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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends.

It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at a bar before Thanksgiving to see some friends, half of them were watching a basketball game involving teams they've never cared about. They showed me that they were betting some wild parlays to hit on this game they had no interest in watching otherwise. They showed me that the apps keep track of your net earnings (I assume this is a legal requirement) and _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Keep in mind that these are young men who just graduated college and we were all pretty broke.

Flash forward, a lot of them still sports bet regularly with regular losses. I live in a different state now, but a group of my friends around here recently go into going to a casino near by. I was blown away by the justifications on their gambling habits. "I usually win" or "I only gamble what I come in with", but the latter isn't true and I've seen it with my own eyes. I met up with them (not to gamble, but to see a friend), and thirty minutes in one of them was asking the other for $40 so he could "win it all back" at the roulette table.

It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.

Anecdotally, I notice that the women in my life gamble less.

View on HN

There was an old Casino parody film from the mid 90s (iirc Mafia!).

Anyway, they had a scene where they were showing the different games that were being played in the casino. Things like a bunch of Saudi princes playing an extremely high stakes game of Candyland, etc.

One of the games was called the black hole or something like that. Anyway, people would step up to the table and the guy working the table would just sweep up their money into a hole and tell them they lost. It had a constant stream of people walking up to the table to lose money.

It's more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.

>There was an old Casino parody film from the mid 90s (iirc Mafia!).

IIRC Mafia! was a parody of the Godfather series, or the mobster movies of the 70s-80s in general.

That is correct for the first half, but the Vegas scenes where he is "observing the floor" and showing the games, including the Black Hole, are parodying Casino scenes specifically.

> It's more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.

Let me tell you a story. Fifteen years ago, a person named n4r9 made £10 at the blackjack table.

They turned around, left the casino, and never returned.

Now they're making 25 times that amount every day they step into the office.

And do you know who that person was?

Albert Einstein?

It's a Me! Mario!

I'm hooked. Who was that?

Michael Scott

n4r9

You're right. I did that wrong.

Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VFgzneS0Dw

This is a slightly different topic (government spending), but I've always loved this old Onion News Network video: 'Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?'. The sentiment feels the same to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ

Isn’t this a scene from Vegas Vacation? Clark is betting on “guessing a number” that the dealer has in his head and so on?

i'm always shocked the grandeur of places like mohegan sun, you walk in and you know it's nothing but losers that built that place, brick by brick, with a tidy profit for the owners and government too don't forget!

In my limited experience as somebody whose friends and family are all pretty well educated and pretty well off (for better or for worse, I work at a big tech company), gambling seems pretty class-specific.

I don't know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it's usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like "[you gamble? don't you have more fulfilling things to do?]"

The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don't need to gamble, but it's not like most people who gamble actually believe it's the path to profit, it seems like there's something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).

There are extremely wealthy people out there gambling on horse races.

That's mostly about pride in their own abilities to "pick the right horse" than to any genuine desire or expectation they will make money.

Either that, or its because the race was fixed.+

Investing in stocks != gambling. The market is not a casino.

Who's doing to tell 'em?

I don't think OP was saying it is, exactly. They seemed to me to say that betting and crypto are gambling, and that picking individual stocks is kinda close.

Which isn't exactly wrong - if you're a retail investor who isn't using satellite footage of parking lots, picking individual stocks is closer to gambling.

Investing in the aggregate is less gambling.

An even more apt analogy, is that investing in individual stocks, is akin to sports betting in a lot of ways.

Investing in the stock market as a whole is just betting the game will be played.

Investing in stocks is definitely akin to gambling.

With individual stocks, you are just betting on horses.

With hedging, you are betting on economic sectors (which can be as large as the whole world economic system) growing infinitely.

And regarding systems growing infinitely in limited environments, I have some bad news for you. Some would call them cancerous.

In our era of meme stocks, yes it is. You can talk about fundamentals all you want, but unless you have a model that correctly models the performance of NVDA, GME, TSLA, and DJT, it's gambling.

SPACs and BBY angrily enter the chat

I have a wealthy and successful friend who loves sports betting, usually places bets in the hundreds-to-thousands range. Calls it “Monopoly money.”

