Don't play roulette (nap)

I just went into Pinner to run a couple of errands and felt a strange complusion as I passed the Coral shop to go in and try my luck. So I put a pound in the roulette machine and put it on red. Black came up. Another pound in, on red. Black came up. I left. Note to self: don't play roulette.

This reminded me of the golden days in 2004 when online gaming was still a relatively new phenomenon. Lots of the major online casinos gave sign-up bonuses and monthly bonuses. The sign-up bonuses were usually for £50, sometimes more. The money would be transferred into your account once you had staked ten times the amount of the bonus. Example: I deposit £50, therefore I have to make £500 worth of bets before the £50 bonus was put into my account. Now this might sound like a lot, but it wasn't. Most people would just spunk the money all at once, but you could just sit there and play 500 games of blackjack and stake £1 on each hand. That's your £500 of bets done, and it would take about an hour. I was pretty lucky I seem to remember and usually finished a bit up on top of the £50 bonus itself. You'd have to be desperately unlucky to lose all £50 if you were only staking £1 per hand, and I don't think I ever even came close.

The same would then happen every month where the casinos would do a 'monthly reload' bonus, which were usually around £25 per casino per month. Easy money. The reload bonuses earnt me about £250 a month, and the one-off signup bonuses probably netted me about £500 that year. This was all when I was 18 and still at school, so it was a lot of money to me back then (it would still be a lot of money now). I've said it before, 2004 has been the best year of my life so far and will probably stay that way. Obviously the casinos wisened up to the fact that people were doing this, and these bonuses are few and far between today.

Earlier on I felt like finally having a day off the booze after a heavy weekend in Bournemouth and another couple of sessions since I got back, but sod it I'll be down the tennis club later with Daz to watch the matches. Back at work tomorrow.

Btw I'm going to start using Twitter a bit more so watch out.

Thanks for reading.