Legalised mugging in the pub

Never before have there been so many flimsy excuses to liberate you of your hard-earned.  Beggars in the street, definitely not buying drugs; badly worded missives from African Princes offering a share of their fortunes; Sex phone-lines, text messages, picture messages, hand-jobs, web-cams and participate-at-home masturbatathon channels.

Drunk people are always an easy target for carefully making them a couple of pounds lighter, hence the old women selling manky roses for a quid to guys trying to impress someone they’ve just pulled, taxi drivers taking the scenic route home and nightclubs charging £15 to get in and £4 for a bottle of warm beer.

Getting drunk has a terrible effect on money counting abilities, especially when trying to pick through a handful of change in a dark, cramped bar.  So, every round ends up being bought with a fresh note, leaving a stack of coins that’s ripe to be picked from.  By the end of the night, you’ll have no notes left, just a stack of £25 in pounds and 50ps.

Certain breeds of pub are also set up to maximise their chances of you returning home with an empty wallet.  Drunk young people with pockets full of cash are primed for dropping a quid here or there:  Fruit machines are the traditional classic: with their incomprehensible rules and flashing lights, they’re for the older generation of money-waster.

The jukebox allows you a chance to sing-along with Queen for the umpteenth time, with the pleasure somewhat reduced when the pub plays music for the rest of the day anyway.  There’s a thrill to be had skipping through the slowly-rotating lists of songs, as they give you a feel of the pub:  lots of ZZ Top and Steppenwolf?  Hope you have a beard, motorbike and shotgun.  Mika, Scissor Sisters and Elton John?  Get yourself ready, big boy.

The pool table, another classic, allows you to recreate all the excitement of real pool on a smaller scale.  Chalk that barely does anything (does anyone really know what it does and how best to use it?), and a cue that’s had the end unscrewed so you can take awkward shots from up against a wall make it a challenging experience.  Another way to gague the quality of the pub is the cost of the pool table.  £1 is pretentious, while 20p is just scummy.  Winner stays on?

Of course, there’s the eternal food and beer cycle.  All the food behind the bar is incredibly salty, which only serves to make you thirsty, and the beer makes you hungry again.  Whoever though heart attacks in a packet were a good idea?  And calling them scratchings. Pork. Scratchings.  Outside of the morbidly obese, who are they supposed to appeal to?  Peanuts, crisps and the previously mentioned scratchings are handily packed in share-size bags, whether you want to share them or not.  Don’t forget that your mate definitely didn’t wash his hands after he went for a piss.

The biggest, most outrageous way of taking money out of you is the new generation of fruit machines, the quiz box.

Playing on the way that people become argumentative authorities on everything once they’ve had a drink, the quiz box serves as a way for you to come agonisingly close to winning something.  Repeatedly.

The quiz offers you a number of games to play, based on and around well-known games like Monopoly and Deal or No Deal.  Answer a number of questions correct and you’ll win money! That’s the opposite of spending money! How can you lose?

Easily.  Firstly, the number of questions you need to answer varies depending on how long its been since the machine paid out.  Certainly it’s a good idea to play in a yokel pub in a village in the middle of nowhere – the sort of place where they’ll be caught out by the question, “how many fingers are there on your left hand?”

The questions start out easy enough – think along the lines of the first round of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”  – but soon descend into the hilarity of asking which date a certain King died on, with the options supplied being October 1st, 2nd 3rd and 4th.  Of course, if you guess correctly, you can smugly pretend to having known the answer all along.

Answer 15 questions but cock one up at the end?  Like an early 90s NES game, there’s no second chances, it’s game over.  A game that makes you feel stupid and actually makes you poorer.  But it has flashing lights!