Gambling addicted bf

Ryemo

Well-Known Member
#23
ZeeBabar said:
Kind of like a cigarette addict saying he would walk away if there were no casinos, a golf addict saying he would quit if there was no golf.
You're wrong Zee. At least for some of us anyway. I know it's difficult for you to imagine, because you've struggled with your own issues related to gambling addiction. But many APs I know never had any interest in gambling until they learned the system could be beat.

There's plenty of times where I've scouted casinos to check out the games, only to turn around and walk out 10 minutes later after realizing that the conditions weren't ideal. I feel like an addicted gambler would find some sort of justification to stay and play, regardless of how bad the conditions may be. I suppose you could be addicted the same way a workaholic is "addicted" to work... but I honestly wouldn't categorize that person in the same group with degenerate gamblers.
 

Taff

Well-Known Member
#24
Lost me at the cigs/casino analogy.!! So a trader will leave the market when the conditions are unfavourable. That decision is made upon cold hard analysis. No money to be made. That's it. Zee I think you want us all to feel the way you do or have, in the past done. I don't.
 

sagefr0g

Well-Known Member
#26
gambling, an interesting topic, me thinks.

addictive gambling, or addictive anything? not so much interesting, far as i’m concerned. way I see it, no harm, no problem, whatever floats your boat. significant or not so significant harm that adds up over time to significant harm, as a result of addiction that’s a problem. gambling without an edge?, a waste of time and resources.

as most everyone has remarked far as having no interest in gambling, that’s where i’m at unless it’s positive expectation. like others mentioned, never really had a desire to gamble in a casino. awe yeah, maybe once a year, with maybe $150 sorta thing. but my upbringing was such that i was told that gambling was a harmful act. i believed that and acted accordingly so as not to experience harm.

then in my early fifties my wife and i went on a cruise. there was a casino on the ship. i wandered in and saw some guy hit a big payoff on a slot machine. dang, i thought, how’d he do that? could I do that? so don’t try this at home folks, but i gave it a shot. ever heard of beginners luck? i lived it .i hadn’t a clue as to what i was doing, just in my mind i had one interest, making money. the gamble it’s self was of no real interest to me. my luck continued after the cruise at local casino’s, for over a year, believe it or not. i only played slot machines. the reason being,(get this) i was unable to understand how to play table games correctly, lol. i’d be watching people play at table games and wonder, hmmm, how do they know what to do? none of the stuff in the casino made any sense to me. i didn’t realize that most of the players hadn’t a clue and were just throwing money down on the bets hoping for luck as i was doing on the slots. hadn’t a clue what house edge meant. So anyway i’d built a nice little bankroll, (really little) around two grand. i kept meticulous records of my winnings and loss’s. then we went on another cruise. went straight to the onboard casino, lost darned near every dollar i’d built up. wake up call!

so i gave that adventure up, tail tucked between my legs. like I said, it wasn’t the gambling that i was interested in, it was the money. the time i’d spent in the joints i’d seen a lot of money flowing. i was convinced there had to be a way to tap into that flow. so i started nosing around on the internet and found this very site. before finding this site, i knew nothing of odds, chances, probability, house edge, expected value, counting cards, advantage play, certainty equivalence, bankroll and risk of ruin or casino comps and free rolls. over time I read an arms length of blackjack books and acquired a great arsenal of software. other than that i had but one thing going for me, i genuinely wanted to make money and wasn’t really attracted to gambling unless it could produce gain and not ultimately harm. and so lost of a puppy as i am and ever shall be, i learned. many years ago, a gentleman on this site Creeping Panther held bj bash’s, where a number of us vetted on the site held some get togethers. that’s when i really learned stuff. one guy in particular taught me so much of the essence of AP that it isn’t even funny. that was machinist, he could with no more than a few simple straight forward words make a whole load of complicated goobly gop but genuinely real advantage concepts make a whole real lot of sense, again in understandable simple straight forward terms. it was him giving a talk at a bj bash that put the bug in my ear (once again) with respect to the folly that gambling is.

