BARRY OHALLORANreviews Life's a GambleBy Roy Brindley Bantam £12.99, pp312
ROY BRINDLEY’S life reads like a text book warning of the dangers of compulsive gambling. He was raised in a working-class estate in Southampton in southern England, and his father, grandparents, aunts and uncles were all enthusiastic, but not very successful, punters.
Dogs, horses and cards all took up their spare time, and the young Brindley caught the bug early. One of his earliest memories is backing second-division Southampton to beat Manchester United in the FA Cup Final in 1976. They won at the outsider’s price of 5/1, earning Roy his first pay day.
Others followed. The boy’s head for figures and prodigious memory gave him an eye for that all important element in gambling, value – where the odds are bigger than the outcome’s true probability.
His father regularly took Brindley to the dogs, where he parlayed £2 spending money into larger sums by playing jackpots. He celebrated his 11th birthday by having £82 on his father’s dog, Ballyard Stag, at Portsmouth, at odds of 7/4, which won him a £145 profit. At 16, he disguised his age to join a casino club, only to be barred shortly afterwards because he worked out for himself how to beat blackjack, something which took US maths professor Edward O Thorpe a virtual thesis to explain. But shrewd as he sounds, the real motivation was an addiction to the rush that winning gave him – that it gives all gamblers – and it quickly took over his life.
He settled on a career in training greyhounds, which meant working in the morning, with enough time off to spend his afternoons in the bookies. There, he pursued the next big win – or in other words, chased his losses. Despite ending up in debt, he continued gambling, sending himself down a road that led to depression, brushes with the law and finally homelessness. Towards the end of the 1990s, Brindley began to pull himself together. He found work in journalism, contributing to the Racing Postnewspaper and editing a greyhound racing magazine.
This took him on a trip to Ireland, and he liked it so much he returned for good. His demons were still chasing him, but a chance trip to the movie Rounders, led him to a cure – poker. The film sparked a memory of something he had read about poker years earlier, and further exploration prompted him to join a casino and card club in Dublin, where he began playing.
The game made him.
The mathematician and strategist took over from the compulsive. He went from being Roy Brindley, hopeless punter, to Roy “the boy” Brindley, European Poker Champion, and a lot more besides. Not only that, he began playing as gambling met the internet. He spotted the potential and became the first player to be sponsored. It was an unorthodox and much-criticised move at the time, but it was prescient, as all high-profile poker professionals now have similar deals.
This is how he makes his living. From the outside, it looks contradictory that a self-confessed compulsive gambler should find salvation in poker. But the game is about understanding probability, your opponents and building a strategy around that. Success requires huge patience and application, the opposite of the instant hit sought by an addict.
Brindley does not hide the fact that his new way of life is difficult and high-risk, but he makes it clear that it’s a lot better than the old one.
Life’s a Gamble is not the usual confessional tale of how someone overcame an addiction, it’s really a story of how one man almost squandered his talents before discovering them.
Barry O'Halloran is an Irish Times journalist