Gamblers: when the fun stops, stop for dinner…

“Well, do you feel lucky?” my wife once asked me at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. It was in response to a question I’d asked her about what to do in the game. Whether to take another card or (I vaguely remember you can do this) “split” my hand or (again, this is the dimmest of recollections) somehow bet more even though you’re in the middle of a hand and betting generally happens at the beginning.

I didn’t get on well with blackjack. It’s so stressful. You have to make loads of quick decisions, one after another, in a slightly stern context where you’re expected to know what you’re doing. There are rules about what is and isn’t appropriate when you have certain cards and it irritates people – both dealers and other players – if you break them. I don’t mean official rules of the game – I wasn’t trying to introduce dice or a quiz round – but things that one conventionally doesn’t do in certain gameplay situations. I can’t remember any specifics, just the stress surrounding my failure to observe them.

This ambience didn’t make sense to me: surely hopeless out-of-towners who don’t understand the rules are exactly the people the casinos of Las Vegas want to attract. My idiocy should have been welcomed and monetised. Also, considering that the game is basically pontoon, why is it considered infra dig to say “twist” when you want a card? You’re not even encouraged to say “hit me”. You just tap the table in a way that I worried was indistinguishable from the general jiggling about that my hands were doing because of the unbearable pressure of the whole situation.

It was in this fraught context that my wife, who loves gambling and has somehow contrived to make a profit out of it, asked me if I felt lucky. “Of course not!” was my rattled answer. This was unfair. In my life, I felt extremely fortunate. I was born into a nice middle-class family in an affluent country many decades after the invention of antibiotics. I am blessed. What I consequently didn’t feel was that fate owed me any good cards. So my developing blackjack system was to lose the small amount of money I’d allocated for the game at a slow and steady pace, without annoying fellow punters or casino staff, because once it had finally run out we could go for dinner. Winning anything would only delay that process.

As a result, I may eat too much but I’m not a gambling addict. So perhaps the Vegas casino didn’t miss out on much by making me feel harassed. I lacked the sense of excitement and possibility, and the associated willingness to get my head round strange playing conventions, that mark out a good mark.

I was thinking about gambling addiction because of a startling statistic I saw last week: 38% of the money that Ladbrokes’ owner GVC takes in deposits comes from just 1% of its customers. This was reported alongside the story that Flutter, owner of Paddy Power among other betting firms, had signed a deal with a hairdresser to “introduce VIP customers” to the firm, in return for £5,000 a month plus a quarter of those customers’ losses. She immediately “introduced” a gambling addict named Antonio Parente, who bet £347,000 over the next 13 months – netting a potential £86,000 for the hairdresser.

The fact that she’s a hairdresser is incidental, by the way. I don’t think betting tips were part of her “Where are you going on your holidays?” patter. Her husband had recently left a job at Ladbrokes and so was temporarily barred from working for other gambling companies, which may explain her contractual involvement with Flutter.

The bookmakers’ incentive to hire “VIP introducers” is made clear by that statistic: without the big gamblers, the 1%, their turnover is slashed. You and me putting a fiver on the Grand National doesn’t cut it. They need Antonio Parente to lose his shirt, and any other shirts he finds unattended, to keep their shareholders happy.

Of course the 1% are by no means all problem gamblers – that’s what the bookies’ PRs are willing me to say and they’re right. Many of them are very rich people who can afford to gamble and lose huge sums. These are the “high rollers” that gambling firms can justifiably tempt with cup final tickets, astronomically posh snacks and a chance to stand near Elton John. But obviously it’s not always easy to distinguish the people losing huge sums who can afford it from those who just say they can afford it, or used to be able to afford it a few huge sums ago.

Problem gamblers are inevitably going to provide a much higher percentage of betting firms’ revenue than problem drinkers do for, say, Diageo because there’s essentially no limit to the amount of money you can bet and there is a limit to how much even a raging alcoholic can drink. No one can down a hundred bottles of vodka in a day, but the cash equivalent can be lost on a horse race with far less effort than a clinking stagger back from Costcutter.

Addiction presents a weird quandary to purveyors of addictive products. In some ways, drug dealers have the most straightforward business model: they just want people to get hooked and it’s all totally illegal. So we know where we stand: no grey areas, no moral ambiguity, it’s against the law. Lovely. And no one has to say: “Enjoy heroin responsibly.”

But for booze and gambling, it’s all so awkward. “Enjoy responsibly” effectively means “don’t buy too much”, and that immediately sounds insincere because anyone selling anything must, on some level, want people to buy lots of it. That’s the point of the activity. But then a salesman’s sense of professional pride is bound to be dented by the fear that some of their best customers only keep coming back because they’re mentally ill.

• Dishonesty Is the Second-Best Policy by David Mitchell (Guardian Faber, £9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15