Do you like gambling or just playing a game with your friends? Because playing poker does not require gambling. You do not have to play with money in the pot.
While technically true, I think poker actually is one of those games in which the stakes (providing a tangible fear of loss) are a valuable element to the game. Tournament style poker would essentially accomplish this, but it’s not always easy to round up enough friends to make it enjoyable. And even then, the people who drop out early on have to either watch or find something else to do.
Tangible loss is a big part of it because it helps keep betting sane. If there's no stakes you can just do whatever you want and there's not really much strategy to it.
Cash games solve the problem of how long it takes. 20 years ago or so I'd play nickel, dime, quarter max bet cash games, dealer's choice of the poker game, round robin dealing. On a real bad night you'd be down $15, or you'd be up $20 on a great night.
It was a blast. $5 was the price of a premium fast food meal back then, if that helps to level expectations of stakes for the younger crowd.
All the best parts of having stakes in the game without risk of losing your shirt. We'd hang out, make food, drink, etc. It was the best of all worlds.
Periodically we'd do a tournament, usually hold em, stud, or Omaha. Then it was a $10 or $20 buy-in with maybe a rebuy depending on how long we wanted it to go. Usually top three were the money, depending on how many at the table. The early drops would start playing dice until there were three people to start a regular cash side game at the table (we'd just shift chairs)
So there's ways to address your points, but most people these days only know what they see on WSOP, which is no limit holdem. There's SO many poker variants out there that the old dawgs played back in the 80s and 90s that didn't come into light with the poker revolution. Red/black, no peek, guts, hi/low split, etc.
I'm not a gambling person at all but I do like the mix of betting inconsequential amounts on a poker game and just doing a game night with a few friends. We'll do poker night occasionally where we all put in $20 CAD and while most of the fun comes from having some pints and chatting, the idea of maybe ending with an extra $80 or whatever in beer change makes it a little more exciting even if i usually expect to lose it.
doing what you need to in order to keep on surviving is the opposite of pathetic. it takes a lot of courage to keep persisting despite the horrors of our world
That's smart, it's a form of dopamine loading, you deny yourself immediate rewards and that builds anticipation, also it lowers your baseline dopamine so that even small rewards feel meaningful, this way you stay off the headonism treadmill and conserve your weed which saves money
I feel the same way with benedryl in that I think of all this shit, fuck shot, but I don't look at it cuz that illegal in my places, so I just think in darkness as the benedryl make happening better tho my gemson doesnt get hard anymore...
Not all, no. DNS level blocking gets a lot, but not all. I use a pi hole at home and it didn't manage to get a lot of in-app ads, but once I rooted then things got a lot better.
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
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.
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.
In a side note, I love playing the 2p pushy machines you find in arcades in seaside towns. But I don't ever think I'm going to win anything.
In a side, side note, my five year old once really, really, wanted a particular toy from one of those claw machines you get in the same seaside arcades. I told him it probably wasn't going to happen but I landed the toy he wanted first time. I was a god to that boy for the rest of the day!
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.
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.
Sure, no shade from me here. This was a game for 14-year olds who knew nothing. Given that I don't think it's too surprising we ended up with a deck of 200+ cards and... calculating... calculating... 50 wild cards. Or so. It was complete fucking chaos.
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.
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.
I feel like we were getting scammed in the US then. I, in the US, was paying over $20 for Atari 2600 games and over $50 for some fairly early NES games. I know Mastertronic was mostly for cheap Sega games
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.
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 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.
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.
Never once in my life have I felt the appeal of gambling.
All I needed to learn is that statistically, the house comes out ahead, 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 (since it has the best odds of victory). 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.
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.
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.
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
I remember in school doing statistics and probability. There was a question to calculate the probability and chances of winning a bet, and we got a near zero answer. I then asked my teacher if that means the person is actually going to lose. She confirmed yes, and warned us that this is why you have to be careful with gambling and being in debt as a result, and being involved with loans sharks who prey on those with gambling problems.
I've personally witnessed what gambling does to a person and their loved ones so I despise it. A lot of the gambling are rigged and so you are more likely to lose.
I tell people that if they're going to gamble, do the ones with more likelihood of success. Poker is rarely rigged, if ever, because it is based on pure psychology of the players. Investing and stock trading has a more established science, despite the occasional stock manipulation. Although, if one invests in more reputable companies with long term growth and only put in the amount of money the person is willing to lose, hardly anybody goes bankrupt with investing.
Humans are very bad with statistics. Even ones that know the statistics can let their emotions lead them when gambling.
