Yes and no. Different games have greater and lesser mixes of skill vs. luck.
In theory, over a long enough haul, luck will equalize, leaving nothing but skill. That long haul can be very long. And there are some games, various forms of poker being one, where skill is worth a lot. Or more accurately, where lack of skill costs a lot.
Yes, in some times and some places and some circumstances.
Nevertheless, card games were a primary form of gambling for centuries, with wild excesses and deadly results and official bans. I found a short piece that serves as a fun reminder that more than just friendly social groups are in its ancestry.
The onset of the Revolutionary War did nothing to slow down gamblers. The Continental and British armies tossed dice and cards into the knapsacks and marched off to fight.
For commanders on both sides, gambling was a constant problem. Washington’s headquarters repeatedly issued orders trying to stop the wagering, as a typical directive from 1776 shows: “All officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers are positively forbid playing at cards, or other games of chance. At this time of public distress, men may find enough to do, in the service of their God and their country, without abandoning themselves to vice and immorality.” …
Jaywalking is normally harmless. Running a red light in your car often isn’t. Every activity is part of a spectrum. The societal problem starts when one end becomes hypertrophied.
A good rule of thumb is to compare rates of return to venture capitalists.
The top 20% of venture capital firms make about 20-25% a year when averaged out over 10 years. Median venture capital firm returns are 10-15%.
These are highly intelligent people who are trained in finance, who have endless millions in capital to invest in good business ideas. If the ‘best’ they can do it 10-25% a year (where your money is locked up for years) then you aren’t going to reliably make a 30% return a year in a highly liquid environment.
I read a quote that said that much of the middle class was created due to fears of communism taking root here. But now that the USSR is dissolved, there’s no fear of that so the oligarchs can go back to being pathologically greedy w/o fear of being overthrown. Hence more people becoming desperate and resorting to gambling and sex work to make ends meet.
Which ironically, the rich are the ones that make money on this gambling. The crypto exchanges make endless billions. North Korea has made billions of cryptocurrency. All the crypto and gambling is just yet another tool to funnel money upwards to the ownership class, making the problem worse.
Some card games, like poker, may be games of skill, while, at the same time, games like faro or blackjack may be more of a straight gamble.
Slot machines are a straight gamble. With Blackjack there is strategy and playing with the best strategy will have you lose at a slower rate than poor strategy. Card counting pretty much can’t be done at modern casinos.
What does skill have to do with anything? Basketball is a game of skill, and people still gamble on it.
Good point. I think what may be pushing ordinary people towards gambling is the ease with which it can be done, plus the constant TV ads about sports betting apps, all of which emphasize, “You thought you enjoyed sports, but you can’t really enjoy sports until you’ve bet money on a game. Use our app to bet!”
In other words, it’s not the economy; it’s the ease. Time was, way back when, where the only place you could legally lay your dollars down to try to win more back was the horse race track or church bingo. And it had to be done in person; you had to make an effort to get to the track or church. No cellphone apps (heck, no cellphones), no casinos except in Las Vegas. By making it easy, with casinos all over the place and sports betting apps so you can bet from the comfort of your home, people seem to be saying, “Sure, I’ll give it a try.”
But I’d suggest that it’s not the economy. It’s the ease.
Agree completely. Ease is most of it.
I lived in Vegas from roughly '85-'95. Pre internet. Pre social media.
Gambling was easy and convenient for people who lived in Vegas, and a few other cities in the USA, but was hard for everybody else. The rates of routine recreational gambling, and problem gambling, among Vegas residents then was IMO not far from the US national rates now. Because the ease is now everywhere, not just concentrated in a handful of cities.
Another factor is connected to social changes that have erased the stigma. It’s not a “vice” anymore. In fact, unless you run around in fundamentalist circles, nothing is a “vice” anymore. That term, and the ideas behind it, are simply obsolete in modern society. And good riddance IMO. There are many good reasons to not drink or gamble or smoke to excess. “What will God / the Neighbors think!” is not one of them. Guilt is always a destructive human emotion.
From what I’ve heard golf is the social weekend sport that is most obsessed with betting. Apparently playing a round without making a dozen bets per hole is pure boredom. (Hyperbole, for the pedantry.)
And that’s in addition to the handicap system, which was invented back in the 17th century to enable betting on who would win in games between unequal players.
Gambling was never a vice to me. Heck, we used to have games of street craps in the boys’ room at high school. Nickels, dimes, and quarters. I used to read the local paper’s sports section for racing selections and commentary, and study the results from the previous day. If something struck me, I’d get my Mom to book the bet when she was at the track. Gambling was normal, in other words. And I was only 11.
