Losing or winning a pint or two once or twice a week isn't the end of the world. The pools involved putting numbers into coupons and sending them off each week, it cost you £2 or whatever, and that was it for the week.

Modern sports betting seems (to my untrained uninterested eye) to be about extracting multiple bets of £20+ an hour, seemingly competing with the coke dealers which is apparently a very common part of football nowadays for the income, and using similar tactics.