STARTING PRICE BETTING

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23517, 3 June 1938, Page 25

STARTING PRICE BETTING

SMALL PUNTERS ALARMED Rome was once the gamblers’ paradise. People who study this peculiar kink in human nature declare that gambling was one of the chief causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. The soldiers gambled their togas and their rations, and as they marched out naked and without food they apparently lost their virility. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. The Romans have been dead for a long time (says the Sydney correspondent of the Melbourne Argus), and cannot rise up and declare that this benighted country will come to the same end unless something is done to put a stop to the system of stealing pennies from silly punters by starting-price betting. From what is said the people who go in for this form of gambling work up more excitement over putting a shilling on both ways or straight out, or whatever way they wish to plunge, than those wise moneyholders whose pockets bulge with wads of notes, and who visit the stalls to see whether the horses have had their toenails manicured and there is the right parting in the forelock.

Now that the .Sydney police have started to suppress it there is an absolute rising against being deprived of the right to punt as they like, and they are determined to do it. The police put down bar betting, and some other system starts. One way of doing it is by sending agents to places where there are large staffs to collect bets on behalf of the bookmakers. There is always the injunction to come back again next Friday and every Friday, Now there is another suggestion to let the gambling go on, and to put a tax of a shilling a bet on each S.P. punter. It is said that more money could go to the hospitals, or it could go towards insurance against poverty when they have done in thdir last bob. It looks as though the Government will yield something to the gambling desire owing to the pressure that will be put on members of Parliament by their clients.