My impression is that it’s a scoring system for competition with his (wealthy and successful) siblings; the dollar values are an afterthought.

Yeah, that's bubble-specific, not class-specific. I think the most successful of the younger professionals I know are most likely to gamble on sports -- it's an excuse for an active group chat, it's something to talk with random people about, and the actual amounts you bet are easy to make trivial relative to income. Very networking-forward hobby. (Also, it's obviously as much an intellectual exercise to gamble on sports as it is to play poker.)

Broadly, though sports in particular is something different bubbles care more or less about, I'd say your perspective is entirely foreign to me. My experience is that the more intelligent groups I'm around are vastly more interested in predicting things and putting money behind their predictions.

>it's obviously as much an intellectual exercise to gamble on sports as it is to play poker

I think this is wrong. The most skilled poker player at the table has an edge and is likely to win over time. I don’t think there is a similar thing in sports betting.

There is, but if you consistently win, they’ll stop taking your bets. And there’s limited options for who will take your bet.

Granted, cash poker is all about sitting at the right table. It’s really the poker tournament structure that legitimizes it.

There are definitely professional sports bettors who have an edge and win over time. I'm not sure it's always that hard as most bettors bet on the team they like without calculating the odds.

If anything, gambling is a great class equalizer, just like the NYC subway.

Rich people gamble. Poor people gamble. Everyone can get hooked; casinos are great at that!

Last month I went to Vegas for the first time in years. I only ever go as a way to get out into the desert - Death Valley most often, this time Zion and Bryce Canyon.

I spent a couple nights in Vegas because my 13yo was interested in seeing it. I watched what was happening in the casinos, and wondered if I was missing something. I read a bit about craps, because I didn't really understand the bets people were making.

Reading gambling forums is just depressing. Many people understand it's just luck and are doing it for fun, but there are so many people who think that you can get "good" at rolling dice. People talk about winning big on a roll and then "reinvesting" their winnings at the table.

Legalized gambling is just a giant machine for separating people of all classes from whatever money they have.

> I spent a couple nights in Vegas because my 13yo was interested in seeing it. I watched what was happening in the casinos, and wondered if I was missing something.

You were missing the dopamine hits.

The highs and lows and 'drama' and 'excitement' of winning (and losing) is what people tend to go for. That's why it can become an addiction: wanting another hit.

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-brain-get...

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/

I hate going to Vegas, but it can be fun without hitting the casinos. They have some of the best restaurants and music venues in the world, and Las Vegas the city has interesting things to do too.

Is it still ok to say that men take more risks than women in general? Gambling is a risk, so on its face it makes sense that men would gamble more on average.

It is fun though, the casinos especially have gotten very good at making it entertaining. Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.

> Is it still ok to say that men take more risks than women in general?

Unless you're so woke that you think testosterone is a social construct, yes it's still very ok

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653580/#:~:tex....

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0907352106

This is legit. A lot of people want to treat men and women as having no biological differences. But the distribution of men’s risk tolerance is shifted well to the right of women’s. And it means that more men end up as entrepreneurs than women, but also in jail, addicted to drugs and gambling, dead in an accident, etc.

the second link you pasted is a study made by economists, not real scientists, strike that.

The first one you really didn't read, did you? "In contrast to received wisdom regarding testosterone and risk, the present data provide the first robust evidence for a nonlinear association between economic preferences and levels of endogenous testosterone."

"Despite the common view that high testosterone levels lead to risky decisions across numerous domains, we found that testosterone has a quadratic relationship with economic risk preferences: Individuals with low and high levels of testosterone (within their gender) were risk and ambiguity neutral, whereas individuals with intermediate levels of testosterone were risk and ambiguity averse."

> the second link you pasted is a study made by economists, not real scientists, strike that.

I find it funny how you're willing to offhandedly dismiss a paper because "economists, not real scientists", but seemingly have no problems with the field psychology which had the replication crisis and "experiment on a bunch of freshmen psychology students and extrapolate to the whole population" studies.

the other paper is penned by neuroscientists lmao, does noboy open the links anymore?

