Daily Archives: February 23, 2020

You can often learn as much from examining bad advice as you can from getting good advice. With any luck, what Ive done with this post is provide seven examples of REALLY bad advice and replace it with good advice.

Many times, just doing the opposite of what the bad advice suggests is enough to prevent a disaster. Other times, the bad advice might be appropriate in some circumstances. And sometimes, bad advice just doesnt matter much one way or the other.

In any case, you should know the difference. Here are seven examples of the worst advice about real money gambling Ive ever heard.

Most of the time, the person urging you to get expert advice on who to bet on is the one selling that advice. In the betting world, someone who sells this kind of advice is called a tout. A company which provides multiple experts is a tout service.

These services prefer to be called handicappers or expert handicappers, but a healthy dose of skepticism would be wise when dealing with such companies.

Most of them have websites offering free picks. These are worth what you pay for them, usually. But the idea of getting you hooked on their free picks is to generate interest in their paid picks. Thats how they get you.

Lets look at some of the math behind betting on sports.

Assume youre an average sports bettor who bets $100 per game on a regular basis. Youre required to risk $110 to win $100, which is how the bookmaker makes his money. Just to break even, you need to win over 52% of the time.

And the lines are set so that your probability of winning is 50%. So, you decide to find an expert to make your betting decisions for you. You find a guy who offers a solid pick for Thursday nights NFL game for just $25.

Youre going to be out the $25 no matter what happens, win or lose.

Lets assume that the tout flipped a coin to choose a team. (Thats a likely a scenario, by the way.) 50% of the time, youll lose $135, which includes the $110 you bet on the game, and the $25 you spent on the pick. The other 50% of the time, youll win $75, which is $100 less the $25 pick.

What does this mean for the house edge? $110 $75 is the equivalent of a $35 loss, or $17.50 per bet. What if the tout was picking winners 60% of the time? 60% of the time, you win $75, and 40% of the time, youll lose $135. Thats $45 in positive expectation, and $54 in negative expectation.

In other words, if youre only betting $100, that $25 pick doesnt bring you to break even if the handicapper is right 60% of the time, which is nearly impossible. Even the people in the business admit that 55% is probably the best you can expect from an exceptional handicapper.

If youre betting $1000 on the game, it might make more sense to pay $25 for a pick. But even then, youre looking at a potential win of $975 and a potential loss of $1,125.

If your handicapper is right 60% of the time, thats $585 in positive expected value. You also have $450 in negative expected value, so now you have a profitable pick. You should notice two things about this youre going to be right 50% of the time even if you choose randomly.

And even if the tout is really good at his job, you still have to bet considerably more than the cost of the pick to make even good picks profitable.

Contrary to popular belief, the house doesnt always win. Sometimes, you win. In fact, about 20% of the people who visit a casino in a given day go home from the casino with winnings in their pockets.

This doesnt mean you SHOULD play, but it also doesnt mean you should refrain from playing. It means that the decision is more complicated than that.

No, you probably wont win in the long run, but you might. If you win a huge progressive jackpot of $10 million, you might conceivably be able to play for low stakes for the rest of your life and show a net profit for your casino gambling career.

Thats not likely, though, to say the least. But what about gambling as an entertainment expense? Is it okay to gamble knowing youll probably lose in the long run as long as youre having fun doing it? Of course it is.

The trick is to decide whether youre really having that much fun while youre playing. My dad might have put $2 into the slot machines the entire time we were in Reno together. (We were there for four nights.)

Gambling in a casino didnt seem like fun to him, but I sure enjoyed myself. I came home a winner on that trip, too! I won about $50 net.

This is just the Martingale system, which doesnt work in the long run. The idea is that every time you lose, you double the size of your previous bet. Eventually, you must win, and when you do, youll win back all your previous losses along with a small profit.

Ive seen some gambling experts say that you can grind out lots of small wins this way. But youll eventually run into a situation where you lose so many times in a row that your bankroll will be devastated, and you wont be able to afford the next bet. Or youll run into a situation where the next bet in the progression will be so big that the house wont let you make it because of their betting limits.

Suppose you start with $5 and go on a losing streak in roulette. Most roulette tables with a $5 minimum bet also have a $500 maximum bet, which means youll need to bet the max when you have a certain number of losses in a row.

Most people underestimate how many losses that will be:

If you lose seven times in a row on an even-money bet in roulette, you cant make the next bet because the casino has betting limits in place.

You might think seven losses in a row is next to impossible at the roulette table, but it happens probably once a day in every casino.

