Honestly idk if I have the gene, but I do have anxiety and that seems to be enough.
Wait, is this a post about adblockers?
I feel a simlar way in that when the police are always taking it in itself, watching, seeting me up, and so I have to walk through the minefield exploding below when I walk pass the middle school I live here next to on everyday. Soneyime multiple time a day. It such!
I was in Chess Club at school (I know, I know, quite the jock!). We played chess. Then we got bored of chess and played backgammon. And backgammon without a bet is dull, so we started gambling. Then gambling became the point of playing. So we moved on to poker.
I remember one poker hand. The deck was made up of about five different packs of cards. Jokers, black twos, one-eyed jacks, bedside queens, and suicide kings were all wild. I ended up with a hand of five aces. Two were real aces, three were wild cards. I had to raise. I mean, how can you not raise with five aces? What is the point of playing poker if you don’t raise with five aces?
Sadly, two other people also had five aces and one of them had three real aces and only two wild cards so they won the hand.
I lost £20 on that single hand and absolutely hated every single moment of playing it because somehow I knew, deep down, that I was going to lose. That was a lot of money for me back then and there were other, far better things I could have dropped it on - LPs were about £5 back then, video games £10.
But, it was a great early lesson on the ‘gotta keep going’ mindset of the gambler combined with the certainty that I was going to lose my money. I’m glad it happened, despite the short term remorse I felt immediately afterwards. I’m just not a gambler. One of the other kids from that same game went on to owe someone else £300 by the time we left school.
I’ve been to casinos a couple of times but took some good advice with me. Think about how much you’d be happy to spend on a night out. If you were going to an arena concert, or the theatre, or a flash sit-down meal, how much would you pay for the night? Think about a casino in the same way. You take a set amount of money which you’re going to ‘spend’ on entertainment. Once you’ve lost all of that, you leave the casino. If you find youself up on the night, hurrah.
What kind of nonsense poker has that many wild cards
The kind of nonsense poker that 14-year olds play with a deck made of four or five different (and not necessarily complete) packs of cards. That’s what kind. It was mostly for pennies and therefore silly fun. This game was different.
I played poker with a group recently and they were trying to make bs wild cards before each hand, like fives and eights are wild, and other stupid shit. I just folded every hand and somehow I’m the asshole. I didn’t complain or even comment, I just folded. Apparently it’s a fun way to play for some people, I think it’s stupid af and had no interest in participating.
It’s dumb af if you like playing poker. If you like playing card games with a 52 card deck like crazy 8s or whatever, it can be fun.
The childish fun police are now en route to your location. Your crime: seriosity! Your punishment: 260 card pickup. Drop and give me 260!
No judgement, I can see how it came off that way though.
I like crazy 8s and rummy and stuff like that, but they’re in a different category of fun.
Poker is a game of broken information, where you try to decode your opponent’s hand based off of their actions in relation to the board state and future possibilities, and what you know of their own personal style.
Wild cards introduce RNG that throws the entire core game loop of poker out the window. People are free to enjoy it but it’s extremely rare for people who play the game regularly to want wild cards in their games. I can’t think of anyone in all my years of playing to be honest but I’m sure they exist. I would never play a game with cash with wild cards, what’s the point? And I can’t imagine wanting to play a free game with wild cards with anyone but kids.
Wild cards+cash, I might as well play craps or any other gambling game in the casino, and then at least I get the fun of watching crazy superstitious people. Poker is NOT gambling, but there is an element of chance of course.
Hope that helps clear it up.
Not the point of your story, but when the hell were LPs and video games that cheap? I would think that any time that LPs were that cheap would be before video games even existed.
Early 1980s. LPs from Woolies, video games from Boots or WH Smiths (I think mostly Mastertronic titles for £2).
More than once I swapped the £1.99 price sticker on a budget game for the £9.99 price sticker on a premium game, mostly in Boots or WH Smiths in Dumfries. Fun bonus fact. This was in the days before EPOS systems and barcode readers at the checkout. Only a bored teenager on the till between me and illicit Commodore 64 glory. I do still wonder if anyone ever bought any of the cheap games for the full ten quid though.
Note: not all Mastertronic games were bad. I loved Kikstart, Finders Keepers, KP Skips Action Biker with Clumsy Colin (I had to look that one up), and The Last V8 - though I think maybe the Last V8 was in their premium £2.99 range.
Bollocks. 99% of gamblers stop before they win big. Maximum bet every time. Go big or go home. Just need to secure that one win, then all of the sunken costs will have made sense!
Seriously though, I once bought 20 quid worth of Overwatch loot boxes during playing I felt exactly the same way playing a slot machine. I have been once in my life to a casino because a friend wanted to go. I played the slot machine for 30 quid in total. Both after the Overwatch loot boxes and the slot machine I felt exactly this same mix of anger and shame. But during it was the exact same mentality of, hey, if I just continue, I can win something I want. The realisation came after. And so, by thinking about this experience, I essentially stayed away from gambling for good. Gambling, be it loot boxes, slot machines, casinos or anything else are a cancer upon society, keeping people poor and preying off the hopes and dreams of people with problems.
