Anyway, they had a scene where they were showing the different games that were being played in the casino. Things like a bunch of Saudi princes playing an extremely high stakes game of Candyland, etc.

One of the games was called the black hole or something like that. Anyway, people would step up to the table and the guy working the table would just sweep up their money into a hole and tell them they lost. It had a constant stream of people walking up to the table to lose money.

It's more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.

Let me tell you a story. Fifteen years ago, a person named n4r9 made £10 at the blackjack table.

They turned around, left the casino, and never returned.

Now they're making 25 times that amount every day they step into the office.

And do you know who that person was?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ

IIRC Mafia! was a parody of the Godfather series, or the mobster movies of the 70s-80s in general.

I don't know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it's usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like "[you gamble? don't you have more fulfilling things to do?]"

The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don't need to gamble, but it's not like most people who gamble actually believe it's the path to profit, it seems like there's something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).

Which isn't exactly wrong - if you're a retail investor who isn't using satellite footage of parking lots, picking individual stocks is closer to gambling.

Investing in the aggregate is less gambling.

Investing in the stock market as a whole is just betting the game will be played.

With individual stocks, you are just betting on horses.

With hedging, you are betting on economic sectors (which can be as large as the whole world economic system) growing infinitely.

And regarding systems growing infinitely in limited environments, I have some bad news for you. Some would call them cancerous.

Broadly, though sports in particular is something different bubbles care more or less about, I'd say your perspective is entirely foreign to me. My experience is that the more intelligent groups I'm around are vastly more interested in predicting things and putting money behind their predictions.

I think this is wrong. The most skilled poker player at the table has an edge and is likely to win over time. I don’t think there is a similar thing in sports betting.

Granted, cash poker is all about sitting at the right table. It’s really the poker tournament structure that legitimizes it.

Either that, or its because the race was fixed.+

My impression is that it’s a scoring system for competition with his (wealthy and successful) siblings; the dollar values are an afterthought.

Rich people gamble. Poor people gamble. Everyone can get hooked; casinos are great at that!

I spent a couple nights in Vegas because my 13yo was interested in seeing it. I watched what was happening in the casinos, and wondered if I was missing something. I read a bit about craps, because I didn't really understand the bets people were making.

Reading gambling forums is just depressing. Many people understand it's just luck and are doing it for fun, but there are so many people who think that you can get "good" at rolling dice. People talk about winning big on a roll and then "reinvesting" their winnings at the table.

Legalized gambling is just a giant machine for separating people of all classes from whatever money they have.

You were missing the dopamine hits.

The highs and lows and 'drama' and 'excitement' of winning (and losing) is what people tend to go for. That's why it can become an addiction: wanting another hit.

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-brain-get...

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/

It is fun though, the casinos especially have gotten very good at making it entertaining. Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.

I dunno, people who do the former seem a lot happier the next day.

If you enjoy blackjack, or poker, or craps, regardless of winning or losing, then it's fine to gamble. If you're only having fun from the exhileration from the large winnings, then it's not "fun", but thrill seeking, just like skydivers or extreme sports. Except for those thrill seeking sports, there's often safety measures in place.

Never been back. The only gambling I do now is buying a $2 powerball ticket every time the jackpot goes above $1B. The momentary fantasy is worth the two bucks.

With small sums ($5), it's too easy to slip into the same mindset after your buddy offers you a beer (since it's basically paid for)

In high school we combatted this with a $20 buy in. Now we do a $50 buy in. Sure, it kinda sucks to lose. But the money is just going back to your friends, and a dinner + drinks out on the town is likely to cost the same. Even when you lose you still had a fun night. And when you win it's even better!

Of course, we are only playing once every few months.. so it's really not a big issue financially.

As long as you don't try to define your terms.

Unless you're so woke that you think testosterone is a social construct, yes it's still very ok

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653580/#:~:tex....

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0907352106

The first one you really didn't read, did you? "In contrast to received wisdom regarding testosterone and risk, the present data provide the first robust evidence for a nonlinear association between economic preferences and levels of endogenous testosterone."