It can be argued that horse race betting isn’t really gambling, but that’s another topic best suited for another thread.
I’m a big believer that the best way to inocculate kids against addictive behaviors in adulthood is to expose them to all that stuff as a kid. In small doses where they get to see their parents modeling well-controlled behavior.
Conversely, hiding and shunning and hush-hushing all that stuff while they’re young then throwing them cold turkey into the freedom of adulthood w zero experience just about guarantees some unhappy outcomes along the way.
So they should smoke, like, 3 cigarettes a day as teenagers to make sure they won’t smoke as adults?
Three cigarettes a day, each one after sex. Just to get experience in both. /s
Many cultures do something like this, though. Jews in America introduce kids to small amounts of wine at Passover and other times. Jews have a 1-2% rate of alcoholism compared to the overall rate of 7%. Most feel that there is a connection.
I think young adults today are indeed feeling hopeless, and they have nothing to lose. No home to lose, no family to lose, no career to lose. They know that the college-to-wealth pipeline is a lie. We put screens in their hands as toddlers. They’ve been playing digital games of chance as their babysitter their whole lives. Now we’ve opened up the ability to play those games for real money. And they have money, from their dead-end, low-paying jobs. Every ad and every podcast is targeted to them to help them part with their little bit of money in exchange for the hope of being rich.
So why not give it a try? They feel like they can weather the losses (if they even consider losses) because the failsafe is staying longer with mom & dad. Or whatever crappy situation they’re already in.
Call me old and cynical, but IMHO young adults have felt that way probably since the dawn of time. There’s always some aspect of “You are an adult now. If you want something like the lifestyle you grew up with a nice home and a wife and kids and all that, now you have to figure out how to build that.” And chances are, for awhile you’re probably going to be at the bottom of the org, living in a crappy apartment, with not too much money
I suppose the difference now is that every ad and podcast makes them feel like an idiot for going to college and working a regular job when they should be getting involved in some get-rich-quick scheme.
Maybe so but that “dream” is much, much more out of reach these days.
I don’t think that’s it.
While there are exceptions, drinking heavily simply isn’t part of Jewish culture. Most behavior is learned behavior, after all. Kids grow up, don’t see their family or neighbors drinking, they don’t drink themselves. Similarly, I don’t know anyone who gambles, so gambling never really seems like something I should do. It just doesn’t occur to me.
A connection isn’t the same as a complete explanation. Other causes certainly also operate and be one of many. Or may even be results rather than causes. Possibly not drinking heavily in Jewish culture is a result of the early, slow introduction of alcohol.
You may not have seen it personally, but you can’t extrapolate that into a generational, national explanation. An Israeli study found numbers more similar to overall American alcoholics, rather than to American Jews.
DSM-IV criteria for alcohol-abuse or dependence (lifetime) were met by 4.3% of respondents.
Same with gambling. A quick search doesn’t give percentages for Jewish gambling addiction in the U.S. A study was done in Israel.
A representative sample of 3224 Israeli Jews and Arabs filled in an online questionnaire in 2022. The findings showed that 50.7% were non-gamblers, 33.8% were low-frequency gamblers, and 15.5% were high-frequency gamblers. Compared to non-gamblers, low-frequency and high-frequency gamblers were associated with Jewish ethnicity…
[A 2023] epidemiological study on problem gambling (PG) in Israeli adults found that 49.3% had gambled in the previous year. Of these individuals, 32.6% were classified as non-problem gamblers, 10.4% as low-risk gamblers, and 6.3% as moderate-risk and problem gamblers
Those numbers are not far off American numbers, although I don’t know whether all the definitions of “problem” gambling are the same.
Can Israeli Jews be compared to American Jews? Not in every aspect. But if “Jewish culture” means anything at all, some similarities should play out.
You could even argue that Jewish kids are exposed to light gambling early with dreidel games but I think it’s a minor effect if anything. There’s also a genetic effect that makes people more likely to have an addiction although that is probably more to do with substance addiction rather than gambling which is the subject of this thread.
Like I tried alcohol early on and many kinds over the years and I dislike it. I tried all forms of gambling and aside from a minorly successful foray with poker I hated it. Even poker got boring after a while. I realized that it was very clearly impossible to win long term. I am a master of gaming systems and gaming can’t be gamed. Nothing could have made me an addict. For some people, the right exposure at the right time and they are cooked.
I think another recent phenomena is that the dips have become shallower because there are so many people waiting to buy the dip, and get a “bargain”.
So big jumps and small dips, and the meme stocks’ values just get further from any proportionate measure of value.