Gambling is easy, right? Wrong: it turns out betting on sport is designed to disturb you | Barney Ronay

Could I turn £10 into £1,000? I thought I could but was undone by the harsh reality and lost a little bit of my soul along the way

Welcome to How I Beat The Bookies: My Gambling Journey. Yes, my extreme methods can work for you. But only in the usual way. Which is to appear very briefly to work and then not to work at all.

First it is necessary to address the latest blow to English football’s otherwise watertight economy. People often talk about playing the world’s tiniest violin, a way of expressing sarcastic sympathy for bogus suffering, usually accompanied by a finger-and-thumb gesture that suggests, incorrectly, this is the size of the world’s tiniest violin.