This isnt terrible advice unless you think its going to magically make you a winning gambler. In the long run, short-term strategies like win goals and stop-loss limits wont change the fact that the house has a mathematical edge over the player.

A win goal is an amount youre going to win thats going to signify that its time to stop for that session. This would make you a winner But only if you stop and never gamble again.

A stop-loss limit is the same thing, but its an amount youre willing to lose before quitting the session. Its meant to limit how much money youll lose.

This would limit the amount you lose But only if you stop and never gamble again.

The way the math behind gambling works, though, is that youre facing a lifetime gambling session thats been divided into shorter, arbitrary sessions. As far as the gods of luck are concerned, its all one big session.

And the more you gamble, the closer your results will get to the mathematically expected results.

Heres the idea behind this advice: Suppose you place a big bet, maybe $500, on the roulette wheel and win. Now, you have $1000. You decide youre only going to play with the $500 you just won, and youre going to preserve your original stake.

If you think this will make you profitable in the long run, think again.

Once youve won that money, its not the houses money anymore. Its your money. If you continue to gamble with it, you continue to give the casino house edge time to work its magic.

It can be fun to gamble with the houses money. But it can be more fun to pocket your $500 in winnings and buy a nice dinner or some show tickets with your profits.

Some casino games involve a skill element, but most of them are pure chance. Even the games with a skill element, like blackjack and video poker, give the house a mathematical edge over the player.

It doesnt matter how much you practice or how skilled you get. If you play long enough, the house edge will eat up all your money.

The only exception is if you find a real advantage gambling technique and get good enough at it to win consistently over time.

For example, some card counters are profitable in the long run. And to make that profit, they do need to practice and become proficient, both at basic strategy and at counting cards.

Casinos dont make that easy either. Once they realize youre counting cards, theyll usually run you off their blackjack games. Some of them will even ask you to leave the casino entirely.

More nonsense has been written about which slot machines are looser than others than anything I can imagine. The biggest and most popular myth is that the casinos put the best-paying slot machines on the edges of the rows so theyll attract more players.

This myth originates from an interview with a slot machine manager at a casino decades ago. Theres no guarantee that the interview actually took place, and even if it did, theres no guarantee that the slots manager was telling the truth.

Multiple more recent interviews with casino managers and slot machine managers indicate that they do NOT place their slot machines based on how loose or how tight they are.

Even defining those terms is tricky.

A loose slot machine is one thats supposed to pay out more, but even a game with a high hit frequency can have a lower payback percentage than a game with a low hit frequency.

Whats the difference, and how is that possible? Hit frequency refers to how often a spin of the reels results in some kind of prize, regardless of the size of that prize. For example, a slot machine with a hit frequency of 33% will result in a win about one-third of the time.

The payback percentage, on the other hand, is a function of how much money the slot machine pays out versus what it takes in. The deciding factor is not only the probability of a win but also the size of those wins.

You can program a slot machine game to pay off at 1 for 1 odds 50% of the time, and if the rest of the prizes hit seldom and arent big, the payback percentage can be really low.

Youll get plenty of bad advice about gambling. It doesnt even matter what kind of gambling you do. Hopefully, youve learned a thing or two from the advice Ive given against what may be commonly heard. What kind of bad advice have you gotten about gambling?

Link:

Casino Gambling Advice to Avoid - Tips on Casino Gambling - BestUSCasinos.org

Image via Amanda Jones Special feature

Cyberwar and the Future of Cybersecurity

Today's security threats have expanded in scope and seriousness. There can now be millions -- or even billions -- of dollars at risk when information security isn't handled properly.

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Since the summer of 2019, a group of professional Chinese hackers has been targeting and hacking into companies that run online gambling and online betting websites.

According to reports published this week by cyber-security firms Talent-Jump and Trend Micro, hacks have been officially confirmed at gambling companies located in Southeast Asia, while unconfirmed rumors of additional hacks have also come from Europe and the Middle East.

Talent-Jump and Trend Micro say hackers appear to have stolen company databases and source code, but not money, suggesting the attacks were espionage-focused, rather than cybercrime motivated.

The two security firms said the attacks had been carried out by a group they called DRBControl.

Trend Micro said the group's malware and operational tactics overlap with similar tools and tactics used by Winnti and Emissary Panda, two hacking groups that have conducted attacks over the past decade in the interests of the Chinese government.

