What's the largest sum of money you've ever placed on a single bet?

You could make an argument that you are gambling the return on investment that you could have got by putting the money somewhere else. So e.g. say you could put the money on a savings account where the money is safe and pays say 1% interest, arguably you are effectively 'gambling' that interest that you would otherwise have earned. A bit tenuous though.
 
HangTime said:
I wondered how long it would take for someone to bring up VAT - your analogy is a fallacy because VAT is not charged/sold in isolation. You don't choose to buy VAT - you choose to buy an item that may be subject to VAT.
For this analogy to be valid, gambling would have to be an additional mandatory option taken when you bought another item. Buy a toy and be forced to buy a lottery ticket with it for example. The choice element being, do I buy a toy or not. But you aren't forced to buy gambling with a toy, because it isn't a tax. It is entirely optional REGARDLESS of what other items you buy. You could literally buy millions of items and STILL not have to pay for gambling. Whereas you would have to pay the VAT on the items it was applicable to.

To put it another way, VAT is a by-product of the purchase of another item. Gambling isn't. You are explicitly choosing to spend money on gambling. A direct affiliation. VAT on the other hand is an indirect affiliation based on your decision to buy something else. Some people might not even know whether they are paying for VAT or not when they buy an item.

If you chose to buy no items at all with VAT on them, that wouldn't mean VAT isn't a tax, because it would still be mandatory for others who did buy items with VAT. The applicability of VAT isn't impacted by whether you personally do or don't buy anything.

Going back to my earlier point, if we go down this path that it is a tax because if you choose to pay for it, you have to pay for it, then effectively that infers that everything you choose to pay money for is tax (it isn't).
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I respect your opinion, but you've said nothing to convince me that gambling isn't a stealth tax on the poor or stupid. You're trying to argue that it's not a tax, but by definition a stealth tax isn't a tax, it's an effective tax that isn't recognized as such.
 
Fair enough, but I guess it becomes a bit meaningless in my eyes to label something a stealth tax if that just means not a tax but rather anything that the poor and stupid choose to spend money on (I appreciate your position is probably more nuanced that this). I just look at gambling and think, is it really that stealthy? I mean with all the regulation now it gets labelled as gambling, warning notices all over the place, age restricted, max wager limits, bans on advertising during certain hours / mid-match, minimum proportion of advertising that has to be spent on responsible gambling guidance etc - it's about as un-stealthy as I can imagine.

Something like car insurance, I could maybe see an argument for being a stealth tax, because people that choose to drive a car (deemed important by a lot of people) have no option but to buy it. Gambling though doesn't come hand-in-hand as a mandatory bolt-on to other activities, so it's neither particularly stealthy nor taxy IMO.
 
bainbridge said:
Premium bonds isn't gambling :) Your money is safe, there's no risk of losing it.
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It basically is but in a different way - it's certainly misleading for the other poster to claim that £1000 invested in premium bonds is "gambling" £1000, the principal sum invested isn't what is being gambled/isn't at risk save for being devalued through inflation, it is the coupon/interest you'd have otherwise received on a similar NS&I bond or savings product that is being "gambled".
 
DeliciousStorage said:
It's pretty much a guarantee you'll lose it to inflation unless you're incredibly lucky. Only useful to store a small easy access emergency fund.
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When compared to interest rates in savings accounts, if you have enough in PB and not incredibly unlucky then you usually come out ahead ... at least by a tiny bit.

There's plenty of articles regarding this but the general consensus is that on average, if you have over £25k in there, you'll probably do alright.

Compared to the lottery which is 1 in 45,057,474 to win the jackpot, your odds of winning 1 mil with premium bonds is 1 in 92,367 (if you have 50K in there).
 
Couple of years ago I got into matched betting. Made a good few thousand doing it.

anyway, towards the end I used some of my profits to place a £1,000 bet on what I thought was a sure thing. My home team (league2 at the time) up against a team in the premier league. I rather foolishly thought they'd lose, but they ended up winning. How a L2 team can beat someone in the premier league I'll never know. They didn't even field a weakened side either.

That was the first and last time I placed a real bet.

Speaking to someone on the MB group, they had the same thing with Barcelona. There was one season where they had a crazy win record and were coming up against one of the teams lower down. They'd never lost to them before so they also put £1,000 on. They only ended up winning for the first time in their history.
 
£800. I had a football accumulator bet and hadnt realised I had picked a sunday game. All selections won on the Saturday so had £2500 riding on the final match. £6000 if my selection won. So I put £800 on the draw and the other team to win so that I was going to be a winner whatever happened. As it was my final pick failed so good job I did.
 