Humans overly weight very very good and very very bad things happening and those stick in our brains. High risk and high reward are where our brains get stuck because of our built in risk aversion.
Case in point: Lotteries. It's 289 million to 1 chance you'll win $10 million. Meaning that in stats, it's an expected value of loss on every ticket you buy should be $1 since we can't lose 99.9995 cents (or whatever the math is). But how often do people say well, can't win if you don't play?" like fools and play their same numbers for the 84,000th time?
When I go to Vegas, I put aside $60, 3 times in the trip, i'll put $20 through a slot machine. If I'm ever up more than $10, I stop and keep that 30, spend it on food or something for the fam.
I broke even once, up 60 once, and down 60 a few times.
I was going to ignore this but God I really hate the ignorance in this statement. I'm genx. Gambling affects everyone. There are plenty of kids and teenagers and christ that's who's being targeted.
Yeah - the old, retired people wasting money on slots is definitely a thing, but another side of the market are people who are desperate and don't see any way of elevating themselves out of poverty except to win big.
And gambling companies are 100% willing to take advantage of those people and take whatever they have.
Yeah if anything gambling is the hot new addiction for young people. Gen Z drinks less, does less drugs, and even fucks less, but they gamble more. As a millennial I remember when gambling was mostly old people at casinos, but that's not the face of modern gambling. These days it's online casinos and sports betting apps. It's increasingly stuff like polymarket.
I think it's because it's much more visible in boomers as they're more likely to be gambling in casinos whereas I'd bet (ha) the majority of betting is online these days.
Go into any casino and see what the age distribution is, in my experience the majority are boomers.
Exactly, they’re trying to get the new generations as interested as the ones on the way out. It’s addictive and now there’s algorithms to make you ‘win’ just enough to stay hooked. That combined with being able to gamble on more than stocks, there’s bound to be a huge shift either direction.
I never knew gamlering like some but I know it is in my brain, as when I ate out of garbage in homeless i was like "each one is scratch offer" and so it was like tickets evety time I look in can
If you know the basics of probability theory, you can calculate the expected 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 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
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.
I just started playing poker championship (free on steam) and while i am not a gambler, since making 40k three times in two days i can imagine the appeal.
I've gambled twice in my life. The first time was sitting in a gas station casino because my buddy's car overheated on the pass. Put $20 into a keno machine, lost about half of it, realized I could have gotten several beers instead. Got annoyed with myself and cashed out.
The second time was in Vegas. Same buddy gave me a massive hit on a vape pen and dragged me over to a blackjack table. He dumped some chips in front of me things happened, the table was a lot of fun to look at, the dealer cleared her throat in a really annoyed way because I was grooving on the pattern on the back of the cards instead of playing. I handed the chips back to my buddy and told the entire casino I was too high for this shit.
I guess I don't have the gene. I've got an addictive personality in general and that's been fun to deal with, but I'm glad it doesn't extend to gambling.
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)
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.
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...
I've had exactly one gambling experience in my life. I went with some friends to a casino in Louisiana and I tried a slot machine. I stuck my credit card in the slot, was debited $5, pushed the "lever" button, and won exactly bupkis. I don't know what the appeal is but I imagine it involves winning occasionally. I'm going to stick with my 0.000 batting average and be happy.
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.
Gambling used to be illegal because it's addictive & destructive. I'm not sure when it became legal & so ubiquitous, but I miss the days when it was illegal & could only be done underground. Gambling was illegal because it's addictive & destructive.
Gambling seems to me like one of the most destructive addictions out there. If you have money you can pretty much consume as much drugs as you want and still have money. Gambling is the one addiction that scales with your income and can leave pretty much anyone homeless no matter where you start from. It's terrible
When you make gambling illegal, you create a mafia or the equivalent, over and over and over again, no exceptions.
The mafia is even MORE destructive than gambling alone for many reasons.
Creating well-funded black markets is always a mistake, one that has been re-learned many times.
Not to mention, throwing people in dungeons for gambling is counterproductive, destructive, morally bankrupt, and flat-out evil
Addictions abound, everywhere. It's part of being human and that's okay. Control your urge to control others.... it's wrong and also an addiction. Power addiction is a well-recorded phenomenon.
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!
They must make an absolute fortune, because I see so many ads for shitty online pokie websites.
nothing makes money quite as well as separating the foolish from it.
I always describe gambling as non-alcoholic vodka.
It just does nothing for me and leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
I like it as a group activity, like poker night, but casinos are depressing.
Do you like gambling or just playing a game with your friends? Because playing poker does not require gambling. You do not have to play with money in the pot.