Currently, it is unclear if DRBControl is carrying out attacks on behalf of Beijing. Most likely not. In August 2019, cyber-security firm FireEye reported that some Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups are now carrying out cyber-attacks on the side, in their free time, for their own gains and interests, separate from their normal state-sponsored operations.

The recent DRBControl attacks are neither complex or unique in regards to the tactics being used to infect victims and steal their data.

Attacks start with a spear-phishing link sent to targets. Employees who fall for the emails and open the documents they received are infected with backdoor trojans.

These backdoor trojans are somewhat different from other backdoors because they heavily rely on the Dropbox file hosting and file sharing service, which they use as a command-and-control (C&C) service and as a storage medium for second-stage payloads and stolen data -- hence the group's name of DRopBox Control.

Typically, the Chinese hackers will use the backdoors to download other hacking tools and malware that they'll use to move laterally through a company's network until they find databases and source code repositories from where they can steal data.

Tools DRBControl has been seen downloading and using include:

Talent-Jump says they've been able to keep a close eye on the group's operations between July and September 2019.

During the respective interval, the hackers have infected and kept track of around 200 computers through one Dropbox account, and another 80 through a second.

Attacks are ongoing, and the two security firms have published indicators of compromise (IOCs) in their reports [1, 2] that organizations can use to detect suspicious activity or DRBControl's malware.

These are not the first attacks on online betting and gambling sites. In 2018, cyber-security ESET reported that North Korean state-backed hackers had hit at least one online casino in Central America from where they're believed to have attempted to steal funds.

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Chinese hackers have breached online betting and gambling sites - ZDNet

Spains consumer protection minister Alberto Garzon has said that the government will most likely seek to limit 80% of all online advertisement.

Spain is once again discussing gambling and specifically gambling advertisement after Unidos Podemos, the countrys left-wing party, brought up the issue that the industry is harming youths and leading to an uptick in gambling addiction.

Together with the Socialist Party, Unidas Podemos have the legal majority to target and change gambling advertisement rules if they deem it necessary. This comes at a time when gambling, including online sports betting and iGaming, are flourishing across the country, marking an all-time high in terms of revenue.

Video terminals and lottery games have been giving rapid ground to the new-found appetite of Spaniards for gambling products.

Spains consumer protection minister Alberto Garzon raised the issue on Friday, February 21, arguing that new regulation ought to be sought to curb the rising numbers of addiction across the country. According to Garzon, the regulation should be similar to how tobacco is taxed.

More importantly, the minister noted, the country will be trying to regulate a sector that has a direct impact on citizens health. Spain is also considering to introduce a ban on specific advertisement policies designed to incentivize people into placing a wager, such as free bets to new customers.

Sweden, one of the most heavily regulated and fairest markets in the world, already has these measures in place. Garzon has also cited the fact that the amount staked online has grown three-fold since 2014 to $19.2 billion in 2018, coinciding with the FIFA World Cup.

According to Reuters, Spaniards are losing some $10.85 billion to gambling activities, citing data from the Spanish gambling lobby.

Cracking down on advertisement practices might have a positive effect for the levels of addiction, but it must not come at the cost of neutering a flourishing business. Italy has already done so under the Five-Star Movement government, a far-right party that promised to remove gambling from public spaces as part of its electoral campaign.

In the case of Italy, partnerships between sports organizations and betting companies have been less frequent due to the Dignity Decree passed in 2018. Many of Spains LaLiga soccer clubs have partnerships with sports betting partners.

This includes big names as Real Madrid and Barcelona. Yet, these partnerships have not gone unnoticed and they have been heavily criticized. The government is also planning to ban teams from selling children merchandise carrying the logos of betting brands.

According to Garzon, the country will aim to ban at least 80% of all online advertisements. Meanwhile, the state-operated SELA and ONCE lotteries will have to be submitted to the same regulations as private operators.

The only difference is they will have more leeway in choosing when to broadcast advertisements. Private business has protested against the double-standards with some arguing that the lotteries have already been known to sell tickets to youths, even though not on purpose.

Visit link:

Spain Says 80% of Online Gambling Advertisement Has to Go - GamblingNews.com

Warm, Sunny Sunday With Temperatures Around 50CBS 2 Meteorologist Robb Ellis has the 5 p.m. forecast for Saturday, Feb. 22, 2020.

Woman Fatally Shot In Head In South Shore NeighborhoodChicago police are searching for the gunman who shot and killed a woman Saturday afternoon in the South Shore neighborhood.

