Last week I was convinced I was going to win the lottery. I told all my friends. I circled the date in red on my calendar. Day by day, as the jackpot rose, I added ideas to what I would do with the money. When I bought my ticket, the jackpot stood at 45 million euros, by the time of the draw it had gone up to 12,62,31,764 euros! I was convinced the jackpot was mine; it was a pretty good feeling.

I got the first number. And the second too. But there my dream ended! My ticket, that I had jealously guarded like a diamond solitaire, was torn and thrown in the bin. The winner of Europe’s biggest ever lottery jackpot is a 25 year-old-woman living in Majorca, Spain. She had spent the weekend in bed with flu and did not even know she had won.

Can you imagine being in that woman’s shoes? Clearly I can, since I had imagined it in detail. Others tell me it’s too much, all that money, it would be too much to handle. It’s fascinating when you look at how people gamble on lotteries. There are two extremes.

On one end there are the daily scratch cards. Sales of these types of games have been rising steadily during the recession both in Europe and in the US. They are games you play instantly. You pay as little as a dollar or a euro, you scratch a few numbers and you immediately know whether or not you have won anything.

On the other, there are the big state and multistate jackpots such as the euromillions draw won by the young unnamed Spanish woman. These have not fared as well during the recession. Some states have reported falls in the number of tickets sold. But when the jackpot rises, people buy more tickets. It makes me smile, winning five million euros would seem enormous to anybody, yet a five million jackpot does not entice entire populations to play the lottery, whereas $100 million does. It creates a whole gambling fever more addictive than swine flu.

Gambling is said to be recession-proof. When times are hard, people gamble even more. When they are desperately short of money, the glimmer of hope provided by a lottery ticket can seem dazzling. Anyone can buy a ticket. Anyone could win, in theory at least. When the UK introduced its first national lottery draw it was accompanied by a vast publicity campaign with the tag “it could be you!” And that’s just it: It could be you.

Buying a lottery ticket every now and then is pretty harmless. The problem is that it is a slippery slope. It is very easy to pick up habits that lead to compulsive gambling. If you play the same numbers every time you play, these become “your numbers”. Should they come up on a week when you have not played, you would be devastated. So what happens? People end up buying tickets every week. Then there is the facility of playing. There are dozens of state lotteries and most now have more than one draw a week. You can play online and do not even have to live in the state where the draw is made. Those winning numbers could be played several times a week in several places. What started off as spending a dollar or a couple of euros a month soon becomes a few hundred dollars or euros.

But the most addictive are stratch cards. They cost so little it is like buying a cup of coffee. The instant gratification makes them an even more impulsive purchase. In many countries they are being aggressively marketed. You can find them anywhere and everywhere. Even airlines sell them during flights! The convenience of having them by a cash till along with the flashing logos and clever marketing make them more and more appealing to a cash-starved public. But small amounts add up, and just as with the lottery jackpot draws, people can easily find themselves spending hundreds of dollars without even being aware of it.

There are also increasing ways to gamble. In Britain, there has been a surge in the financial gaming industry. This is spread betting, when you gamble on currencies going up or down or on stock prices rising or falling for example. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem so different to what those bankers did that led us to where we are now! You know you are a gambler when you start to think of gambling as “investing” or “working”. It is the roulette player who will tell you he has a “system”. It is no longer a game of chance but something you do with serious intent. As unemployment rises and the economic recession continues to bite, gambling will become increasingly attractive. How else could you become a millionaire in an instant? It could be you after all.