While technically true, I think poker actually is one of those games in which the stakes (providing a tangible fear of loss) are a valuable element to the game. Tournament style poker would essentially accomplish this, but it’s not always easy to round up enough friends to make it enjoyable. And even then, the people who drop out early on have to either watch or find something else to do.
Tangible loss is a big part of it because it helps keep betting sane. If there's no stakes you can just do whatever you want and there's not really much strategy to it.
Cash games solve the problem of how long it takes. 20 years ago or so I'd play nickel, dime, quarter max bet cash games, dealer's choice of the poker game, round robin dealing. On a real bad night you'd be down $15, or you'd be up $20 on a great night.
It was a blast. $5 was the price of a premium fast food meal back then, if that helps to level expectations of stakes for the younger crowd.
All the best parts of having stakes in the game without risk of losing your shirt. We'd hang out, make food, drink, etc. It was the best of all worlds.
Periodically we'd do a tournament, usually hold em, stud, or Omaha. Then it was a $10 or $20 buy-in with maybe a rebuy depending on how long we wanted it to go. Usually top three were the money, depending on how many at the table. The early drops would start playing dice until there were three people to start a regular cash side game at the table (we'd just shift chairs)
So there's ways to address your points, but most people these days only know what they see on WSOP, which is no limit holdem. There's SO many poker variants out there that the old dawgs played back in the 80s and 90s that didn't come into light with the poker revolution. Red/black, no peek, guts, hi/low split, etc.
I'm not a gambling person at all but I do like the mix of betting inconsequential amounts on a poker game and just doing a game night with a few friends. We'll do poker night occasionally where we all put in $20 CAD and while most of the fun comes from having some pints and chatting, the idea of maybe ending with an extra $80 or whatever in beer change makes it a little more exciting even if i usually expect to lose it.
I get that same fun playing D&D. There's risk and a thrill you might lose, but it's super cheap.
I have my doubts about DnD being cheap, unless you do 🏴☠️ (Which i do cough)
Even if you're not pirating, you can still play using the SRD. You can skip the DMG entirely and get monster stat blocks online.
Yeah i can understand that others enjoy it, but even a poker night with friends sounds unpleasant to me - like a game night ruined.
I like board games with bluffing mechanics, but once you put money into them, they're no fun.
Agreed!
That 6 pack of non alcohol beer I accidentally bought in my fridge about to hit the 3rd year...
Except there's actually good non-alcoholic beer! Most vodka doesn't taste like much of anything...
I'm not actually drinking it for the taste.
Nah, you hold on to whatever hope you have. Stay with us
I think that's actually a pretty neat trick. So long as not winning doesn't feel even more crushing.
doing what you need to in order to keep on surviving is the opposite of pathetic. it takes a lot of courage to keep persisting despite the horrors of our world
I stopped smoking weed during the week so that I had something to look forward to on the weekends. It's pretty pathetic
not pathetic imo. whatever gets you through the week and allows you to keep surviving is perfectly valid!
That's smart, it's a form of dopamine loading, you deny yourself immediate rewards and that builds anticipation, also it lowers your baseline dopamine so that even small rewards feel meaningful, this way you stay off the headonism treadmill and conserve your weed which saves money
You should get like a low maintenance pet, like a fish, snake, or lizard.
If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid.
Hope things get better, but this is low-key genius
Props to you, it's not pathetic at all.
thats not pathetic, its a good trick
stay strong :3
I feel the same way with benedryl in that I think of all this shit, fuck shot, but I don't look at it cuz that illegal in my places, so I just think in darkness as the benedryl make happening better tho my gemson doesnt get hard anymore...
Ublock Origin users:
I forced Chrome to continue using it and it seems to be holding strong so far.
What are you even doing that you see these ads. I hardly see any ads.
Ad block your home internet and phone yall. Life changing.
I use adblockers and cracked apks whenever I can but some mobile games still have ads. Any advice on getting those blocked anyway?
I use Adguard dns on my phone, and don't see any in-app ads.
Thats it! thanks :)
Rooting your phone is generally the only way to get rid of those types of ads.
I think a pi hole would do it, no?
Not all, no. DNS level blocking gets a lot, but not all. I use a pi hole at home and it didn't manage to get a lot of in-app ads, but once I rooted then things got a lot better.