Stabbing Leaves One Dead At Richard's Bar In Fulton River DistrictA 23-year-old man was fatally stabbed late Friday night, after being involved in a verbal dispute with a 30-year-old man inside of a Fulton River District bar.

60 Elite Plungers Making Multiple Jumps Into Lake Michigan For Special OlympicsPeople will be braving the frigid water to help the Special Olympics, the world's largest sports program for kids and adults with intellectual and physical disabilities.

Man Stabbed To Death After Fight Outside Fulton River District BarA 23-year-old man was fatally stabbed late Friday night, after being involved in a verbal dispute with a 30-year-old man inside of a Fulton River District bar.

Sunny Weekend Ahead Of Rain And Snow This WeekCBS 2 Meteorologist Ed Curran has the 5 a.m. forecast for Saturday, Feb. 22, 2020.

Report Of Stabbing In Oak LawnOne student suffered minor injuries trying to break up a fight.

Woman Falls Into Manhole, City Denies Injury ClaimA woman walking to the train, fell into a manhole, got hurt and filed a claim with the city to help pay her medical bills, but was denied. CBS 2's Charlie DeMar reports

Chester Weger's First Day Out After 60 Years Behind BarsThe prison doors opened Friday for "the Starved Rock Killer." CBS 2 's Tara Molina reports.

Three Men Hit By Car In West LoopThe friends were getting ready to walk to the United Center to watch the Blackhawks. CBS 2's Jermont Terry reports

Chicago Weather: Shot At 50 On SundayThe RealTime forecast with Mary Kay Kleist

Starved Rock Killer Chester Weger Arrives In ChicagoCBS 2 News at 6:00 p.m.

Real ID Causing Real Confusion For MotoristsCBS 2's Vince Gerasole reports on the long lines and questions people have regard a new form of identification people will need in order to fly.

'Starved Rock Killer' Goes FreeCBS 2's Chris Tye the man who served 60 years for the murder of three women is now out of prison and in a halfway house.

Super Polar Plunge In EvanstonMary Pocuis will be taking a dip in the icy waters off Lake Michigan in Evanstonnot just once, but once an hour for 24 hours. CBS 2's Marissa Parra reports.

Dan Ryan, Kennedy Closures Over WeekendMore work on Jane Byrne Interchange. CBS 2 News at 6:00 p.m.

Chicago Police Taking Aim At Spike In Citywide Carjackings,A spike in the number of carjackings so far this year is leaving residents rattled, and prompting Chicago Police to re-convene a special taskforce to try to stop it. CBS 2 Investigator Megan Hickey reports.

SUV Crashes, Slams Into Pedestrians In West LoopThree pedestrians were injured when they were hit by a speeding car Friday afternoon in the West Loop. CBS 2's Jermont Terry reports.

Chicago Weather: Warm Temps Stick Around Through TuesdayCBS 2 meteorologist Mary Kay Kleist has a look at the extended forecast.

Speeding SUV Hits 3 Pedestrians In West Loop; Driver Also HurtThree pedestrians were injured when they were hit by a speeding car Friday afternoon in the West Loop.

Real ID Requests Turing Into Real Headache For Those Signing Up For The CardCBS 2's Vince Gerasole reports on the confusion over the need for a Real ID card. Who needs one? Who doesn't?

'Starved Rock Killer' Freed After Decades Long SentenceCBS 2's Chris Tye reports the longest serving Illinois inmate has been paroled and will now spend time in a halfway house.

SWAT Officers To Soon Cover CTA Stops, Trains After String Of Violent CrimesCBS 2's Dana Kozlov reports on plans from the city's interim police superintendent to curb crime on the CTA after several violent incidents on trains and platforms, including one person shot to death.

Chicago Weather: Nice Warmup For Your WeekendMary Kay Kleist has your ReatTime weather forecast.

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Casey Urlacher, 9 Others Charged In Gambling Operation - CBS Chicago

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NAB is providing new ways for customers to take greater control over their finances, becoming the first Australian bank to offer the option to block gambling transactions via its app.

All retail banking customers with NAB Visa Credit or NAB Visa Debit cards can now restrict most gambling transactions with immediate effect with just one touch.

The gambling block capability was first implemented via iOS devices in December 2019, and has now been expanded to Android devices. NAB also remains the only major Australian bank to offer a restriction option on debit cards.

NAB Chief Customer Experience Officer Rachel Slade said the new app feature would support Australians in controlling their financial future. In December, the latest annualAustralian Gambling Statisticsreport revealed almost $25 billion of gambling expenditure in 2017-18, with this figure rising by around 5 per cent on the year prior.