The people who can least afford it are the ones with the most ‘hope’. Gambling companies prey on hope.
I recently learned that, with perfect play at certain tables, you can cut the house edge in blackjack down to like 0.5% and potentially even give yourself a slight edge with advantage play. I’d be worried, if I had the gene, but I’m just interested in the fun, breezy, hobbyist way, not in the sick, out-of-control way.
Correct, blackjack is pretty much the only way you can make money reliably at US casinos, if you study and learn how to do it, which takes a lot of time and practice, and being in the right parts of the country.
But it’s so BORING. I don’t understand who can just grind grind grind blackjack for a living.
I love blackjack. Sometimes ill play 4 seperate hands against eachother just by myself when im bored. I dont tend to gamble though. I just love chance. I also like to just roll dice to see what happens (its usually numbers)
Hey if it works for you, go for it. Blackjack used to be my fallback game in a casino when I was too drunk to think straight enough for real strategy.
What would be a “real strategy” game? Poker? Craps? Blackjack is the only one I ever felt “good enough” at to play for money.
Blackjack is pretty formulaic about the best move to make depending on what cards you get and what the dealer’s up card is. You can look it up, it’s a chart. Memorize it, walk in, and you’re in business. A lot of casinos will even give you a card to have at the table with all the moves on it if you ask. The only real variance is that casinos use multiple decks so it messes with the probabilities, so you’re always at a very slight disadvantage even if you play “perfectly.” Counting cards can swing that last couple% points of probability in your favor.
So there’s no thought or strategy to it. If X, do Y. It’s pretty easy to learn, so it’s very beginner friendly. Also great for when I’m hammered and can’t play anything that I need to have mental skills for.
Craps is gambling. There’s infinite numbers of “strategies” but they’re all just different ways to bet, just more complicated versions of “put 100 on black” at a roulette table, and none of them will beat the house over time.
Poker requires tons of thought to play well, and there’s no skill ceiling. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a strategy game but there are strategies. It’s an adversarial puzzle game of broken information, it’s not gambling.
Ah yes, the intense strategy of craps and slots. Poker maybe but even so, the main winning strat is just know when to walk away. Everything else is just chance.
Poker is what I was referring to as requiring thought, yes. But more complicated games like craps can also be too much if you’re hammered, especially at a busy table.
There are those that “enjoy” grinding in MMOs like Runescape.
Number go up I guess?
Thing is, if you win at blackjack too much they kick you out and ban you (or in the old days, took you into a back room to beat you up).
I bet I dont have this gene
You don’t have funny gene too.
Wanna bet?
I see you’re good at recycling.
You get ads?
I make ass, reel good ads to, like this one! All the curious soles want to cum to my island, not associated wit other well-know islands
I have a story idea, for a training program for spies.
As an exercise, a trainee is told to enter a poker game, read the expressions of the other attendees, and win the pot. The agency can give them a near unlimited budget, but they’re advised to pull out if things are not going well.
Then, they enter the game, win maybe one hand; but after eight or nine hands it would become increasingly obvious there’s some serious cheating going on, and everyone at the table is in on it except the agent. They would never be allowed to win, and cannot complete their mission.
Maybe some trainees would relent to force to get the cash, which would be arranged to make a splashy headline about “The agency’s brightest caught cheating at poker, attempts to murder club owner!”
The lesson there would be to dispel feelings of invincibility, or pursuit of perfection, by the agent; to get them to accept there will be bad, failing circumstances they need to pull out from. Learning when to fold, and then to walk away from the table, is honestly a pretty important life skill.
The ol’ Kobayashi Maru
Never once in my life have I felt the appeal of gambling.
All I needed to learn is that statistically, the house always wins, and that was that.
A friend once insisted on dragging me out to a casino, and I came up with a hare-brained plan for blackjack. I decided to double my bet every time until I won. But only up to as much money as I was willing to lose, because there’s a low chance for this strategy to go poorly very quickly.
I made enough money to pay for the entire trip, and then I never gambled again for the rest of my life. So that’s my story of how I came out ahead.
I have quite the similar tale. And that was that for me as well.
Same here. Went with friends mainly so I could get free AC and free food for the day and put a $10 bill into a slot. Won $999.99 and never cared to gamble again lol
Same. Went to a casino once, pulled a slot machine and won $30. Then lost $30. Never returned to one.
I do enjoy being gifted scratch-off tickets, though, but I won’t spend my own money on them (unless as gifts to others). I manage at a grocery store and I’m often surrounded by people who aren’t particularly wise with money. Every time there’s a big lottery drawing coming up I get to hear from everyone how “THE JACKPOT IS UP TO 30-MILLION NOW! YOU BETTER GET A TICKET! YA CAN’T WIN IF YA DON’T PLAY!”
