I've never used one and doubt I ever will. An acca is a way of making a Saturday afternoon in front of the telly a bit more exciting. I'd be gutted if I just walked in, hoyed a tenner in and my fun was over in seconds. (Although with some of my bets it might as well be.)Agreed. As an occasional thing I quite like the machines tbh, iirc the average pay out is about 97% or so, so quite often you'll put a tenner in and walk out with a little bit of a profit and feel like you've won a couple of free pints or whatever. More often you'll lose it, but again if it's only a tenner every so often you don't miss it. I'd say I've done better on those machines overall than I have when I do my rare accumulators.
You can see how easily they could get addictive though, the relatively high % pay out makes people think it's with putting extra in to chase their losses rather than walking away, and they're obviously just so accessible, can hardly walk 20 yards in many city centres without finding one.
It's an interesting one though, should we force bookies to remove them just because some people get addicted to them? I genuinely don't know, on the one hand you don't want people ending up in financial trouble because of them, but then there's the issue of personal responsibility, would these people not just find other ways of losing money, online casinos and the likes?