Could possibly be block lists, but I'm not sure.
those ads are delivered through same ip the programs use for valid data so you cannot filter at DNS level for those
similar to Twitch in stream ads
Block them at the installation level and stop playing mobile games.
this is the real answer
stop using it or pay for non ads
sometime popular programs will have work arounds but you’ll have to trust the coder who did it
If you watch any sport, most of the ads are for sports betting these days
I play WordFeud with friends and see the kazzzhhii ads after 50% of my plays. (Didn’t wanna spell it correctly and give them even more web presence)
It's so wild to me that there are still people out there rawdogging the Internet
Podcast commercials
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
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.
Probably because Trump's current casino of choice is Polymarket.
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.
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.
In a side note, I love playing the 2p pushy machines you find in arcades in seaside towns. But I don't ever think I'm going to win anything.
In a side, side note, my five year old once really, really, wanted a particular toy from one of those claw machines you get in the same seaside arcades. I told him it probably wasn't going to happen but I landed the toy he wanted first time. I was a god to that boy for the rest of the day!
What kind of nonsense poker has that many wild cards
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.
Sure, no shade from me here. This was a game for 14-year olds who knew nothing. Given that I don't think it's too surprising we ended up with a deck of 200+ cards and... calculating... calculating... 50 wild cards. Or so. It was complete fucking chaos.
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.
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.
I feel like we were getting scammed in the US then. I, in the US, was paying over $20 for Atari 2600 games and over $50 for some fairly early NES games. I know Mastertronic was mostly for cheap Sega games
I bet I dont have this gene
You don't have funny gene too.
Wanna bet?
I see you're good at recycling.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
stupid, the answer is stupid
at least my gambling comes with animated titty first!
People are dumb animals.
Never once in my life have I felt the appeal of gambling.
All I needed to learn is that statistically, the house comes out ahead, 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 (since it has the best odds of victory). 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.
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.
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..
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.
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
Can't relate.
...and you can, too, lemmy users!
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
🗿
I've found you can make anyone your suster in your head when the need arises as I do rise to top the thot
I remember in school doing statistics and probability. There was a question to calculate the probability and chances of winning a bet, and we got a near zero answer. I then asked my teacher if that means the person is actually going to lose. She confirmed yes, and warned us that this is why you have to be careful with gambling and being in debt as a result, and being involved with loans sharks who prey on those with gambling problems.
I've personally witnessed what gambling does to a person and their loved ones so I despise it. A lot of the gambling are rigged and so you are more likely to lose.
I tell people that if they're going to gamble, do the ones with more likelihood of success. Poker is rarely rigged, if ever, because it is based on pure psychology of the players. Investing and stock trading has a more established science, despite the occasional stock manipulation. Although, if one invests in more reputable companies with long term growth and only put in the amount of money the person is willing to lose, hardly anybody goes bankrupt with investing.
Humans are very bad with statistics. Even ones that know the statistics can let their emotions lead them when gambling.
Humans overly weight very very good and very very bad things happening and those stick in our brains. High risk and high reward are where our brains get stuck because of our built in risk aversion.
Case in point: Lotteries. It's 289 million to 1 chance you'll win $10 million. Meaning that in stats, it's an expected value of loss on every ticket you buy should be $1 since we can't lose 99.9995 cents (or whatever the math is). But how often do people say well, can't win if you don't play?" like fools and play their same numbers for the 84,000th time?
They already played 84,000 times? That means they have a 288,916,000 to 1 chance to win!
At least the earnings from the sales of lottery tickets go to charities.
When I go to Vegas, I put aside $60, 3 times in the trip, i'll put $20 through a slot machine. If I'm ever up more than $10, I stop and keep that 30, spend it on food or something for the fam.
I broke even once, up 60 once, and down 60 a few times.
My wife and I are fantastic gamblers. We always get more value in free drinks than we lose gambling.
I am this person. How anyone could be interested is beyond me.
Boomers with too much time amd money, cos they could afford to retire at 50 and still have enough money to waste on stupid things
I was going to ignore this but God I really hate the ignorance in this statement. I'm genx. Gambling affects everyone. There are plenty of kids and teenagers and christ that's who's being targeted.
Yeah - the old, retired people wasting money on slots is definitely a thing, but another side of the market are people who are desperate and don't see any way of elevating themselves out of poverty except to win big.
And gambling companies are 100% willing to take advantage of those people and take whatever they have.
Yeah if anything gambling is the hot new addiction for young people. Gen Z drinks less, does less drugs, and even fucks less, but they gamble more. As a millennial I remember when gambling was mostly old people at casinos, but that's not the face of modern gambling. These days it's online casinos and sports betting apps. It's increasingly stuff like polymarket.
Yeah boomer hate is in vogue, we would have thought only boomers would get distracted from class wars by gen wars.