Yeah, and I don’t burn money if I don’t play, either…
“THE JACKPOT IS UP TO 30-MILLION NOW! YOU BETTER GET A TICKET! YA CAN’T WIN IF YA DON’T PLAY!”
I join in the lottery pools at work, not because I think we’ll win, but because I can’t bear to imagine the horror of having everybody at work win the fucking lottery but me.
Gambling is like alcohol, some is fun but you need to learn your limits.
If you go into gambling thinking ‘I’m gonna make 100 dollars!’ you’re gambling wrong. If you go into gambling thinking ‘I’m gonna spend 100 dollars.’ you’re gambling correctly.
That’s exactly how I treated my trip. “This trip is going to cost 400 dollars and not a penny more.” The fact that it didn’t was just a happy coincidence.
The most risk I ever take with my money is an indexed investment fund and even that feels a bit much at the moment.
I was down in winter once and decided I’d try out the whole gambling thing. Put 50 into some website and lost it all on a shit game.
Why do people get addicted to that? I experienced no joy and the outcome was exactly what I expected.
I tried the online poker thing a little bit. With friends IRL it’s fun but online it’s boring. People work it like it’s their job.
I tried an IRL casino once, won a bunch of money on the first machine and I was thinking I’m done, but had to wait for my friends so I kept doubling a small bet on black on roulette. It landed on red 9 times in a row. It’s all a scam
The Martingale system is the definitive example of gambler’s fallacy. There’s definitely a “smart” way to gamble, but it generally requires games with a skill element, which casinos specifically avoid for this reason.
People are dumb animals.
Sometimes I’m scrolling through Twitch.tv and come across the virtual casina category. Always some streams with people doing some random slot machine game and raving about it. I understand nothing about it.
I’ve heard a lot of the times the odds are stacked in the streamers favour. It’s worth the hit for the casino to get people to join.
They’re also generally not playing with their own money.
The good sites will give you a little bit of your money back so it doesn’t seem like complete bull shit and have a lot of “near misses” too.
It can also prey on desperate people who might not usually try gambling but maybe feel like it’s their best option at the time.
But if you’re even the slightest bit aware of statistics, near misses are exactly the same as complete misses. Seems strange that anyone educated falls for it. Desperation I can understand, especially these days when traditional ways of building wealth are almost as bad as just leaving cash under your mattress.
Because in most aspects of human endeavor close to success means try again. You may say that that’s true, but only for games of genuine skill, and yes, but part of why gambling fucks with our brains so much is that for a lot of people that difference isn’t instinctive.
I won a tiny bit on the first game (like £10 up maybe) but at no point did I believe that a game of odds would possibly allow me to win anything meaningful.
I would equate the experience to burning a £50 note.
stupid, the answer is stupid
at least my gambling comes with animated titty first!
I probably dont have the gene, but I dont feel cool for not clicking an ad. What I mostly feel is rage that the promotions are so obviously geared towards getting the potentially addicted to try it by offering $100’s of free (bonus) bets.
And at the end they have the audacity to mention a helpline.
I’m pretty sure they’re legally required to display the helpline. No idea how the requirement has survived the current U.S. admin so far, but if these companies had their way, their victims would not be getting help
Probably because Trump’s current casino of choice is Polymarket.
If the helpline hurt their bottom line, they’d have found a way around it by now.
I think that is what angers me so much, is they mention the helpline and suddenly thier hands are clean of any responsibility.
No, that’s how it feels to have a pi-hole with expansive blocklists and a wireguard VPN so I can access the pi-hole ad blocking from my phone wherever I am. I never see ads, even on my phone. uBlock and other browser based adblockers are great for computers, they’re less effective for phones whereas network adblocking like Pi-holes are super effective on phones.
Oh and also not having the gambling gene.
Not saying pi hole isn’t great, but ublock origin works pretty well on Firefox on phone
Bit depressing to think that there are people having their lives (and often the lives of those around them) ruined by gambling… Even more depressing is the fact that there are companies freely exploiting the previous fact. What a time to be alive…
If you know the basics of probability theory, you can calculate the expexted value in most of the games. For roulette with two zeros, the expected value of your win is 95% of your bet, so it doesn’t make any sense.
If you want positive return gambling, then you have to wait and that’s no fun.
If you want a positive return on gambling, you have to own the casino.
But if I buy shares in the casino, then I still have to wait for a return!
Your finances should be as boring as possible.
If you want fun, there are some pretty great hobbies, video games, books, movies, animation, and other media and pastimes out there that cost less than gambling.
Yeah if your finances are exciting then you’re either taking massive risks or you’re investing in companies that feel it’s worth spending money that could go to investments or dividends to ensure investors are excited. Either way it’s a bad position to be in