Economy and psychology aren't too dissimilar when it comes to being "real" science. People can think whatever they want about genders, dismissing hormones is a bit harder, especially when people fight to get said hormones to affirm their gender, if it was all "the same" and interchangeable it wouldn't be the case

I've been surgically modified such that my body doesn't produce sex hormones in any significant quantity on its own. As a substitute, I use separate transdermal gels containing testosterone and estrogen, which have relatively short metabolic half life in my body.

I normally target an estrogen level similar to an average woman and a testosterone level between the female and male reference ranges. I'm able to adjust the mix on the order of days when it suits me, and there absolutely is a difference. People who know me well can usually tell what mix I'm running.

the other paper is penned by neuroscientists lmao, does noboy open the links anymore?

> Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.

I dunno, people who do the former seem a lot happier the next day.

But if you win..?

if you're unhappy after gambling and losing, you're not having fun. Winning gambling is not the fun, it's just happiness from money.

If you enjoy blackjack, or poker, or craps, regardless of winning or losing, then it's fine to gamble. If you're only having fun from the exhileration from the large winnings, then it's not "fun", but thrill seeking, just like skydivers or extreme sports. Except for those thrill seeking sports, there's often safety measures in place.

That matches my personal experience, for sure. I have been to a casino exactly once (aside from playing nickel slots at LAS a couple times just to kill some time). As I recall, it was indeed $50 that I lost. Very quickly, too. I felt terrible. Stupid for even playing a game I knew was stacked against me.

Never been back. The only gambling I do now is buying a $2 powerball ticket every time the jackpot goes above $1B. The momentary fantasy is worth the two bucks.

I don’t find gambling entertaining at all. I know it’s negative EV so it just feels bad to me. I’ve only gambled one time when I turned 21 and went to Vegas (a bit of a tradition perhaps) and I didn’t enjoy it.

It's not just risk: it's taking actions that have negative expected value. 20-something men also tend to ride motorcycles and volunteer to go into battle, so it's kind of a thing.

Exactly. My friends and I have poker nights occasionally, and we always make sure dues are paid to those who are owed them, and nobody is upset in the end. It's about playing the game and having something to do with friends. You'd pay that much going out to watch a movie or going to dinner anyways.

Why involve money?

Dopamine

Because without betting something you at least notionally care about, poker is a tedium simulator rather than a game. The betting is where the game is, and if you don't care about winning or losing the bet, you're skipping the game portion.

Of course, that just shifts the question to why not play a game that's actually fun.

It is very fun with small amounts of money.

The game truly doesn't function without stakes. With no bets, the only stakes are losing your entire stack and not being able to play, so it pushes the game very early on into all-in territory.

With small sums ($5), it's too easy to slip into the same mindset after your buddy offers you a beer (since it's basically paid for)

In high school we combatted this with a $20 buy in. Now we do a $50 buy in. Sure, it kinda sucks to lose. But the money is just going back to your friends, and a dinner + drinks out on the town is likely to cost the same. Even when you lose you still had a fun night. And when you win it's even better!

Of course, we are only playing once every few months.. so it's really not a big issue financially.

> Is it still ok to say that men take more risks than women in general?

As long as you don't try to define your terms.

> It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.

This what scares me the most in that trend

Gambling should be treated like drugs.

Nothing good comes from it. It only increases the wealth gap.

Legal & regulated drugs generally don’t cause as much damage as legal & regulated gambling.

Gambling mostly damages just the person gambling (and loosing) while drugs tend to damage not just the consumer but also people and the environment around them (violence, crime, homelessness, mental issues, robberies, feces and syringes everywhere, harassment etc).

We’ve never really had legal and regulated drug use other than mostly coffee and alcohol.

The same illegal drugs used by the lower echelons of society is the same as the ones used in higher echelons of society. You’d be hard pressed to find folks not using hard drugs in the Fortune 500 list.

The difference is the availability of drugs. Many rich people never struggle to find high quality drugs. That is not the same for everyone.

>You’d be hard pressed to find folks not using hard drugs in the Fortune 500 list.

Oh for sure, the big difference is that rich people can afford to go into the best private rehab whenever they cross the line, whereas working class people tend to end up broke, homeless and sick.

