He ambled away in decrepit shoes to put his coins in the poker machines. He came back a couple of hours later and asked me to break another note for him.

I reminded him he had made me promise I wouldn’t give him change on another large note.

He pleaded and my supervisor came over. The supervisor said something like, ‘‘the customer is always right, so break the note’’.

I suggested the customer was right the first time. We argued the toss and I was shown the door.

We could say that this old bloke was perhaps lonely and couldn’t control the gambling urge and lost his pension each week to the machines rather than pay his bills and buy nourishing food.

We could say that - but it isn’t the whole story. The 200,000 problem gamblers, research shows, are victim of machines designed to create addictions.

Problem gamblers lose around $4.7 billion a year. Overall, around $11 billion is lost each year.

Research shows that when the poker machine game has just one symbol missing suggesting ‘‘a near win’’ and the bells are ringing, lights are flashing, icons are moving across the screen, most people feel the possibilities of winning through their racing heart and sweaty palms. When this happens the machine has done what it was designed to do.

Many simultaneous bets that are part of one poker machine game can include small wins, but here’s the crunch: despite there being an overall loss, many players have a sense of winning.

The ‘‘near misses’’ and small wins create the excitement that is addictive.

That in turn reinforces the urge to keep trying to win again, according to Canadian academic Professor Kevin Harrigan.

When you combine this onslaught of ‘‘almost winning’’ stimulation with high bet/high payout machines and the potential for 350 bets in half an hour, little wonder the gambler’s brain and body responses are in high arousal and logic leaves the room.