Its very easy to place a bet, so theres real value in giving people the option to plan ahead and control their spending. This tool is designed to put the choice in the hands of our customers, Ms Slade said.

Since commencing the roll-out in December we have seen more than 10,000 customers turn on the restriction, highlighting the importance of offering easy-to-use tools for customers to manage their finances.

The new app capability comes as Australians continue to face significant budgeting challenges, with theNAB Australian Wellbeing Survey, released Wednesday, revealing rising financial anxiety and one in four Australians experiencing some form of financial stress or hardship over the past three months.

Were making it easier for customers to take greater control over their money, Ms Slade said.

We also recognise problem gambling remains a major challenge affecting the community, and one that requires organisations, governments, and the community to work together to effectively address.

NAB will continue to offer new opportunities for customers to improve their financial health and wellbeing, with other recent actions including offering a freecredit health checkfor all Australians, launchingMy Goalsto track progress on personal savings ambitions and providingSMS remindersfor credit card payments.

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Gambling Business Group deliver powerful industry insight to UK government department - European Gaming Industry News

Argentinas online gambling prospects are once again on the rise after the city of Buenos Aires published new regulations governing online play.

On Friday, the Loteria de la Ciudad (LOTBA) in the autonomous city of Buenos Aires published details of its plan to start vetting online sports betting and casino operators who want to offer services to the citys roughly 3m residents by the final quarter of this year.

Its worth noting that these operations would be confined to the autonomous city, although hopes are high that, should this effort prove successful, it could invigorate efforts to regulate online gambling at both the provincial and national levels.

The Instituto Provincial de Lotera y Casinos (IPLyC), which oversees gambling in the province of Buenos Aires a separate legal entity from the city announced plans last spring to issue seven online gambling licenses. Sadly, these plans were put on hold following changes in the provincial governments lineup last August.

LOTBA is proposing to authorize an unlimited number of Online Gaming Agencies that would be allowed to offer online sports betting, virtual betting, non-sports betting, slots, roulette, blackjack, punto banco baccarat, poker and lottery games. While there will be no competitive tender, there are a few hurdles operators will need to clear.

Companies interested in becoming an Agency would need to pay an upfront fee of US$30k, prove that theyve been in business for two years, have annual revenue of ARS100m (US$1.6m) and demonstrate a net worth of $25m.

Licenses would be valid for an initial five-year term, extendable for an additional five years. Agencies would pay an annual license fee of $100k and 10% tax on their online revenue.

They also have to submit a Guarantee of Compliance in the sum of $2m, although this will be reduced to $1m following accreditation of the final technical certification report. Customer account balances must be kept in a separate city bank account that LOTBA will control.

There are also detailed boundaries on advertising and marketing communications, responsible gambling and free-to-play games, all of which suggests that LOTBA has been contemplating this move for some time, or at least since their provincial counterparts dropped the ball.

See more here:

City of Buenos Aires to issue online gambling, betting licenses - CalvinAyre.com

Whenever they start talking about the 'housing issue', I start thinking about the 'gambling issue'.

ousing is difficult, with many vested interests and conflicting opinions to negotiate before you start shelling out the money in vast quantities.

There is even an ideological problem, whereby governments in this country (and most other countries) are pathologically opposed to doing anything that they believe can be done more efficiently by our old friends, the "private sector".

Indeed this belief persists, even when it has been clearly shown that these things can't be done more efficiently by the private sector - and in some cases they can't be done at all.

With all these issues in play, and when you throw in the natural torpor of an institutional culture, the last Government hardly even noticed the tremendous anger that had been building for a long time.

They seemed frozen, putting out these graphs and numbers and projections about the greatness of the economy in general, seemingly oblivious to the better kind of evidence which has been emerging - such as the fact that so many people are finding themselves broke before the end of the month.

This sense of creeping inertia is partly just a function of the way things are done, and the inability of those on large six-figure salaries to imagine what life is like for those less fortunate than themselves - which is almost everyone.

And yes, housing is difficult, and would be difficult even if everyone was doing the right thing and thinking the right way all the time.

With all these other obstacles, it can take an insanely long time to get something done that is in the public interest, and not actually against it - such a long time, that inertia ceases to be a mere malfunction, and becomes a policy.

