Are you one of those who rely on gambling, betting, ‘playing football pool’ or jackpot to improve your finances? Then you have to check it as you are gradually drying up your pocket.
Though high profile betting and staking is not widespread in Nigeria but ‘playing football pool’, jackpot and some sort of gambling are ubiquitous especially among the youth and some elderly individuals. At strategic spots along streets and some shops, you will see young men crowding around kiosks with a small machine trying their luck through betting.
Similarly, in some shops, men sit for long periods at a time going through old past football documents to predict their chances in football pool. After researching and predicting the games, of course they stake their hard earned money. Some deny themselves or their families feeding allowances to play the ‘pool’.
A write up entitled Betting risks by Football-Data.Co.Uk put it frankly that the larger the size of the betting stakes as a proportion of salary whether daily, weekly or monthly pay, the greater the chance of “bankruptcy” if things go wrong. In many instances among the Nigerian men, things have gone wrong as hardly any individual in Nigeria is said to have become rich through the coupon play.
A player who stakes a minimum of N100 per play and ten consecutive losses bi-weekly amounts to N1000 and in a month it amounts to N2000. Mind you, in order to increase their chances of winning big, some punters stake high amounts. At end of each day, you hear these punters regretting that they lost because of a game. They now know the trick and will try again, but money is constantly lost. . When the punters are reminded that they are losing money through the betting, they will tell you that all businesses are risks.
“To most punters, losses will seem intuitively obvious, yet it is surprising how many still insist on using stake sizes that a proper risk assessment would consider to be entirely unacceptable”. Unfortunately, these coupons are finding their way in formalized industries like telecom, banking and manufacturing. GSM operators will send messages to you telling you to win huge amount of money by texting certain code to certain numbers. Each text costs about N100.
But experts have said that these punters who are into these gambling defined by Wikipedia as “wagering of money or something of material value (referred to as “the stakes”) on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods, can save the betting money and invest in more secure ‘games’ like stocks. Stocks give dividend, earn capital appreciation and bonus and you can resell your stock.
An expert and assistant director with the chartered Institute of Stockbrokers, Vincent Adubor, advises skeptics in a report not to allow market fluctuations to discourage them from investing in stocks
You can also aggregate the betting money and invest in petty trading like pure water business, groundnut selling. You can do this by funding a petty trader in these businesses with arrangement to pay you certain amount of money (interest) monthly. By doing this, you have succeeded to increase his/her share capital and boost the business than throwing the money away through pool betting.