I think it's because it's much more visible in boomers as they're more likely to be gambling in casinos whereas I'd bet (ha) the majority of betting is online these days.
Go into any casino and see what the age distribution is, in my experience the majority are boomers.
Exactly, they’re trying to get the new generations as interested as the ones on the way out. It’s addictive and now there’s algorithms to make you ‘win’ just enough to stay hooked. That combined with being able to gamble on more than stocks, there’s bound to be a huge shift either direction.
I never knew gamlering like some but I know it is in my brain, as when I ate out of garbage in homeless i was like "each one is scratch offer" and so it was like tickets evety time I look in can
If you know the basics of probability theory, you can calculate the expected 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.
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
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!
tbf, the fact that promoting this is legal in the first place angers me
It's not in the developed countries, it's a no-brainer, really.
It is in the UK, and it's pervasive as fuck
Yeah, just like I said.
in estonia a sports stadium is named after a sports betting platform💀
It's getting approved in more and more western countries. Lobbying is a powerful tool...
you watch ads?
Well theres always time to start
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
I just started playing poker championship (free on steam) and while i am not a gambler, since making 40k three times in two days i can imagine the appeal.
Thankfully it's all points and not real money.
I suspect the skill level will be much higher among people playing with actual money.
Oh definitely. Thankfully it's fun before getting to that place
wrong text on the picture. that one should read: "getting 200+ gambling ads daily while having the gambling gene and not gambling anyway."
The picture that goes with the original text would be someone not even noticing the bullets flying and missing.
It's showing how it feels not how it is. It likely doesn't feel that good having to constantly resist an urge like that.
Also, the oblivious guy being missed by everything would be the ad blocker, not the non-gambler.
do yall seriously not use adblockers
Yeah but sometimes they put them in on the server side that's why I use raid war of parley get 50% off your first prediction with code lemmy
spamton
I've gambled twice in my life. The first time was sitting in a gas station casino because my buddy's car overheated on the pass. Put $20 into a keno machine, lost about half of it, realized I could have gotten several beers instead. Got annoyed with myself and cashed out.
The second time was in Vegas. Same buddy gave me a massive hit on a vape pen and dragged me over to a blackjack table. He dumped some chips in front of me things happened, the table was a lot of fun to look at, the dealer cleared her throat in a really annoyed way because I was grooving on the pattern on the back of the cards instead of playing. I handed the chips back to my buddy and told the entire casino I was too high for this shit.
I guess I don't have the gene. I've got an addictive personality in general and that's been fun to deal with, but I'm glad it doesn't extend to gambling.
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.
There are those that "enjoy" grinding in MMOs like Runescape.
Number go up I guess?
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.
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).
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
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...
Wait, is this a post about adblockers?
I think it’s between 5%-10% of the population have the compulsive RNG gene.
And that's why 100% get bothered. Capitalism doing it's thing.
I just hope to the universe my nephews are not drawn into this.
It feels very sadening and worrying about the current state of society.
Our lack of solidarity with sick people?
I've had exactly one gambling experience in my life. I went with some friends to a casino in Louisiana and I tried a slot machine. I stuck my credit card in the slot, was debited $5, pushed the "lever" button, and won exactly bupkis. I don't know what the appeal is but I imagine it involves winning occasionally. I'm going to stick with my 0.000 batting average and be happy.
The most risk I ever take with my money is an indexed investment fund and even that feels a bit much at the moment.
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
I was going to ask if you were Australian. Be sure to post this on your local instance
Gambling used to be illegal because it's addictive & destructive. I'm not sure when it became legal & so ubiquitous, but I miss the days when it was illegal & could only be done underground. Gambling was illegal because it's addictive & destructive.
Gambling seems to me like one of the most destructive addictions out there. If you have money you can pretty much consume as much drugs as you want and still have money. Gambling is the one addiction that scales with your income and can leave pretty much anyone homeless no matter where you start from. It's terrible
When The House is also The White House, they can do as they please.
When you make gambling illegal, you create a mafia or the equivalent, over and over and over again, no exceptions.
The mafia is even MORE destructive than gambling alone for many reasons.
Creating well-funded black markets is always a mistake, one that has been re-learned many times.
Not to mention, throwing people in dungeons for gambling is counterproductive, destructive, morally bankrupt, and flat-out evil
Addictions abound, everywhere. It's part of being human and that's okay. Control your urge to control others.... it's wrong and also an addiction. Power addiction is a well-recorded phenomenon.
Me blocking ads like Neo and they still keep spawning 😭
Honestly idk if I have the gene, but I do have anxiety and that seems to be enough.
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!