Gambling can have many externalities too, starting with the families of gambling addicts.

Yeah but much less so than with hard drug addicts. When was the last time a roulette addict took a shit on your car or chasing people in the park? Or a roulette addict being even allowed in the casino having soiled himself?

Of course they could have externalities too, but their blast radius is mostly contained to their near circle of family instead of the entire society.

I think you'd be surprised at the number of people who wear diapers to the casino so they don't have to take a break from the machines.

Yeah but that's a conscious decision, not one do to mental illnesses.

Huh, I think you're splitting hairs at that point.

Splitting hairs? Really?

So to you there's no difference between someone voluntarily and consciously choosing to wear a diaper so he can continue doing an activity for longer without toilet breaks(some video gamers do that too), and someone who is soiled himself because his mind can't control the bowel movements due to being fried by hard drugs?

Yeh, they're technically both addicts, but gambling addicts tend to harass less people and cause less overall ER calls, petty crime, trash, feces in the neighborhoods, than hard drug addicts.

One is a much greater annoyance to general people on the street than the other. What actual arguments do you have to refute this other than just calling it splitting hairs?

> Yeah but that's a conscious decision, not one do to mental illnesses.

You tried to establish mutual exclusivity between conscious decisions and mental illness.

I refuted that.

Never said the impact on society of your examples were similar.

Alcohol overuse causes 178,000 American deaths annually:

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2023/11/6/23931877/alcohol...

We need to re-label modern gambling (like the lottery and casinos) into what they are. Cons. An entertaining gamble is one in which you have a real shot. Heck the carnival games at least involve a reasonable skill. Whereas casino games the only skill is how bad you lose. The casino at scale is taking on no risk. (besides that people wise up to their con).

IDK about in the US, but in Canada the lotteries do fund a lot of charitable things but I wasn't able to find a good stat about the proportion. Also at the end of a day it just a waste of human potential (running the corporation and wasting human hopes on useless things instead of potentially beneficial things)

The sad part about Canadian lotteries to me is all the advertising. If we accept the idea that they exist to preempt illegal gambling, no ads are required. The sheer waste of these campaigns, and the likelihood that they are a factor in developing some gambling addictions is quite saddening.

I don't play the lottery but I don't think things like the national lottery in the UK are a con so much as entertainment. People get enjoyment from thinking what if I won the lottery. No one is claiming the mathematically expected value of your return is greater than one.

Agree, both can have profound effects on mental health, relationships and overall well-being...

That's why this is called gambling _addiction_. If you understand the existence of other behavioral addictions, it's not so different.

there's two types of gambling addiction.

sports betting, table games, etc: gambler motivated by excitement, somehow thinks they are going to win and make money. often racks up massive losses due to desire to "win it all back" as you say. this is stereotypically the "male" style of gambling addiction. like your friends.

slot machines, video poker: the psychology is very different. the heaviest slot machine players don't have any expectation that they are going to come out ahead. they play the game partly because it puts them into a soothing flow state (though in many cases it is just compulsive behavior with no good motivation). losing money overtime is understood as the cost of playing.

slot machine gambling is stereotypically associated with women. you wouldn't see this either because it's a more solitary activity (unlike table games/sports betting) but it can be very dark -- I think probably worse than the classic gambling addiction.

i think the gender distinctions are real although obviously it's not hard and fast (plenty of male slot machine players, plenty of women losing money placing bets). i think it's probably partly brain differences and partly who casinos/bookies vs. video slot companies choose to market to.

I rarely go to Casinos, but usually go in with $20, if I lose it, that's basically it for me. I can't imagine justifying throwing more money after losing it all, only in video games where gambling is allowed.

The key (and way easier said then done) is to take a small amount of money out, accept that its likely all going to be gone, and try to milk it slowly so all the free drinks you get are worth the money.

I like in NYC, so achieving the typical cost of drinks is not hard.

Not a bad tip! I will keep that in mind.

It's best to think of it as spending $20 on entertainment.

Right. There are lots of things I’ll spend $100 on an entertainment expense for a night out. And plenty of things that people think is worth $100 for entertainment that I don’t find to be worth it.