"Despite the common view that high testosterone levels lead to risky decisions across numerous domains, we found that testosterone has a quadratic relationship with economic risk preferences: Individuals with low and high levels of testosterone (within their gender) were risk and ambiguity neutral, whereas individuals with intermediate levels of testosterone were risk and ambiguity averse."

I find it funny how you're willing to offhandedly dismiss a paper because "economists, not real scientists", but seemingly have no problems with the field psychology which had the replication crisis and "experiment on a bunch of freshmen psychology students and extrapolate to the whole population" studies.

I normally target an estrogen level similar to an average woman and a testosterone level between the female and male reference ranges. I'm able to adjust the mix on the order of days when it suits me, and there absolutely is a difference. People who know me well can usually tell what mix I'm running.

That's why this is called gambling _addiction_. If you understand the existence of other behavioral addictions, it's not so different.

This what scares me the most in that trend

Nothing good comes from it. It only increases the wealth gap.

IDK about in the US, but in Canada the lotteries do fund a lot of charitable things but I wasn't able to find a good stat about the proportion. Also at the end of a day it just a waste of human potential (running the corporation and wasting human hopes on useless things instead of potentially beneficial things)

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2023/11/6/23931877/alcohol...

Of course they could have externalities too, but their blast radius is mostly contained to their near circle of family instead of the entire society.

So to you there's no difference between someone voluntarily and consciously choosing to wear a diaper so he can continue doing an activity for longer without toilet breaks(some video gamers do that too), and someone who is soiled himself because his mind can't control the bowel movements due to being fried by hard drugs?

Yeh, they're technically both addicts, but gambling addicts tend to harass less people and cause less overall ER calls, petty crime, trash, feces in the neighborhoods, than hard drug addicts.

One is a much greater annoyance to general people on the street than the other. What actual arguments do you have to refute this other than just calling it splitting hairs?

You tried to establish mutual exclusivity between conscious decisions and mental illness.

I refuted that.

Never said the impact on society of your examples were similar.

The same illegal drugs used by the lower echelons of society is the same as the ones used in higher echelons of society. You’d be hard pressed to find folks not using hard drugs in the Fortune 500 list.

The difference is the availability of drugs. Many rich people never struggle to find high quality drugs. That is not the same for everyone.

Oh for sure, the big difference is that rich people can afford to go into the best private rehab whenever they cross the line, whereas working class people tend to end up broke, homeless and sick.

sports betting, table games, etc: gambler motivated by excitement, somehow thinks they are going to win and make money. often racks up massive losses due to desire to "win it all back" as you say. this is stereotypically the "male" style of gambling addiction. like your friends.

slot machines, video poker: the psychology is very different. the heaviest slot machine players don't have any expectation that they are going to come out ahead. they play the game partly because it puts them into a soothing flow state (though in many cases it is just compulsive behavior with no good motivation). losing money overtime is understood as the cost of playing.

slot machine gambling is stereotypically associated with women. you wouldn't see this either because it's a more solitary activity (unlike table games/sports betting) but it can be very dark -- I think probably worse than the classic gambling addiction.

i think the gender distinctions are real although obviously it's not hard and fast (plenty of male slot machine players, plenty of women losing money placing bets). i think it's probably partly brain differences and partly who casinos/bookies vs. video slot companies choose to market to.

They should rather bet on the stock market where the expactation value is well into positive territory.

Explain to them that they not have just lost an avarage $600 of their live-time earnings, but over $70,000, if they had invested the money in the stock market for retirement. If we assume that the avarage S&P 500 return with dividends reinvested is somewhat above 10%, as it was in the past, investing $600 now would yield them over $70,000 for their retirement in 50 years. The real value must be adjusted somewhat due to taxes and inflation. But in addition, investing in the stock market provides one with some sort of an inflation insurance for free.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/average-stock-marke...

vs.

A lifelong proclivity to quantize, metrify, and reduce all social interactions to transactional objects that exist soley to be leveraged.

The latter also happens to drug addicts, but the it is a psychological phenomenon that can be stymied with medication.

Unfortunately, no analogous chemical exists (yet!) for the similarly inflected urge to gamble.