that said, just me maybe, gambling is an interesting topic. really, it’s virtually an inescapable reality of life. like is so often said, just crossing the street has an element of gamble to it. there’s a concept in physics, the uncertainty principle (the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory), that and a few other ‘quirky’ quantum phenomenon (of which aren’t absolutely forbidden in macroscopic realms), means to me that our knowledge is limited as a consequence of time and change over time and what we are able to measure, hence we are continuously faced with gambles. so, how the heck did we ever get to the moon, land a rover on mars, split an atom? i sure don’t know, but me thinks it’s a matter of taking small gambles with dynamic feedback and learning. so we can never always be spot on target, but we can always adjust through feedback our trajectory towards our target. shall we always succeed? nope, but with an edge we probably shall more often than not.

card counting blackjack with some really, really small ROR. what’s that mean? it means the act is a gamble, it means you might, probably not, but might face ruin. we deal with that by dynamically, adjusting our bet spread as reason (through feedback) calls for adjustment, up or down. still it’s a gamble. expected value, that’s what we normally go by when we decide if taking a chance is worth it or not. expected value is most often the only parameter we have to go by because of the rarity of more ‘virtually’ certain events and the consequences of opportunity risk. but expected value is only an average, that means the actual outcome of a given event may fall short of what is expected or surpass what is expected or even nail what is expected. so we gamble, expecting the results of the events to average out, over time and events (the long run). again, ROR being a fact of life while going after EV means there is an element of a gamble existent.

so is there such a thing as an option embraced by certainty, rather than expected value (ie. no gamble)? yep, sort of, but there is still expected value involved, as well as positive advantage, positive disadvantage and a worst case outcome (that has no loss) that is at least zero or greater as well as a best case outcome. such options present as rare unpredictable (albeit there may be pre-event indicators) extreme events that are identifiable. that’s the antifragile stuff. the kind of thing that we tend to not realize can happen and intuitively don’t expect to happen because we ‘properly’ think in terms of expectations and standard deviations. just as we tend to not realize ruin can happen even if we have a tiny ROR. we don’t hear so much of the card counters and advantage players that realize ruin. so we are blind to that statistic experientially. it’s fine to think in terms of expectation and standard deviation, but not to the extent that we ignore the eventuality of extreme events. such events not only can happen, they will happen. hidden is an extreme advantage and disadvantage existent. guard (survive) against the one and jump on the other with all four feet (prosper), in the interim overall one shall do just fine with a properly tuned dynamically adjusted ROR and expected value target if they are wisely chosen rather than chosen with a reckless gambling attitude.

at the very least don’t gamble when you don’t have the edge, might as well cross the road blindfolded with earplugs. and don’t waste time, there’s an EV tangled up with time, just as one asks one’s self if a risk is worthwhile for an expected financial payoff, so it goes with time it’s the most precious free roll we have. all that said, stay on the ethical side of the gray line.

i know, blah, blah, lol. sorry guys and gals, just trying to sum up my take on it.
 

Taff

Well-Known Member
#27
Another sage thought. As much as we like to suppress it we are all gamblers. If we are effective at what we do we look for around six winning sessions out of ten. But what happens during the four losing sessions. We don't suddenly become bad players or misplay our hands so why can't four sessions turn into ten.?? The math tells us we are correct and will succeed in the long term but the long term can be a very long haul indeed. I think in BJA3 Don speaks of the possibility of around 9% of players being down after 500 hours of play. That's around two years of a recreational player. So the math and R.O.R be damned as good as we are we can still lose every single session, and keep doing so.
 

sagefr0g

Well-Known Member
#28
@ Taff,
your post made two perspectives regarding AP pop into my gourd that are worthy of thought, imho. those being S.C.O.R.E. written about in, once again BJA3 and N0. both of which me thinks are tools for gauging a gamble.
 

Taff

Well-Known Member
#29
Yes. Both point to analysis in order to achieve an expected outcome. I can work out score but, like most I don't know the score of the game I played yesterday. If pushed I could work it out. Maybe the best we can hope to be are gamblers who do their utmost not to be gamblers. Our whole lives,pension funds,investments involve some form of gambling. Its a grey area.;)
 
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