Independent on Sunday, The: LONDON LIVES: A game for suckers

S o they - the Government - are going ahead with deregulating casinos. In a couple of years' time venues will be present on every high street - roulette wheels, blackjack tables et al. That is the plan, one presumes. So when you come out of the supermarket you can leave your bags at reception and drop a quick 20 quid on 13 black. Then go back and make the kids their tea.

What is their - the Government's - motivation? Tax, one again presumes. Possibly to offset the loss on people giving up smoking, but that's another issue. OK, but what underpins this motivation? Naivety, as usual.

I was thinking this while waiting for a central London casino to open recently. I am experienced in casinos. A few years ago I gambled away about pounds 20,000 in them, in two quick hits. It was not my money: first, it was a publisher's, and then it was a TV company's. I didn't ask them for it; they just gave it to me. They thought I was a likely type, and could serve their purposes. The fact is they didn't have a clue, but I wasn't going to say no. Would you? On their part it was naivety again.

I would never - in theory - gamble in casinos with my own money. The games - blackjack and roulette, almost exclusively - are loaded against you, particularly roulette, which is a sucker's table, if elegantly laid out, as it has been for some 300 years. Blackjack is more slow death, where mathematically it is possible to claw merely slim losses; but losses they will be, if you go in often enough.

The casino opened at 2pm, though apparently this is about to change. It was a small, high-end joint in Belgravia, up the road from where I work as a barman in a gentleman's club. I was just checking it out, with a view to gambling there that evening. I'd been there once before, a few years ago, with the wad provided by the publishers, and dropped pounds 1,000 in just over an hour. That was nothing. The bloke sitting next to me at the blackjack table, I remembered, said he'd done twenty grand since lunchtime. And I knew he was telling the truth.

From memory, there were only about half a dozen blackjack and roulette tables, and the clientele had consisted of the usual smattering of Arabs and hookers, plus the obligatory couple of nutters. Also, one female croupier had looked remarkably like Elkie Brooks.

Now the maitre d' greeted me, confirmed I was indeed still a member, and said it would be perfectly acceptable for me to bring two guests that evening. Thanks to my unrequested gambling odysseys, I seem to have become a member of virtually every casino in central London. It is rare, when going through notebooks and other belongings, for some gaudy membership card or other not to pop out. He was a good pro, the maitre d' - a very good actor. So much so that for a second I almost believed he was that pleased to see me.

They did that well here. I remembered being comped with a pounds 5 Bloody Mary when I'd dropped the grand. "For you, sir, on the house." Thank you very much. That only leaves you with a pounds 995 profit.

This time the maitre d' offered to show me around. "You will not believe how it has changed, sir." I accepted. What people who've never done service jobs don't understand is the paramount importance of clock-watching. I knew he'd calculated that by the time he'd given me a guided tour, seven or eight easy minutes would have been lopped off his shift, and I was glad to help him out with it.

The place was exactly the same: same type of Arabs, same type of hookers, same type of nutters. The only difference was that the services of Miss Brooks seemed to have been dispensed with.

Later I came back, with Laura, my other half, and Marek. Laura is an informed and correct horse-player, if inexperienced in casinos, while Marek adopts the persona of an enthusiastic novice in casinos, though he is far cleverer than that. We were each going to gamble pounds 20, in the interests of research.

Before doing so, I ordered three white wines off the maitre d', going through the charade of assiduously asking for the bill. They always comp you the first one. To my amazement he presented me with a genuine bill for pounds 18. I suppose we had been talking too loudly about the lunacy of casino gambling. Fair enough.

We addressed the roulette table. The croupier was a fast male pro and it only took about four minutes for Marek and me to lose ours. Laura won. I urged her to cash it in, which she did, reluctantly. I was touched both by her happiness and her innocence of the novelty of getting out of one of these joints in profit.

Purely for research, of course, I visited another establishment off Oxford Street the very next night. A rookie croupier meant it took 10 minutes to lose my stake and the wine cost pounds 12. I wondered if that would have been the case were it not for this impending deregulation. It seemed to me that in advance of it casino gaming is in limbo, knowing that pay- dirt is round the corner, just waiting, letting the old world dwindle away - a world that no one gives a fig about anyway. The casinos are in the traps, but the hare hasn't passed yet.

But the pattern of deregulation of gambling in other countries is established: an initial bloodbath of mug punters, wildly optimistic forecasts by tax- raising bodies, then a retreat back to the same core of hardened gamblers that existed in the first place. Look at Australia: massive budget deficits; social problems. They must have thought it was magic to start with. But, given time, people aren't that stupid with money. m