DeliciousStorage said:
It's pretty much a guarantee you'll lose it to inflation unless you're incredibly lucky. Only useful to store a small easy access emergency fund.
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When the payout on the Premium Bonds was 5% it was a dead cert place to put your max £25,000 unless you were really unlucky, is you were a 40% taxpayer. There was no alternative investment at the time which offered 8% gross and your investment was safe. Plus you only needed to get lucky once and win one of the bigger prices such as the £50k or even the million pound and you would be rolling in it.

I used to get several small wins every month so was happy.
 
thegreysquirrel said:
Compared to the lottery which is 1 in 45,057,474 to win the jackpot, your odds of winning 1 mil with premium bonds is 1 in 92,367 (if you have 50K in there).
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But that's comparing a £2 bet on lottery draw with a £500 bet (the 1% interest) on the premium bonds.

the chance that a £2 bet wins the lottery is 1/45,057,474 (2.22*10^-8)

for premium bonds, each £1 invested gives you a 1/54,640,000,000 (1.83*10^-11) chance of winning the jackpot in a monthly draw

so with 50k invested, you have a 9.1510^-7 chance of winning a premium bonds £1million jackpot in a given month or 1.10*10^-5 year

if instead, you'd taken your £500 interest you'd gambled there and just bought 250 * £2 lottery tickets at the end of the year you'd have a chance of 5.55*10^-6
of winning the jackpot

So your chance of winning a premium bonds jackpot over the course of a year is roughly twice as likely than had you gambled that same interest amount on a national lottery draw 1.10*10^-5 for the premium bonds vs 5.55*10^-6 for the lottery. (of course the national lottery jackpots tend to be rather more than £1million)
 
That's all true ... but the lottery doesn't give you your money back if you don't win. With the lost interest it's not a free bet but as you're more than likely to win smaller prizes, it's also not a dead loss.


Of course this is all assuming you even want to "gamble" at all. I know that the only way I'm ever going to have crazy money is through a big win and so for a small cost it's nice to know that potential (no matter how minute) is there. You gotta be in it to win it rings very true to me and even with the lack of wins, I think I like the "maybe one day" more than the couple of quid a week.
 
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m@rty said:
£2k when I was younger and very careless with money.

I lost :(

I don’t gamble anymore!
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Sometimes it takes a shock like that to prevent you from really getting started. Of course, there are those who would try to win that loss back. It's how it starts.
Same with me. Not placed a bet since. To be honest, I don't actually like it. Too stressful. It ruins the game for me, rather than making it more exciting.
 
dowie said:
But that's comparing a £2 bet on lottery draw with a £500 bet (the 1% interest) on the premium bonds.

the chance that a £2 bet wins the lottery is 1/45,057,474 (2.22*10^-8)

for premium bonds, each £1 invested gives you a 1/54,640,000,000 (1.83*10^-11) chance of winning the jackpot in a monthly draw

so with 50k invested, you have a 9.1510^-7 chance of winning a premium bonds £1million jackpot in a given month or 1.10*10^-5 year

if instead, you'd taken your £500 interest you'd gambled there and just bought 250 * £2 lottery tickets at the end of the year you'd have a chance of 5.55*10^-6
of winning the jackpot

So your chance of winning a premium bonds jackpot over the course of a year is roughly twice as likely than had you gambled that same interest amount on a national lottery draw 1.10*10^-5 for the premium bonds vs 5.55*10^-6 for the lottery. (of course the national lottery jackpots tend to be rather more than £1million)
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The average payout in premium bonds is 1%, but if you exclude the top prizes it's around 0.9%. That means you're only gambling 0.1% on the jackpot. Assuming you had £50k in there, it would be a £50 bet not £500. There is 1 draw each month, so over the whole year it would be a £4.16 bet per draw.
 
I've placed the odd £5, £10 or I think even £20 bet in the past when I've gone to a day out at the dogs or horses for example, but don't generally bet outside of that, especially when it appears so complicated, I had a 5-0 away win in my FM22 beta play for Liverpool at United and said to my mate I should put a bet on that, but after having a quick look at betting sites I just couldn't be bothered making an account etc.

I used to do the lottery occasionally and am probably the only person I know who is still up on the lottery after getting 5 numbers on the first ever Wednesday draw - shame it was only £660 winnings (even the jackpot ended up being about half a mil for each winner as so many entered and shared numbers).
 
DeliciousStorage said:
The average payout in premium bonds is 1%, but if you exclude the top prizes it's around 0.9%. That means you're only gambling 0.1% on the jackpot. Assuming you had £50k in there, it would be a £50 bet not £500. There is 1 draw each month, so over the whole year it would be a £4.16 bet per draw.
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I already accounted for the monthly draws, you can’t just gamble on the jackpot though, likewise the same applies to the lottery. Buying £50k of premium bonds is a £500 annual bet to try and win any of the prizes.
 
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