The problem with gamblers is not that they lose. Everyone who has ever placed a bet loses. It is not really spoken of, and there are many out there who consider themselves successful gamblers, but everyone, in the end, is a loser. Just not always disastrously so. Winning big every so often doesn’t make you a good gambler. Go and check the profit and loss data for each of your accounts (the average number for an online gambler is three) and you’ll see it there, in black and white. Sorry. Red. If you win consistently and believe me, you don’t, the bookies will reduce your limits. If you do it enough (you won’t), they will ban your account entirely. They won’t offer an explanation, as they don’t need one, as they can do whatever they like, but it is this: you are the rarest kind of gambler, you actually take money from us, therefore you aren’t allowed to play. If you can even call it playing.

I spent half a year working for one of the most profitable gambling syndicates in the UK, placing bets upwards of £10,000 (often as much as £50,000) with eye-watering regularity. As in, every few minutes. Obviously, this didn’t help anything. I know what it takes to ‘beat the bookies’ and it takes: an algorithm you will never understand loaded with more data than you could ever imagine. It takes: state of the art computer software and a full-time IT team in Israel to run it. It takes: monitoring the markets for games weeks in advance, and then for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the match itself. Oh, and then monitoring it in-play. And this isn’t just games that take your fancy, or in the Premier League. I’m talking about every match you can physically bet on. Today, that basically equates to every match that’s played. Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. It takes: a proclivity for energy drinks you still can’t shake. Actually, no. It takes: never sleeping properly again.

Beyond that you’ll need local experts in these far-flung places, scouting the minor leagues for any edge they can find. That means a guy in Estonia sending you details of a lineup anomaly even before the bookmakers have that information themselves. Even before the opposition manager does. It takes: finding one bet amongst several hundred that your algorithm believes is value by a couple of decimal points and then obliterating the market for all it is worth. Then doing that over and over and over again each time you find an opportunity. Take humans out of it, with their emotions, ‘gut instinct’, favouring of big teams, any actual football knowledge they think they have, fatigue, fluctuating concentration levels, capacity for error, greed, everything like that, and hand the reins over to a computer, and you might be able to creep up to a 51–52% winning rate on your bets. 55% is practically unheard of. To make money from gambling it takes: all of the above and more capital than you will ever have. But you, like me, knew it was fixed already. You knew that all along.