MIDDLETOWN, Conn. — "Fast Eddie" Felton thought he'd found a gold mine when, as a kid, his father took him to the racetrack.

"My dad went nine for nine that day. He won every race," the 28-year-old East Hartford man recalled.

As soon as Felton was old enough, he picked up his own gambling habit. He was "'in remission," he says, when the Mashantucket Pequot Indian tribe opened the Foxwoods High Stakes Bingo and Casino last February.

"I took $100 down to Foxwoods and ran it up to $8,000. I was feeling invincible," he said. "I was going to make a million dollars."

He didn't.

When the binge was over, he had gone through all his credit cards, written some rubber checks and didn't even have enough money to make it back home.

Felton's is a familiar story at a time when a wave of gambling fever is cresting across the nation. Many are drowning.

In the decade since Atlantic City, N.J., joined Nevada as a casino mecca, gambling casinos have sprung up in South Dakota, Colorado, Iowa and Illinois. Riverboat gambling now is available in Iowa, Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana. New Orleans is getting ready to open a casino, and efforts are under way to build casinos in Chicago and Hartford, Conn.

"We're in the midst of an extremely rapid shift in availability and acceptability of legal gambling in this country," said Jean Falzon, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling in New York City.

"In addition to problem gamblers, many of whom have gotten caught up in illegal sports betting, we're beginning to get a lot of calls on our national hotline from clinicians who are seeing problem gamblers for the first time. They don't know how to treat them, so they come to us for help."

She said her organization, which acts as an information clearinghouse, is constantly holding clinics for mental health professionals who are beginning to see people like Eddie Felton, people ruining their lives because they can't control their compulsive gambling.

As did Felton, many desperate gamblers wind up at Gamblers Anonymous, which now has some 800 chapters around the country.

"To give you an idea how fast the problem is growing, we had roughly 550 meetings in 1989," said Karen H., a spokeswoman at the national service office of Gamblers Anonymous in Los Angeles.

Rachel Volberg, a sociologist who specializes in problem gambling, said problem gambling tends to be most prevalent in cities and states with large concentrations of young, undereducated males.