I can’t find a reference but I think it was Nick The Greek (or maybe Ti Thompson?, one of those guys anyway) who said ‘You wanna know how to make a thousand dollars in horse racing? Start with ten thousand’ (or close to it anyway)
Oh, that horse actually made me money.
Amaretto Rose, she was called. Just looked her up - 6 races, 4 wins before being retired to become a breeding mare. Betting on her a couple of times worked for me 
But for the syndicate? Yeah, stable fees were a lot and the winnings weren’t. And I think the owners they were leasing her from didn’t want them to keep racing her because she was worth more to breed more horses for other suckers to buy…
Greyhound racing seems even worse. I guess being an owner is a hobby, and you are going to lose money on it.
The growing menace of free* games is an interesting one, and is linked into exactly how these games are designed to be compulsive but not rewarding.
Let me hand over to some people who can talk about this way better than I can-
And of course, this.
They say it better than I could. Free* has become an anti-player, scummy, way to make games pay.
any locked down version
My 5 year old daughter has an old tablet that we use for long trips to keep her entertained. I noticed that one F2P app in with in-app purchases had a “child mode” that disabled the ability to buy things, which of course I enabled (not that her tablet is tied to any cards or banks accounts).
However, this mode doesn’t remove the myriad of purchasing buttons that litter the app. Instead, when she presses them, it displays an animated sequence showing how to go into the options and turn off child-mode.
There are so many deceptive practices in the mobile app space.
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I hate all freemium games, but especially the ones with competitive advantages for people who pay more. I’d much rather pay a few dollars, one time, and get all the content from the beginning. As soon as I see opportunities to buy sacks of gems or chests of crystals in a game description, I’m gone. But freemium is a proven, douchie model for making lots of money, so it will never go away. Hooray.
Races are shady as fuck anyway. We used to sell speed to the jockeys near Lambourne Gallops, and we’d always get tips when they knew someone was going to pull a race.
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