One of the many things being a cheapskate protects me from.
You’d be surprised. The biggest gambler I know is the biggest cheapskate.
Addicted to money in all forms
They should get that into the DSM
On my honeymoon 7 years ago my wife and I took a very expensive 13-day Mediterranean cruise on a huge ship with a casino. One afternoon I went there and spent $300 over about an hour.
I still kick myself for throwing that money away.
Best thing that could have ever happened to you. If you won it ‘big’ you’d have ended up losing way more than 300 bucks. A moderately priced lesson.
I went to the casino with friends around 12 years ago. We agreed to get a few coins (around 20€ or so) at the beginning, play them and leave once we run out of coins.
Everyone lost their coins except me, I left with like 27€. It was the only time I went to the casino.
So now I can never go in a casino again ! I have a perfect record, I’ve always won against the casino and I intend to keep it this way my whole life.
One time a coworker asked me and another friend to go to the casino with her, her mom and her boyfriend after work and me and my friend said yes. We arrive and when we walk in we are told “if you sign up for our players card you get 20 dollars preloaded for free”… What the hell why not, free 20 dollars. Everyone besides me and my friend had one already so we said we’ll meet you inside once we get the card.
So we go to the counter and fill out their one page form, take maybe 10 minutes being generous. We get the card and go to walk onto the floor, keep in mind this place only had machine games, no tables or anything and my coworker is walking out with her family. “what’s up? I thought you were playing.” she responds “nah, we are leaving, we already lost $1500”
Somehow they lost $500 each in under 10 minutes… I still don’t know how.
Those $10 slots can get ya
Having shitty luck helps, too.
An important thing to keep in mind when gambling is that luck isn’t real. You can get lucky, but you can’t be lucky. It’s all statistics, and if you play long enough the casino always wins. Odds are a few people gain some money, but more money is always lost than gained, and you’ll eventually be a loser.
While that is true, also due to the nature of randomness and big numbers, there will be someone out there that wins an abnormal seeming amount. Like with the lottery. You can’t win, but someone always does.
I went to a casino once because my roommate at the time wanted to go for a bit. He even spotted me $10 because I had no cash on me. Turned that $10 in to $40, paid back the roommate and left with the $30 and never went back.
When i was in Australia, i was kinda surprised how widespread gambling was. There were some gambling machines in almost every pub. I put 5 dollars in a machine and won 50. Never ever gambled again.
There’s a study on this… I o py remember it pretty vaguely, but the tl;dr was that if people win at gambling it doesn’t hold much appeal – the initial drive to continue gambling only comes after losses. Something about ‘making up for’ anything you lost drives the addiction behaviour far more. This struck me initially as kinda counter-intuitive (you’d think that people were more motivated by behaviours with positive outcomes, right?) so it always stuck in my head…
Google sunk cost fallacy
No
but you already invested so much effort into this
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New response just dropped
You sank
Its not so bad in Australia these days, depends on which state you’re tin too but yeah, fuck gamblibg.
Did they manage to get pokies out of all the AFL clubs yet? Last I paid attention, I think there might have been a couple of holdouts.
It varies state to state with NSW being the worst still:
It was quite weird to see. People just staring at a machine for hours. Did they change the law?
Some people are built differently.
I have no impulsion to gamble either. But one of my family members? So much money burned at casinos.
I have it the same, but with beer.
You’re only an alcoholic if you can’t afford it, but drink anyway.
He’s not an alcoholic. Alcoholics go to meetings.
Seriously though, if anyone feels they MUST do some optional thing its likely time to take a break. That goes equally for something you consume or something you do.
Quitters always quit before they hit the jackpot. Respect the hustle! Sell the wife, sell the kids.
If you do the math, there is literally 0% chance of winning in most gambling. Especially because of the fact plenty of them are rigged.
Arguably the safer bet if one wants to gamble is stock investing, but only after doing due research and willing to be patient to see its results. For those willing to do CFD stock trading, the person would require not just research and patience, but also nerves of steel not to panic.
But I think that most addicted gamblers don’t like the win, they just want the dopamine hit of playing.
I had friends who used to play online poker in uni. They’d have 5 or 6 screens open at once and just play the dominant strategy for each hand. Was good for some extra beer money.
Also work with a dude who is a former professional poker player. Although when he explained his schedule to me it sounded a lot like a regular job. Good years he could make £40k out of it but not crazy money.
I guess poker is somewhat more predictable compared to other gambling but I am not too familiar with it. But in racing and dice games, plenty of games are rigged or that there simply isn’t chance of winning in many, if not most, bets. I remember doing statistics and probability in school, and one of the correct answers was like zero or close to zero chance. I asked my teacher if that means literally zero chance of winning. She mentioned that that is indeed the case but most gamblers don’t realise this.
With poker the house takes a “rake” from each hand so they get a certain % of whatever is being gambled for hosting. Since the game involved skill they have to do this to ensure they are making money regardless of who wins.
Pretty much every other game is like you describe; people being bad at maths and conditioned to keep going with inconsistently timed rewards.
Isn’t blackjack a game you can also beat the house more easily than other games?
If you are good at math you can be very succesfull with black jack. However casinos dont really like this and this might get you kicked out. I have also heard, that they use multiple decks to make counting cards harder, but I dont know if that’s true.
I’ve seen this before, and even when I first saw it, threw up some red flags about it being real. Still funny tho
Lived it before. Casinos exist to fuck with your head. What’s been illuminating for me is the P2W video games that adopt so many of the casino strategies to goad people into constantly feeding money into the machine. Once you start picking up on the queues and triggers coming off your cell phone, you can’t unsee it when you’re standing on the floor of the Bellagio.
I spent like $2000 playing Star Trek Online. Lockbox keys, lifetime sub, all sorts of ships, items, and boosts. They introduced Mark XIV equipment with a gambling-based crafting system. You could spend dilithium (which you could buy with $) to have a chance to upgrade your equipment.
The straw that broke me? Their shitty customer service. I wanted to gear up an alt and give them the Jem’Hadar battleship with the Jem’hadar attack ship so they could launch the attack ships from it as fighters, which you could do if you had both. Problem was some ships were account bound, and some ships were character bound, and I lost track of which was which. I ended up claiming the box for one of them on the wrong character. Easy fix, right? Well not every MMO is run to the same standard as Blizzard. Craptic absolutely refused to help me. So I cut ties.
It was after that, when I experienceced withdrawal, that I read about gambler’s fallacy and sunken cost fallacy and I really analyzed why it hurt so much to leave behind my addiction. I never went back, because I know that whole game is run like a casino. They do everything they can to hook you in.
Quitting an addiction is so simple, I’ve quit 100 times.
Also:
“I’m addicted to placebos: I’d quit, but it wouldn’t matter.”
– Steven Wright