And the house edge at a casino isn’t THAT bad. Eg if you’re playing blackjack at $20/hand, a house edge of 1% means you can play 500 hands for your $100.

I had a professor once say that when the lottery gets really big, at that point, it's not gambling, it's an investment. But keep it small.

It's interesting the types of people who can walk into a casino like you and I and say OK, $20, that's all I'm spending. We lose that and we say good night. Other people… They say no, I can win this, and so they go and spend another $20.

That decision point - to continue or withdraw - is utterly fascinating.

Out of curiosity I once went into a very small-time casino. I ended up at a blackjack table with various characters, one of whom was a single mom. She said she was playing to get money to buy the kids Easter chocolate. She was quite experienced and was up a few hundred dollars for a while. And she said that was it, she was leaving. And then she didn’t. And then lost it all. And then gained some back. And lost that too.

By the time I’d slowly bled away my $20 and gave up, she was still there.

Hell I go in with $20 just to get the free drinks and sit there bored out of my mind hitting some stupid button that occasionally gives me another round of drinks or not. I am so sick of Vegas and will never go to another conference there.

> I had a professor once say that when the lottery gets really big, at that point, it's not gambling, it's an investment. But keep it small.

This seems like funny logic.

My local provincial lottery can range from $5 to $50 million. If I were to accept that I could possibly win, anything in that range is a ridiculous sum of money for me - easily more than I am likely to make for the remainder of my career.

I know I won't win if I play, but if I thought I might I can't figure out why $5M is gambling, but $50M would be an investment. Either way, it's absolutely life changing "quit my job tomorrow" money.

If a ticket costs $1 and you have a 1 in 10 million chance of a win, any payout larger than $10 million (after taxes) gives a positive expected return. Unwise to invest your life savings on a longshot, but still worth buying a few tickets if the expected return exceeds the market rate. I believe the Kelly criterion gets you to an exact percentage of your wealth to spend on tickets.

> any payout larger than $10 million (after taxes) gives a positive expected return.

and conditional on you being the sole winner too (unless the lottery is guaranteed to only have one winner).

Taxes, too: the government will be taking over a third of your winnings for a big payout.

depends on the country

Discounting the possibility of multiple winners splitting the jackpot, and not taking into account taxes on the earnings.

Sure, if you take the whole population, then each ticket will, on average, be worth more than $1. That doesn't change the odds of my making money back on this. There's going to be a handful of people who massively skew the statistics, but it doesn't mean that for the vast majority of players the odds get any better or that their ticket becomes more winning. Expected return doesn't matter on a ticket by ticket basis when the odds and winnings are so skewed, it creates an illusion of worthiness that doesn't exist for the single player.

I think, it's meant like this:

If the lottery gets too big, then it's an investment = if your gambling gets to big, then it's an investment. If you do big gambling, then it's an investment. The law of bigger figures :) the often you try, the higher the chances (whereas the chances stay unchanged here)

It's not about the lottery and it's pots itself (like euro jackpot, USA Powerball.. etc)

Games of chance have an expected value [0], in this case the expected amount you can win with your ticket. Normally, this is very low, lower than the price of the ticket, for sure. However, when the payout is high enough, the EV goes up. If the EV surpasses the price of a lottery ticket, that's the point where you think about "investing".

Of course, calculating EV is very hard, so people just draw a line in the sand - "if the payout is $50MM or over, I will buy a ticket, otherwise, I won't".

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

I think the problem with that is it forces the data into a normal distribution when it's not actually the case, and instead it's a very large bump at one end with an incredibly long tail that drags the other tickets up?

It makes sense in statistics, but as a single person with a single ticket, it's much less relevant. The EV of a ticket is over 100% of the cost, but that doesn't matter for 99.9999% of the players and only matters for the very very few with the correct numbers.

Another thing about EV that gamblers conveniently forget is that it only matters if you are repeating the experiment many times. So if the lottery odds are 1:100M, and you're only buying one ticket, your odds are effectively zero, and it doesn't matter if the payout is $200M, $500M, $1B or $10B.

