Like Jack Ritchie, gambling took over my life. It nearly killed me

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An inquest under way at Sheffield town hall may well have huge consequences for the British gambling industry. The coroner, David Urpeth, will seek to determine “whether gambling caused or contributed to [the] death” of Jack Ritchie, an English teacher who took his own life in 2017 aged 24. The inquest heard how Ritchie had struggled with a gambling addiction since he was 16 and first won £1,000 on a fixed-odds betting terminal (or “fob-tee”) in a bookies near the school where he was then a sixth-former. In the days prior to his suicide in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was working, Ritchie was a regular visitor to the BetVictor gambling website.

The coroner will hear evidence on what warnings and treatment were available to Ritchie