Edit, my school is the top link when I searched for a reference, I guess they included it after the casinos went into Atlantic City. Generalized Gambler's Ruin Problem - Rutgers Math https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/EM20/GamblersRuin.p...

Lots of my women friends do various scratch and win tickets and joke around that winning is the only way they're going to be able to retire.

At the core of it both groups clearly feel that the economy is so broken that it's no longer to achieve the outcomes they want through normal means and only some short cut of luck will get them there.

I like in NYC, so achieving the typical cost of drinks is not hard.

And the house edge at a casino isn’t THAT bad. Eg if you’re playing blackjack at $20/hand, a house edge of 1% means you can play 500 hands for your $100.

Now they cut back on that, I park elsewhere and they don’t even get a chance at my $20 on red anymore.

It's interesting the types of people who can walk into a casino like you and I and say OK, $20, that's all I'm spending. We lose that and we say good night. Other people… They say no, I can win this, and so they go and spend another $20.

That decision point - to continue or withdraw - is utterly fascinating.

People who can't stop are possible gambling addicts already, or, are about to become ones without even noticing by themselves.

And further, I classify myself to: I wouldn't even go to a casino except it's the money I found right before it's entrance I want to spend there.

And that actually minimize the possibility that I'll ever will make the experience how it is to feel lucky/lose/win in a series, minimizing my understanding of such a situation. And that's may be is the point we don't understand how it is, not to be able to leave after 20 bucks are lost, but rather try to get it back. Just a thought.

(I compare it to an alcoholic. One alcohol addict, because too often & too much & too good feelings. One occasional drinker will never go over the threshold. One who never drinks can't even understand how it is to want to get drunk.)

This seems like funny logic.

My local provincial lottery can range from $5 to $50 million. If I were to accept that I could possibly win, anything in that range is a ridiculous sum of money for me - easily more than I am likely to make for the remainder of my career.

I know I won't win if I play, but if I thought I might I can't figure out why $5M is gambling, but $50M would be an investment. Either way, it's absolutely life changing "quit my job tomorrow" money.

and conditional on you being the sole winner too (unless the lottery is guaranteed to only have one winner).

Of course, calculating EV is very hard, so people just draw a line in the sand - "if the payout is $50MM or over, I will buy a ticket, otherwise, I won't".

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

It makes sense in statistics, but as a single person with a single ticket, it's much less relevant. The EV of a ticket is over 100% of the cost, but that doesn't matter for 99.9999% of the players and only matters for the very very few with the correct numbers.

The casino can live with a 0.01% edge because they are conducting millions of games. You're not playing that many times.

If the lottery gets too big, then it's an investment = if your gambling gets to big, then it's an investment. If you do big gambling, then it's an investment. The law of bigger figures :) the often you try, the higher the chances (whereas the chances stay unchanged here)

It's not about the lottery and it's pots itself (like euro jackpot, USA Powerball.. etc)

By the time I’d slowly bled away my $20 and gave up, she was still there.

I don’t really get skiing, it’s a very expensive and dangerous activity to me, yet to others it’s a whole lifestyle. Fine by me, put knives on your feet and fall down a hill. Life is short, find your dumb thrills, it’s fine.

You don’t need to gamble yourself, that’s not the point, just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.

> Losing a few hundred dollars every now and then is fine

Agreed. I think everyone has that freedom to do so. I'm just commenting on the gambling trend I see in my peer group. That said, a few hundred dollars means different things to different people, and without diving in, these friends should not be losing a few hundred dollars every month.

> just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.

I feel like there's some hostility in this comment. I'm sharing an anecdote anonymously on an online forum in a relevant thread. I don't have these conversations with our mutuals.

however, if we ever came up with such an indicator the gambling companies would be quick to campbells-law it to death so people would ignore it

I see this among a fair number of engineers in their 30s, 40s, and one pushing 50. I don't think many of the older crowd are doing it, but maybe they just don't talk about it. I have no idea how well they do, but I'm sure they lose on average. Bets are often in the hundreds of dollars if I'm hearing them correctly.