The casino can live with a 0.01% edge because they are conducting millions of games. You're not playing that many times.

That's the part what causes addiction. First you win. Then you lose. Then you win. A feeling of success and happiness will overcome you (that hormones..).

People who can't stop are possible gambling addicts already, or, are about to become ones without even noticing by themselves.

And further, I classify myself to: I wouldn't even go to a casino except it's the money I found right before it's entrance I want to spend there.

And that actually minimize the possibility that I'll ever will make the experience how it is to feel lucky/lose/win in a series, minimizing my understanding of such a situation. And that's may be is the point we don't understand how it is, not to be able to leave after 20 bucks are lost, but rather try to get it back. Just a thought.

(I compare it to an alcoholic. One alcohol addict, because too often & too much & too good feelings. One occasional drinker will never go over the threshold. One who never drinks can't even understand how it is to want to get drunk.)

With gambling, that dopamine rush and crash is pretty intense, so I can wrap my head around that. That TikTok, Twitter or even Facebook leverage the same reaction to keep people glued to their phones consuming bullshit that they otherwise wouldn't even care about fascinates me.

It's a good strategy but I think it's quite hard to notice that gambling is becoming addictive and a problem

I used to do this in Niagara Falls, but that would be enough to get you free parking.

Now they cut back on that, I park elsewhere and they don’t even get a chance at my $20 on red anymore.

If you ever go on a cruise, the ones with a casino typically give you about $10 of free in-casino credit.

I majored in statistics undergraduate and being able to derive and prove the gamblers ruin problem is one of the requirements. At 50/50 it's your money over your plus house's money. And it gets drastically worse as soon as the house gets even a slight edge. I wasn't the casino's target anyways as I saw it was a waste of time and I loathe all the time wasted walking past the gaming area to even see music at a done here like a Hard Rock.

Edit, my school is the top link when I searched for a reference, I guess they included it after the casinos went into Atlantic City. Generalized Gambler's Ruin Problem - Rutgers Math https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/EM20/GamblersRuin.p...

Gambling is an addiction. Having been there, in the moment you don't have control. I would consciously repeat to myself that I wouldn't buy weekly options and repeat in my mind all the reasons why it was just guaranteed to lose me money and how it did not benefit me. A few hours later I would get a random impulse and do it anyway almost without conscious thought. It turned out I had crippling ADHD and after starting to take vyvanse I just completely stopped gambling overnight, (along with binge eating and drinking).

There was a post yesterday on /r/smallbusiness about helping an employee who had a heroin addiction and helping one who had a gambling addiction. The overwhelming consensus was that the gambling addiction was worse, which is not what I would have expected. But the logic made sense from the financial perspective: you can only use so much heroin in a day, but you can spend an unlimited amount on gambling.

I feel like this is backwards? When you reach your heroine limit, you die. It's pretty final. And, most people don't have unlimited money with which to gamble.

Every time you use heroin, it works. Gambling works maybe 1/10 times.

Not really, addictions usually need higher quantities and frequency.

Another thing with gambling is the drug (cash) is always around you and in your hands. Easy to lose value for it.

A dizzy, barely uncomfortable bed-ridden weekend and a strip of Orange paper,

vs.

A lifelong proclivity to quantize, metrify, and reduce all social interactions to transactional objects that exist soley to be leveraged.

The latter also happens to drug addicts, but the it is a psychological phenomenon that can be stymied with medication.

Unfortunately, no analogous chemical exists (yet!) for the similarly inflected urge to gamble.

This does not sound like a real gambling addiction, it sounds like a group of friends who enjoy the occasional small thrill and doing something together. Losing a few hundred dollars every now and then is fine, even if you personally find it morally unacceptable. A gambling problem is taking your entire paycheck to the casino, taking out a loan, selling a car… Borrowing $40 is so far from being problematic, sounds like a group of people who trusts each other to occasionally borrow and pay each other back, and for things other than gambling too. And seriously, all this over $40?

I don’t really get skiing, it’s a very expensive and dangerous activity to me, yet to others it’s a whole lifestyle. Fine by me, put knives on your feet and fall down a hill. Life is short, find your dumb thrills, it’s fine.

