Gambling

Generally, I tend to be relatively libertarian when it comes to self-damaging behaviour: while I think that, say, overdrinking or smoking tobacco or marijuana is a bad idea, I think that all of these things should be legal.

One case in which, however, I am far less convinced of this is gambling. Let's be clear, my problem is not with a once-per-year lottery or with friendly games of poker; rather, it is with slot machines and lotto and so on.

That sort of thing can be addictive as hell, and has been known to utterly ruin people. I have a very strong dislike for people who profit of that, and, despite my general leanings, I cannot think of a good reason why that sort of thing should be allowed at all.

What do you think? Should slot machines and the like be legal?

edited 13th Jun '12 2:03:18 PM by Carciofus

I fail to see how this is different from any other kind of self-destructive behaviour such as smoking or over-drinking.

We have government monopoly for gambling, RAY and Veikkaus, both non-profit:

Need I say I think this is one of the areas best handled by government monopoly?

On a related note: I've never actually been to a casino, so the info I have on them comes from the media. Do they really regard calculating basic probabilities in your head as cheating? If so why don't they just eliminate all games that aren't pure chance?

I'd support moving towards banning smoking and a lot heavier regulation on alcohol. But I agree gambling isn't a greater threat than the others.

edited 13th Jun '12 2:36:50 PM by Qeise

Card counting is counted as cheating. I don't actually know why.

Probably because the people who are actually capable of doing that are also capable of cleaning a casino out of money. They don't make money if you're too talented. That's also why they end up comping things like high priced rooms for people who are winning big; so they don't have to shell out actual money they give you something supposedly of equal value to your win, and hope you spend money in the mini bars and shit.

This is a misconception. Card Counting is only cheating if you're using anything other than your brain to do it.

Casinos, however, are in the business of making money, and can refuse to allow you to gamble for any number of reasons... But unless they find something that proves you used more than just your brain, they have to let you keep your winnings(even if they bar you from the casino from that point on). And, without proof, they can't tell other casinos about the instance either(so you wouldn't be barred from other casinos until you're "caught" there too).

That's the stance in Nevada... Mostly because the Nevada Gaming commission is rather strict in that regard.

This is correct. Card counting is legal per se, but at least in Vegas, Casinos, by virtue of being a business, have the right to deny service to any person at any time for any reason (or no reason at all). They also have the right to allow (or restrict) the use of basic strategy cards at their discretion, which are also not de facto illegal.

Gambling is a lot like alcohol to me. It's something that's not really good for you, but if handled in moderation, is not necessarily self-destructive. Anyway, it's not like you can shut down every casino and resort that has a blackjack table, just like you can't outlaw alcohol or drugs, someone's always gonna do it.

Playing cards should not be confused with gambling. If there's minimal or no stakes (i.e. money) involved, it's fine.

I am a craps player. When I go gambling I play the dice tables and nothing but the dice tables. It's pretty much the only drinky-people-crowdy-shouty thing I love to do, and it took time and effort to learn the special unspoken rules and etiquette involved. I love craps. I will happily take a few hundred to Vegas and spend 5 hour stretches at a time around them so long as a good roll comes by now and then to keep me alive and the cocktail waitresses keep passing along those "free" watered down drinks.

Problem is, Kansas City, where I live, is a rough game. I don't play here because it's too hard to win. The dealer turnover is too high, I swear to all I hold dear the dice are fixed, and the rolls are consistently so bad that most of the people betting place their odds on the no pass line. It's ridiculous. Unfortunately, people here take what they can get, and if they are a craps player they get a rotten deal and a lot of lost money. The casinos that I occasionally go to — to visit people and the occasional meal, no longer to play — are just... jeez, they should at least pretend they care about their players. They're so mismanaged, the budget is so poorly distributed, and they alienate their high rollers so much that, well, I would pretty much sign any petition put in front of me to have them shut down. It's just that awful. You would understand if you've been gambling just about anywhere else and then come to KC. It's where people who can't find another hobby go to give their money for... for, hell. By now it's habit for most. They go to give their money because that's what they did for the first ten years the boats were open and things were nice, turnover was low, and the employees at least put on the front of being entertainers and now it's routine. It's sad.

