fairer Gambling study conducted three years ago which claimed that for every 5,000 jobs that might be created by their FOBTs, a further 25,000 are lost elsewhere.

It seemed more reasonable to conclude that what was actually upsetting the bookies was the realisation that their days of gouging the vulnerable for the equivalent of more than £5m a day, every day of the year, on these risk-free (for the bookies), highly addictive casino-style gaming machines might soon come to an end.

UK gamblers lose record £13.8bn as industry braces for FOBT crackdown Read more

The Guardian’s racing correspondent, Greg Wood, pointed out that as well as the welcome social consequences of the decision, it could also compel bookies to accept “decent bets from customers they have previously banned or restricted to pennies”. Customers who win, in other words. Customers who display what is known in bookmaking circles as “limited profitability”. The kind of customers bookmakers emphatically do not want.

Considering that British gamblers made record losses of £13.8bn in the year to the end of September 2016, it seems these shrewdies to whom Wood alluded are in the minority and bookmakers remain only too happy to accept the custom of those who enjoy a fairly regular flutter on sports like football or horse racing in which they actually have a chance, however slim, of winning.

Tony O’Reilly, an Irishman from County Carlow, used to be one such punter and in February 2003, under the username Tony 10, he opened an online account with Paddy Power and placed a bet of €1 after being given a voucher as a gift. When this account was closed just over eight years later he had staked a total of €10,413,619.66, recording net losses of €1,400,584.63. A man who worked as a manager in a provincial post office and whose gambling addiction got so out of hand it prompted him to start betting with other people’s money, these losses would eventually land him in prison.

O’Reilly’s story is well known in Ireland and made headlines at the time of his capture by police while on the run in Northern Ireland (almost comically, he was tracked down after visiting a betting shop) and subsequent imprisonment in 2012 for the theft of €1.75m from his employer. The story has since been published, in a fascinating and often incredible book the compulsive gambler wrote with the help of the journalist Declan Lynch, whose sympathetic coverage of O’Reilly’s troubles from the time he first made the news led to the pair becoming collaborators and friends.

Sign up to The Recap, our weekly email of editors’ picks.

Tony 10: The Astonishing Story Of The Postman Who Gambled €10,000,000 ... And Lost It All, tells the story of an apparently likable, otherwise completely normal man of extremely modest means who had never set foot in a betting shop before the age of 24, but who ended up being sentenced to four years in prison, with one of them suspended, before his 40th birthday.

That escalated quickly, as they say. But how? How did a man whose first ever bet was an old Irish pound on Patrick Kluivert to score the first goal in a World Cup quarter-final between the Netherlands and Argentina in 1998 find himself in a hellish frenzy that led him, on one occasion, to bet €40,000 on the Norwegian women’s football team? And another to include a basketball team from the Philippines called Rain Or Shine Elasto Painters in an accumulator bet that cost more than he earned in a year?

While O’Reilly took full responsibility for these poor decisions that would ultimately cost him his marriage, make him contemplate suicide and ultimately land him in jail, the book that chronicles his downfall in such excruciating detail makes it abundantly clear those who enabled his gambling ought to shoulder at least part of the blame.

“When the fun stops, stop,” the bookies warn us in the advertising that has come to saturate sports coverage in all its forms in the UK. However, long after the fun had stopped for O’Reilly and his life was in a catastrophic tailspin, Paddy Power, despite its responsible gambling policies, was entertaining him as a special guest at the Irish Derby and the Europa League final. On one occasion, when its website crashed, its spokesman even got in touch to give O’Reilly his personal mobile number in case he felt the need to get any bets on before the IT department had got it back up and running. At no time, it seems, did anyone at Paddy Power towers pause to wonder how exactly this humble postmaster from Carlow in its hospitality box was managing to rack up such extraordinary numbers on its website.

It seems strange that amid all the hoopla over fixed odds betting terminals in Britain, the equally pernicious perils of online gambling have gone largely and surprisingly ignored. O’Reilly has done his time, been through rehab and now works as an addiction counsellor and with EPIC Risk Management helping some of the many thousands like him.

He will be kept very busy – perhaps the ultimate cautionary tale when it comes to problem punting is that there have been calls for this powerful book to go on Irish school syllabuses. Tony 10 may have closed his online account and given up gambling, but the profits of those who took so much of his and other people’s money continue to soar.

Tony 10: The astonishing story of the postman who gambled €10,000,000 and lost it all by Declan Lynch & Tony O’Reilly (Gill Books, £14.99). To order a copy for £12.74, go to guardianbookshop.com

