When did y'all draw the line in gambling

[PandaBear]

If you're going to be gambling, at least do it on something where you have some control and where some skill plays into the game, like Black Jack. If you have a good memory for remembering the cards, you can improve the odds enough to make consistent money. Scratchers are pure luck, which is just an imaginary concept.

There are ways to keep the odds high for the house now, they can do multiple decks together and shuffle mid-way, so you cannot just count cards like before. If it works there would have been professionals who live off black jacks, and currently people are better off working min wage jobs in the long run than playing black jacks all day.

 

[PandaBear]

There is a reason some people are blacklisted from casinos. They beat the odds by counting cards and actually make a profit.

More likely they are money laundering as they are just there to lose money and launder.

 

[PandaBear]

I am a CPA. As I prepare income tax returns I see the W-Gs from people who have won over $600 in a casino. I almost never see less in losses than the winnings. It depresses me that people waste their money that way.

I gamble a little. For example, when Powerball is over $700 million or so, I sometimes remember to buy a ticket. After all, you definitely will not win if you don't buy one. But that is it, one ticket. I have gambled at the casinos in Las Vegas and Laughlin playing craps. When I go completely out of control wild I have lost as much as $40 over the course of an evening of entertainment and free drinks. I have also come out ahead a few dollars on rare occasions. With the higher minimum bets these days, it has lost its allure. If you are losing hundreds of dollars or even thousands, it stops being entertainment.

Lottery is a slightly different mechanism as they pool the non winning from one week to another, so if you only play when the payout is big then you are adjusting your odd to your favor. However, you still can only buy a ticket here and there so you are still likely to lose.

I remember there was once the payout is so big, an investment firm in Australia decided to join in and buy up all the tickets in every single store they can ask to close down and run tickets for them. They ended up only getting 75% of the tickets they want to buy as time run out, and it is still a dangerous move for them as they can lose money if there were 2 winners to split the prize with. I think they end up going multiple millions and they eventually won. This pissed off a lot of people in the state and they finally passed rules to limit how many tickets you can buy at a time, making it "fair" for the casual bread and butter gamblers instead of having an investment firm swoop in when the odd is good and push out the regular players, and eventually damage the system permanently.

 

[atikovi]

More likely they are money laundering as they are just there to lose money and launder.

How would that work, just asking for a friend? If you have $100K from selling drugs, you go to a casino and buy $100,000 in chips, lose $20K, redeem the $80,000 at the end of the day as a check from the casino, then deposit it in your bank as gambling winnings? If it's that easy, why don't all drug dealers do that?

 

[JavierH19]

A little update

So I guess I didn't learn my lesson but that was a good thing today because man I just couldn't leave it there.

I went to the shell and got three tickets each one being $100. First won nothing, immediately felt terrible, second won $500, on the third I won $200. So now I'm at -539 which is less painful than -939.

But man o man I've got the reinvest the $700 winnings for 7 more tickets feeling and it's a feeling I'm trying to shake since I know I should. But what if the 20m winner is just a few tickets away.

 

[GON]

A little update

So I guess I didn't learn my lesson but that was a good thing today because man I just couldn't leave it there.

I went to the shell and got three tickets each one being $100. First won nothing, immediately felt terrible, second won $500, on the third I won $200. So now I'm at -539 which is less painful than -939.

But man o man I've got the reinvest the $700 winnings for 7 more tickets feeling and it's a feeling I'm trying to shake since I know I should. But what if the 20m winner is just a few tickets away.

Javier,

"I didn't learn my lesson but that was a good thing today because man I just couldn't leave it there."

I wish you would have lost. Get this out of your system. Your wins today were not beneficial to your behavioral health.

There are many ways to win in life. Start a business, mentor a young person, fix a senior citizens roof, many things. Gambling is a sure way to lose in life.

 

[Pablo]

A little update

So I guess I didn't learn my lesson but that was a good thing today because man I just couldn't leave it there.

I went to the shell and got three tickets each one being $100. First won nothing, immediately felt terrible, second won $500, on the third I won $200. So now I'm at -539 which is less painful than -939.

But man o man I've got the reinvest the $700 winnings for 7 more tickets feeling and it's a feeling I'm trying to shake since I know I should. But what if the 20m winner is just a few tickets away.

Quit now. Period.

 

[JavierH19]

Quit now. Period.

I'm gonna try.

 

[PandaBear]

A little update

So I guess I didn't learn my lesson but that was a good thing today because man I just couldn't leave it there.

I went to the shell and got three tickets each one being $100. First won nothing, immediately felt terrible, second won $500, on the third I won $200. So now I'm at -539 which is less painful than -939.

But man o man I've got the reinvest the $700 winnings for 7 more tickets feeling and it's a feeling I'm trying to shake since I know I should. But what if the 20m winner is just a few tickets away.

I suggests you learn more about statistics. Your odds of winning each ticket is independent of whether you win or lose in your last ticket. Each new dice roll is independent of the last one.

If you can easily win back what you lost in the last gamble, then that means your odd of winning is also good when you first started, and since everyone has the same chance and odd, everyone's chance of winning is also good.