So when they talk of housing, I think of gambling, which had a bill drafted in 2013, under the then minister Alan Shatter - a man whose lawyerly skills have never been in doubt, a man who was not in the habit of sending bills out into the world in an unfit state, and certainly not to the extent that it would take at least seven years (and counting) for them to be enacted.

No, there wasn't much wrong with that bill at the time, and there still isn't much wrong with it - so you'd think that was a good start. And yet seven years later - considerably longer than World War II - several parties were able to declare in manifestos that they'd be treating the introduction of gambling legislation as a matter of urgency, because whatever attitudes the last Government had to it, urgency was not among them.

Yes there will be a regulator, perhaps before the end of this year. But there has been a regulator in Britain for some time now, dishing out enormous fines to betting corporations for stuff that their Irish branches could be doing all day long, without hindrance - taking money from punters for example, that turns out to be stolen, without performing adequate checks on where it came from.

And meanwhile, the bankruptcies and the break-ups and the jail sentences and the suicides will continue, as they have done for the past seven years and beyond, while legislation in this area has been sitting there as if there was nothing to get excited about - like this was just some esoteric issue pertaining to the preservation of certain forms of wildlife, the sort of thing that would never demand your immediate attention.

Not that attention wasn't being paid to it, in another sense. If there is lobbying on behalf of powerful interests in the area of housing, you may be sure that with gambling legislation the corporate bookies have not been slow out of the traps either, with their fine presentations.

Despite the jolly facades, they are ruthless people - and not just in their ceaseless quest to acquire all the territory they can before the marshal (as it were) arrives in Dodge City.

In Britain, there has been a facility whereby bookies can make a voluntary contribution to a "social fund" for the treatment of problem gamblers, to which one bookmaker contributed the sum of 50 - yes, that's fifty pounds sterling.

In Ireland's proposed legislation the "social fund" should be mandatory, and perhaps this will happen under the benign stewardship of the kind which Fianna Fail or Sinn Fein or Labour are promising. But dear God, it has taken such a very long time already. And like the housing problem, gambling has many crazy stories. For example it is not uncommon now for drug dealers to be paid not in cash on street corners, but by addicts going into betting offices where they can lodge money to the dealer's online account.

But none of this was considered urgent enough during the past seven years to push the legislation through - "push" in this case being a somewhat relaxed form of pushing.

And you wanted them to build a load of houses, right now?

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Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar

REUTERS

I get that Bernie Sanders is a Commie and all that, and that Joe Sixpack will never vote for a Commie - but I would not agree with all these "responsible" pundits who warn that Bernie going up against Trump is as unelectable as Jeremy Corbyn.

Though they are both Commies, Bernie is a very different kind of man to Corbs, who for all his socialist zeal, is actually quite posh - he and his equally posh chums at the top of the Labour Party who have exposed the British working class to the catastrophe of Brexit, are never really angry about anything. They try so hard, but it's just not in them.

Bernie's rage is real, and people can identify with that. Indeed, they probably can't remember the last time anyone stood in front of them asking for a vote, who had anything real about them.

So Bernie has a chance there, and when they call him a Commie he can say that Trump is a Commie too, except he only believes in socialism for billionaires.

But the main reason I distrust much of this Anyone But Bernie commentary, is that it tends to come with a recommendation that Joe Biden is the reasonable alternative. That Joe is electable.

My friends, Joe is not electable. Not on this planet anyway, to which it seems he is an increasingly infrequent visitor.

Indeed there is something quite troubling going on here, with pundits still pretending that Joe is on his game, while the results of the primaries deliver a very different diagnosis.

But Joe is showing us something - in time his candidacy may be held up as an illustration of how difficult it can be, for a man and his family and friends to face the sadness of his decline.

Jimmy Greaves, who was 80 last week, was a phenomenal footballer and unusual in that he didn't really like football that much - he said he had "an interest" in it, rather than a passion, though he loved playing it.

And it was perhaps this detachment from the game that made him such a great goalscorer, enabling him to get over the disappointments of the missed chances because he wasn't all that disappointed anyway.

John Giles revered him, recalling how he would see Greaves for Spurs bearing down on the Leeds goal and know for sure that Greaves was going to score - he had that striker's gift of making the goal seem a mile wide.

But he was also brilliant in speaking about his alcoholism, insisting it wasn't just a result of his being injured when England won the World Cup.

He spoke about it at a time when public figures, especially sportsmen, were not so forthcoming about their addictions.

He made that - and staying sober - look easy too.

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Gambling is probably the toughest addiction of them all - and yet it remains virtually unregulated - Independent.ie