Well, I think that the key is, besides never gambling more than you can afford to lose (the biggest sucker bet of them all), making sure that you come in with the expectation that you're going to lose most of, if not all, of what you plan to gamble. And to consider those losses as the price of a few hours of entertainment. After all, spending $30 for an evening with some friends is not the worst thing in the world.

I chuck a couple of quid on the football at the weekend. Not enough to be missed when you get it wrong, but enough to pay for a few pints if you get lucky.

I'm strangely lucky in that I've only ever came out negative when gambling a handful of times. I'd give myself a 70 percent streak of coming out positive during a session.

Part of this is because the only game I ever play is blackjack, and because I count cards to a degree.(The legal way, with your brain) I can only really do that if there's between 1-3 decks in play though, any more than that and there's no point to trying, and I'm not rainman.

My biggest rule though is thusly: When I go to gamble, I have a preset amount that I am willing to gamble with, and I also have a cash out limit. So say I hit Caesars Palace like I do a few times a year when I go see my grandparents. I'll come in with 200 dollars meant specifically for blackjack. My absolutely positively must cash out and call it a night amount is... Well for this situation lets say it's 600 bones. When I have 400 dollars in profit in addition to my initial investment, it's time to go.

The only exception to this is if I make a rule that now that I've hit 600 bucks, I'll cash out 400 and put in 200 again and see how I fare. I basically rinse, wash, and repeat this process until I put an initial investment amount in after cashing out the profit and I lose all of the investment.

So no matter what happens, the worst outcome is that I lose 200 bucks. That's the only outcome really, I lose 200 bucks and any profits I made from that are a bonus.

Oh, and I don't drink alcohol when I gamble. I only drink when I watch other people gamble. The most money I've ever made gambling was around 1600 bucks in a day, not counting the 400 I started with that was allotted to blackjack.

edited 13th Jun '12 11:46:24 PM by Barkey

Barkeys way of doing it is ok if you really want to gamble. The problems start when people who can't do it try and don't know when to stop.

Re card counting: When I asked on another thread, I was told the problem is that it enables to reliably beat the house. Which means, it shifts averages toward your side, not only against the other players (which is neutral for the casino) but also against the house itself (which is bad).

And a casino can only make money if the average is on their side: A player is supposed to win other players' money, not the house's.

Exactly. Blackjack, Baccarat, and, depending on the specific machine, Video Poker are the three games where the house edge is decidedly low - under a half percent, assuming you employ strategy correctly. In the case of Blackjack, card counting is able to push the house edge under 0%, which is why casinos frown upon it. But it's not technically illegal, and you can't be prosecuted for it.

Of course, in actuality, casinos like the idea of card counters, because most players are decidedly bad at it.

edited 14th Jun '12 8:32:25 AM by DarkConfidant

Exactly. The method I use is only good if you stay disciplined enough to hold to it, and it only works if you pick games where the house edge is decidedly low, as mentioned by Dark. Otherwise the odds will always win out in the end.

Blackjack is a really intuitive game, it involves a good bit of intuition on your part based on counting cards and statistics. I don't have card-counting down to a science so much as I keep a sort of figure in my head on averages of what cards are left in the deck, a trend of high cards like tens or face cards, or low cards. Then that overall sense of what is left in the deck affects my decision to hit or stand if I have, say, a 15. there are lots of high cards in the deck and I have a 15 or 16, I might decide to stand, because the dealer has to keep on hitting until he hits 17 or better. So if the chances are really good that the dealer will pull a face card when he has a 16 and I have a 16, I'll just stay.

The military has helped me develop this intuition a lot, because when soldiers have free time, they tend to play cards a lot. I have played a lot of no stakes blackjack over the years just to pass the time, both with people and on my phone. Blackjack is one of those games that you can get pretty reliable results on when you've just played the shit out of it so much that you develop that intuition like a muscle.