Since we know this is impossible, this means your chance of winning the next time is also not higher than losing the next time. If you NEED to win then you are in trouble, because chances are, you will lose rather than win.

So I hope my explanation discouraged you from "reinvesting". A real investment has a higher chance of making money than losing, gambling is not.

 

[Dave Hess]

A little update

So I guess I didn't learn my lesson but that was a good thing today because man I just couldn't leave it there.

I went to the shell and got three tickets each one being $100. First won nothing, immediately felt terrible, second won $500, on the third I won $200. So now I'm at -539 which is less painful than -939.

But man o man I've got the reinvest the $700 winnings for 7 more tickets feeling and it's a feeling I'm trying to shake since I know I should. But what if the 20m winner is just a few tickets away.

Open up a Fidelity account and save all that cash you’re burning up today for next year….

 

[RhondaHonda]

I'm gonna try.

If you can’t manage to quit at least keep us updated here, but seriously, quit. Never in my life have I bought a $100 lotto ticket, I’m not even sure they sell them in Missouri.

A friend’s mom won $3.5M on the Missouri lottery. Randomly bought a ticket and moved their retirement up a few years. That’s probably a rare winner’s tale if I had to guess.

 

[javacontour]

If you can’t manage to quit at least keep us updated here, but seriously, quit. Never in my life have I bought a $100 lotto ticket, I’m not even sure they sell them in Missouri.

A friend’s mom won $3.5M on the Missouri lottery. Randomly bought a ticket and moved their retirement up a few years. That’s probably a rare winner’s tale if I had to guess.

This is what I tell people. The lottery isn't my retirement plan. But that handful of times I play when the jackpot is greater than the odds against, it is my EARLY retirement plan.

I have no illusions I'm going to win a big prize.

I know it's irrational.

Yet I'm rational enough to only play when the prize is large.

 

[nickaluch]

Show me a gambler I'll show you a loser

 

[ctechbob]

He probably makes money on the YouTube channel, off other addicts' time and habit (the advertisement targeting gambling addicts by preying on them).

Actually, his channel is pretty small, and even though it is monetized I don't think he's hit the right spot on the algorithm to make it pay. It is more of an experiment for him. He's actually talked about killing it off at the end of the year.

 

[DejaVue]

There are ways to keep the odds high for the house now, they can do multiple decks together and shuffle mid-way, so you cannot just count cards like before. If it works there would have been professionals who live off black jacks,

I'll assume you wrote too quickly there and it came out wrong because of course there have been blackjack pros. I can teach an 8-year-old how to count cards. The hard part is getting away with it in a casino.

Even when they brought in big multi-deck shoes and shuffled early, you could often still track the cards in the shuffle. But then the auto-shuffler machines arrived.

A funny thing about blackjack is the worst blackjack player in the world is still better than the best slot machine player. (Yes, I know there is no skill involved with slot machines.) If we assume a good slot machine still only pays out less than 90% of what you put in, a blackjack player doing everything wrong such as not splitting aces, splitting tens, etc, will still lose less money than the slot player. And less than a scratch-off and similar player.

 

[mk378]

A really bad blackjack player would hit a 20 or stay with a 12. That's still better than lottery tickets though.

 

[Dave Hess]

If you can’t manage to quit at least keep us updated here, but seriously, quit. Never in my life have I bought a $100 lotto ticket, I’m not even sure they sell them in Missouri.

A friend’s mom won $3.5M on the Missouri lottery. Randomly bought a ticket and moved their retirement up a few years. That’s probably a rare winner’s tale if I had to guess.

$3.5M can last a few generations if they were very careful with that money and not go crazy.

 

[GON]

$3.5M can last a few generations if they were very careful with that money and not go crazy.

Yes, 3.5 million, put in an irrevocable trust, that pays 50 percent of the earned interest every quarter, and reinvests the other 50 percent of the interest back into the principle. Issues are fees for the trust, trust risk for principal, and an institution willing to set up that style of trust for such a small amount,. No big money for the lotto winner up front, but generational money that can't be blown. And the trust needs to be set up like a pension, so even if the trust owner kills someone (like OJ), the trust payment can't be touched against a civil judgment.

 

[Dave Hess]

So the last day I played scratchers i was $38 profitable from all that I've spent and won in total.

So I got pretty cocky today since I won $1,000 on a scratcher a while ago. I went in to buy many more and kept rolling the cash back into tickets and now I'm at -939. So I lost a total of $977. So I'd have to make that back to at least break even which I'm not sure I wanna try. Yeah I think I might end it here.

So when did y'all draw the line after some decent losses, or did y'all keep going? Has anyone on here won more than they lost? Before this I've won more than lost.

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[ecotourist]

I understand that the typical person with a gambling problem often "had good luck" at the start. Winning came easy - at first. But later on, as the losses pile up, they try to "win it all back".

A long term marriage in our family almost broke up over gambling. My relative lost all of his accessible money and was finally caught out when he tried to borrow money from my elderly mother.

In my opinion gambling can lead to a major addiction, right up there with doing hard drugs. It can and does destroy lives.