The stakes are high. For students nationwide tuition fees have just risen to nearly £10,000 a year and where jobs are scarce, student finance loans are the lifeblood of many student accounts.
Where day-to-day expenses of food, nights out, transport and course books all filter from the same depleted source, some students believe that they have found the solution to their fiscal turmoil.
They believe they have found this solution within the lurid, florescent bulbs which glow like beacons of opportunity in every casino.
Despite the fact that the odds are stacked – almost unbearably – against their consumers, casinos are attracting more and more students to bet their student loans. Essentially they are gambling with tax-payers money.
It seems as though every other week fresh stories concerning students drinking too much, like the Bar One Christmas day bus accident or the infamous Phillip Lang story seep from the pores of the student body.
But gambling is almost never reported on in the mainstream media.
For this reason it has become known as the silent addiction. Nevertheless it should not be ignored or underestimated.
Probability is a fickle friend even when it appears to be on your side as one undergraduate found out the hard way last year.
It was the 78th minute of the Angola vs Mali game in the Africa Cup of Nations game. Angola were up 4-0 with just ten minutes left to go a student placed a bet of £4,400 on their almost certain win with a one per cent profit for his audacity.
In a remarkable turn of events Mali managed to pull out a 4-4 draw and effectively cost one student his entire student loan.
Whilst the fallout from some gambles isn’t always as devastating as that one, they are the symptom of a larger problem which snowballs at breakneck speed.
Most casinos target audience is the young post-teenage male, understandably for their notoriously competitive nature and – in popularly perceived student culture – the willingness to push boundaries.
It is perhaps for this same reason that the group most vulnerable to developing a gambling addiction is males aged 16-24.
Four per cent of those who have gambled in the past year developed a serious gambling problem.
Gambling as an industry has found ever more insidious ways of permeating the lives of the vulnerable over the past decade with online bingo, poker and roulette becoming a new phenomenon.
It seems as though now more than ever the polemic of the gambling addicted student is becoming more and more common.
Everyone appears to have a story about a friend who took the risk and lost out on hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds for their misadventure.
But is there more to the stories than urban myth and second hand chinese whispers?
One unlucky US student posted on Psychforums.com her story of misfortune which earned her notoriety as she lost $300 in just over an hour on online poker.
Chief Executive of the gambling aware charity helpline GamCare Andy McLellan noted a rise in the number of calls the charity were receiving from students since 2009.
There has been a worrying increase in the number of students calling such helplines when they find themselves overwhelmed by debt after gambling irresponsibly.
According to official statistics kept by GamCare, almost 60,000 adolescents aged between 12-16 may be classed as having a serious gambling problem at any one time.
It is because of this that the charity is seeking to start a campaign which makes gambling addiction and its ramifications a permanent part of the PSHE curriculum in schools.
The charity is believed that this would act as a viable method of preventing young people from being allured by the seemingly glamorous landscape of gambling.
McLellan explained some of the things which may cause students to resort to or seek thrills from the world of virtual gambling.
“You’re away from home; it may well be the first time you’re managing your own money,” he says.
“Sometimes it can mean that looking at gambling can appear to be a way of helping to deal with other problems you have encountered.”
Another reason the thrill of the addiction consumes almost instantly is yet more scientific than McLellan’s explanation.
Compulsive gambling bears a relation with chemicals in the brain, and in particular a hormone called Dopamine; the same hormone which urges people to pursue things which provide pleasure such as food and sex.
Dopamine is one of the key hormones which tempt people to gamble and it is produced more when the brain perceives there is an incentive for a reward in an activity – for example a big cash prize for a dangerous bet.
However not all gambling is as treacherous, it can sometimes turn a good night into a great one for students.
To celebrate the end of exams this year, Management student Chris after a night out at ROAR paid a visit to Grosvenor G casino for some spontaneous gambling.
“I went in with £40 and was just playing roulette for a while,” says Chris, “slowly building it up really.”
Chris was lucky and walked away with £270 on the night. “Biggest win I’ve ever had by a long way. I don’t go often at all though maybe once every few months,” he says.
Cautionary tales of gambling still exist in their bountiful numbers though in varying extremes.
One Newcastle University student studying a degree in Maths thought he could beat the odds by mastering the statistics, with severe consequences to his wallet.
Within a year he had amassed debts of nearly £7,000 maxing out not only his student overdraft but two other credit cards he applied for as well.
Then there is the even more haunting and real threat that gambling is a problem which extends its reach beyond the university career as a recent article in The Guardian charted how it is being used as a method of paying of university debts.
While there is no way to know whether the hand you have is lucky or not, it is an addictive game of chance in which the benefits and pitfalls depend entirely on how much you are willing to bet. Would you bet your student loan?