Tom Cummings

Today is Melbourne Cup day. The day of the “race that stops a nation”. The day every man, woman and dog has a punt on the horses.

Today will see an awful lot of money wagered on the Cup. You could call it an obscene amount of money. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be bet on the race, most of it on losing horses. Some money will be won, but most of it will be lost.

Talk of a second Victorian casino has been going around almost since the day Crown opened its doors over 20 years ago. Mildura, Portland and Lakes Entrance have all been mooted as possible sites but nothing has ever eventuated.

Now, according to this exclusive in The Age, they’re considering it again… only this time, they’re looking at Geelong.

Australia, it’s official. We’ve been had.

Even if you’ve never played a poker machine, most of us are familiar with the concept. You put some money in, you press a button, the reels spin, and if they line up, you win. If they don’t, you lose.

Or so we thought; it turns out we were wrong.

Poker machine documentary “Ka-Ching! Pokie Nation” went to air last night, and has caused quite a stir. The hour-long documentary looked beyond the human element and analysed the machines themselves, the people who design them, the people who make them, the people who profit from them. It pulled no punches and was damning in its conclusions: that poker machines are designed to addict, and that they do it incredibly well.

This is not my review of Ka-Ching!. This is my review of the industry response.

Early on Saturday morning, around 1am, an email arrived in my inbox. It had come through the contact form on my blog, and it was from a young man, Joe, in another city.

It was a cry for help. At the tender age of 20, Joe was addicted to poker machines.

Damn it, Facebook. Enough is enough.

Clubs NSW, the representative body behind hundreds of venues and tens of thousands of poker machines, today announced they were suing the ABC.

If you’ve ever dropped by a “gaming room” to “play the pokies”, it’s time for a language reboot.

How firmly entrenched has gambling become in the teams we follow? Do you know how committed your club is to the gambling dollar? Does private ownership make a difference, or is betting the only course for financial stability in our sport?

How involved in gambling is YOUR team?

I recently published an article in The Age about AFL club Hawthorn, who have won the last three AFL premierships and who run two extremely profitable poker machine venues.

It’s illegal to operate poker machines in Australia without a liquor licence. Think about that for a moment.

Bookmaker William Hill is asking Australian punters to pretend to make phone calls, to get around laws prohibiting in-play betting on the internet.

I thought I’d made it; I really thought I’d made it. I believed I’d put enough time and space between myself and the person I used to be. I thought I was finally safe.

I was wrong.

NSW has the worst gambling problem in Australia… and at its heart is the local government area of Fairfield.

In the 2014/15 financial year, venues operated by Woolworths’ gambling division ALH Group grossed $678 million from poker machines. That’s 26.4% of Victoria’s overall losses.