You don’t need to gamble yourself, that’s not the point, just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.

Yes, skiing and gambling are very similar, that's why there are all those hotlines you can call for help quitting skiing

The parent poster isn't claiming that skiing and gambling are "very similar" in general, just that in the particular example given where they only loosing a few hundred bucks is pretty close to a mildly expensive hobby, like skiing.

Thrill seeking can be an addiction, but whether its bad is debatable. I have that tendency myself.

people are eager to look for some sort of leading indicator that there's a gambling problem before you get to the 'taking out a second mortgage' level of desperation.

however, if we ever came up with such an indicator the gambling companies would be quick to campbells-law it to death so people would ignore it

I see what you're saying, but I never referred to it as an "addiction", which I agree it isn't. It does seem to be becoming a compulsion among them though. I think there may have been a miscommunication here, because I also never referred to it as a "gambling problem". This is just me sharing an anecdote.

> Losing a few hundred dollars every now and then is fine

Agreed. I think everyone has that freedom to do so. I'm just commenting on the gambling trend I see in my peer group. That said, a few hundred dollars means different things to different people, and without diving in, these friends should not be losing a few hundred dollars every month.

> just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.

I feel like there's some hostility in this comment. I'm sharing an anecdote anonymously on an online forum in a relevant thread. I don't have these conversations with our mutuals.

Man, this post sucks. I’m sorry for making the internet worse.

> _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800.

Explain to them that they not have just lost an avarage $600 of their live-time earnings, but over $70,000, if they had invested the money in the stock market for retirement. If we assume that the avarage S&P 500 return with dividends reinvested is somewhat above 10%, as it was in the past, investing $600 now would yield them over $70,000 for their retirement in 50 years. The real value must be adjusted somewhat due to taxes and inflation. But in addition, investing in the stock market provides one with some sort of an inflation insurance for free.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/average-stock-marke...

The women you may know may still gamble but escape notice because they're doing it differently.

Lots of my women friends do various scratch and win tickets and joke around that winning is the only way they're going to be able to retire.

At the core of it both groups clearly feel that the economy is so broken that it's no longer to achieve the outcomes they want through normal means and only some short cut of luck will get them there.

These people aren't entirely wrong, but at the same time a scant number of them (in my personal experience) bother doing something boring like investing their money in a taxable account or IRA. In a peak act of irony, they dismiss the stock market as "gambling." They'll give bits of money away in a piecemeal attempt at random chance but dismiss participating in a market that has a far, far greater level of predictability than lottery tickets. It doesn't matter that the barrier to entry has been lowered to near-zero. It doesn't matter that a person can invest in a single ETF so they can set it and forget it. They won't do it. So while the economic situation has become more challenging for a lot of people, if all people are doing is trusting their 401k and otherwise throwing their money at random chance, then I really don't want to hear them complain.

>> As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends.

I see this among a fair number of engineers in their 30s, 40s, and one pushing 50. I don't think many of the older crowd are doing it, but maybe they just don't talk about it. I have no idea how well they do, but I'm sure they lose on average. Bets are often in the hundreds of dollars if I'm hearing them correctly.

The sneaky thing about gambling at casinos and other professional outfits is that the career total of any given gambler is a random walk that can easily end up quite positive with significant probability (e.g. say around 50-50), so if you poll your friends you may well find people who are ahead, which is really great marketing. The house advantage is that of course these "around 50-50" odds are in the house's favor, and thanks to large numbers of visitors they can remove the variance and profit reliably.

Compulsive gamblers have a tendency to not be honest about only counting their big wins and discounting their losses.

A guy from my old local pub was always very keen to tell us about the couple thousand pound payouts, while also being very keen on asking others to buy him a pint or four because he had no money.

Anticipation is a hell of a drug. You'd think they'd start improving their technique though.

Lots of people talking about dopamine as the reward "drug" but few seem to understand that the very anticipation of a thing releases dopamine. You get some dopamine just thinking about opening a tab to that site, not just from following through on it. The anticipation of the next good video/pic/post can be what keeps you scrolling/browsing.

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