I've never 'got'

I play the lottery.

Yep, got to be in it to win it. I do it by Direct Debit so I never get tempted into buying more or playing the instant win games. I do, however, recognise that I'm lucky that I've £50/mo of disposable income to do this.

Never been to a bookies.

Pretty much the same.

Although 15-20 years ago I made ~8%/week on the discrepancies between bookies odds on UK football betting. But then the bookies got better at providing similar odds, any chance of an outright arb disappeared, and the overround closed in.

8%/week sounds good but to maintain a reasonable income (say £1k/week) you'd need to be staking ~£12k/week and there's a risk that a set of bad results could see you lose it all in one go. I couldn't stomach risking that much so I don't think I ever staked more than £100 in a week with most individual bets being £5 or £10.

One benefit of being a Maths/CompSci nerd is that I was able to do a whole load of statisticaly modelling and worked out that the best way to make money out of it was (when the bookies had closed things down) to stop doing it and write a book about how it all works. I managed the first part easily but not the second (Joseph Buchdahl's books/guides were the ones I used along the way - I missed the opportunity to extend them and publish by own, but then it'd be a moral quandary for me to facilitate/promote other people to gamble).

The few times I've gone to Vegas I've just played $5 blackjack tables with friends or had a small punt on roulette, literally randomly picking red or black with a single bet and then walking away regardless of the outcome (I'm definitely up in this).