Calvin Ayre – While it didn’t quite the reach the initial £500 million estimates being thrown around last week, the Cheltenham Festival still proved to be a gold mine for UK bookmakers, both in terms of betting handle and customer acquisitions. That’s how big the four-day horse racing festival has become in the UK. Throughout the week, more than £250 million in bets were taken, a staggering figure that was compounded even more by the boost in new customers bookmakers were able to acquire during the entire week. It figures that with 67,814 attendees on the final day alone, Cheltenham…

Mancunian Matters – Stockport barber Alex Wooliscroft is fighting back against his severe gambling habit by campaigning to get himself banned from every bookmakers in Britain. Father of one Alex, 26 is begging every bookie to stop him coming into their betting shops after blowing £25,000 in eight years on computerised roulette machines. Already Alex has handed photographs of himself to bookmakers near his home in Stockport urging them to refuse him admittance after he became addicted to playing the ‘fixed odds’ terminals. Today he began a round of TV and radio interviews in a further bid to make his self-imposed…