Gambling is all about discipline. Take a set amount that you are ok with losing, and never spend more than that amount. The goal is that you never ever ever gamble to where the outcome is that you lose more than your set amount. You can gamble past your initial investment if you've been up, by gambling further with your winnings, it's just that with the fact that the house always has a statistical advantage, you're playing with fire when you do that and the odds of you walking out making money go down the more you do that.

To the best of my knowledge, card counting works a bit like this:

Whenever you see the a face card or a 10, you decrease the count by 1. Whenever you see a 2, 3, 4, or 5, you increase the count by 1. The higher the count, the more likely it is that the dealer will bust (due to the stand on 16, stay on 17 rule). As a result, a higher count is advantageous to the player, and card counters increase or decrease their bets based on how the count changes as the game plays through the decks.

^

In Blackjack that's the most meticulous way to do it, yeah.

I don't necessarily have it down to the numbers at that level, for me it's just kind of a rough average. I'll think to myself "2 kings, a queen, and two jacks have already been played... So 7 face cards remain..."(If it's one deck, which is uncommon in places like vegas)

I'll use that observation in consideration of my bets and if I hit or stand on a hand.

Where I live, commercial gambling is prohibited except for the government-run lottery that funds college scholarships (I think in the theory that the people who can't do math are the ones who benefit most from access to education, and thus should pay for it), and also the local Native American tribes, who are still as least theoretically somewhat sovereign nations.

That said, I don't personally feel that it is any more evil than many other things we allow people to choose to waste money on.

Thankfully California is ripe with Indian Reservations so I don't have to take the 4 hour drive to Vegas if I want to go.

Hell Yeah

[[quoteblock]]while I think that, say, overdrinking or smoking tobacco or marijuana is a bad idea, I think that all of these things should be legal.[/quoteblock]]

Well, overdrinking and smoking tobacco can be addictive as hell, and have been known not only to utterly ruin people, but also to kill them. Why do you feel one way about gambling and another about these vices?

Perhaps — just perhaps — one difference is that nobody is likely to think that tobacco is a health tonic, or publicize it as such: we all know that it is dangerous, and people who partake in it do so as an indulgence (and, hopefully, take whatever precautions they consider reasonable in order to keep the risk within the levels they are comfortable with.)

On the other hand, gambling is custom-designed to look like a sensible investment, even though it is quite obviously not so. If I spend 200 euros to go skiing, well, I know that at the end of the weekend I will have 200 euros less than I had; and if I think I really need to get more money, I will not spend my last few bucks to go skiing in the hope that I will find one million somewhere along the descent.

However, I might feel tempted to burn my last 200 euros in a slot machine: it is a terrible idea, obviously, but human minds are not particularly good at working with very low or any high probabilities.

Essentially, the gambling house is taking advantage of a bug in my utility optimization algorithm in order to try to get me to do something that is almost certainly not in my interests.

I don't see that as very different from taking advantage of a bug in one's PHP script in order to get their site to do something that is not in their interests.

edited 15th Jun '12 5:40:43 AM by Carciofus

... How does gambling look sensible? Anyone with two brain cells to rub together has grown up hearing all the time about how "The house always wins." and about people who've been ruined by it. It's about as sensible as, say, a lotto ticket. You know that your chances of winning are abysmal, but at the same time you buy one because, what the hell, you might win.

And I know I'm not the majority, but I already explained how with my gambling habits I treat it the way you treat a ski lodge. 200 bones available to spend there, and not a cent more.

You have a good education, and you were probably taught good habits. Not all people were so lucky. I know of more than a few people who ruined themselves through gambling; I cannot say I know anybody who ruined himself by spending too much money on skiing.

edited 15th Jun '12 10:04:40 AM by Carciofus

It wasn't so much a good education as common sense and the discipline not to give in to temptation. It's that little chance that gets you, the thought that even though you've blown everything but your last dollar, you might just make it all back on that last dollar if you're lucky.

It's all about self-control. Where gambling is concerned, I have it, but I wouldn't blame gambling for other people lacking self-control.

I have horrible discipline in a lot of concerns, gambling is just something I take seriously because I realize the reality of what can happen if you don't take it seriously and just start frittering away money on your intuition without setting rules for yourself to obey first.

edited 15th Jun '12 10:29:35 AM by Barkey