Maybe I’m atypical, but every young person I know thinks they don’t have enough funds (whether they do or not) and is adverse to wasting money. Sure, they have their hobbies that they spend a lot on, but all of these leave them with something physical. Gambling, fancy restaurants, even high priced movies seem to all leave you with no tangible reward, despite taking a lot of money. I mean, it’s not as if you can just run down to the local coffee shop and spend a few quarters on a machine for a bit. Gambling requires a pretty hefty money outset.
And, yes, we are more educated on the fact that we will not “win big.”
You say that most casinos you go to are very nice, 4 or 5 star hotel-like or whatever, but do you think the average young person can afford that?
I’m sort of a youngster at 25. None of my friends gamble, with the exception of the occassional scratch off lotto ticket for fun or the rare poker tournament in my friend’s basement.
The casinos in Detroit are filled with nasty people and I don’t feel like going through the bad parts of Detroit just to flush my money down the drain. There was a nice one up north, but that was before the smoking ban and the cigarette smoke from all the old-age raisins made me want to blow my money as soon as I could to get out of there.
Many of us weren’t raised with the luxury of extra money. As adults, we work hard for our money and don’t want to spend it on something so frivilous. Some of us have kids, some of us have houses, and we all have bills to pay in one form or another that the money could be better for.
I think it’s logical to say “I’d rather take this $200 and buy something I want now rather than risk it in a game where the odds are against me.” Not to mention finding the time to go down to a casino to throw it away seems silly.
The reason I don’t gamble is video games (but not for the reason you think!).
So I play an MMO. In the MMO there’s a gambling minigame. The most simple gambling possible: you pony up X fake, virtual money, someone else ponys up the same, and one person gets all the money randomly. Simple, right? But for whatever reason this makes people go totally insane. For example:
-Every six months there’s a new thread in the forums about how someone has a “strategy” to “beat” the casino.
-One time, someone went and reported everyone who beat him in the casino for “hacking”.
-There are loan sharks and pawn-brokers constantly hanging out in the trade channel, offering gambling money for valuable items (at 85% value, of course).
-The owner of the game is a frequent contributor to the forums. He says, 95% of the time there’s a serious problem, like credit card fraud or account hacking, it’s by a desperate gambler. He would kill it in a heartbeat if the game wouldn’t pop back up, run by players, in the chat channels.
Mind you, all this craziness is for fake, virtual gambling in a virtual fake world. If people go this crazy about that, I shudder to think what would happen gambling in the real world (especially given that I have an addict’s personality).
Last experience in a casino was in Niagara Falls. A boring place full of octogenarian Asian folk mainly. We didn’t spend more than an hour tops before we lost interest and went elsewhere.
However, online gambling is enormous here as are bookmakers. I’d say a huge chunk of 20-40something men in this country go in for online poker etc. and small card clubs have proliferated the last few years while other types of business wither on the vine.
Maybe young people are just innately tax-savvy. The U.S. tax laws make gambling a losing endeavor here for most people. Unless you itemize deductions, which most young people don’t do since they typically aren’t paying home mortgages or racking up huge medical expenses, you cannot offset gambling expenses against gambling revenues. Most young people would properly report their gambling revenue on line 19 Other Income, without subtracting any losing sessions from any winning sessions.
I’m 30 and and my brother is 25. Don’t know if that still counts as “young”, but we are both in love with gambling, casinos, and everything seedy about them.
/but yeah, a lot of gamblers are older. Especially at the casino after 11 PM or before 3 PM
//We still love it. I get a huge kick out of sitting next to some crusty old Vegas veteran and chatting with him about “the old days”.
Meh, I’m just not a “gaming” person. I don’t like betting. I don’t like owing people money. And every casino I’ve ever been to just seems tacky to me. I also don’t know a whole lot of people who gamble…maybe a couple people who play poker online, but that’s about it.
For me, it’s not a question of reasons I don’t, I have no idea why I’m supposed to want to gamble.
Easy money? I mean, I guess that’s supposed to be the appeal, but the odds are too obviously poor.
The glamour? Yeah, I’m not the one in a tailored suit with slick hair and babes on either arm. I don’t even want to be that guy. I’d rather be the guy with a glass of good Scotch and a few close friends at a movie or a restaurant or, well, pretty much any where else.
It is a predatory industry and I think it is great that many young people don’t want to be involved with it. I went to a casino (Foxwoods, supposedly the biggest in the world) a few weeks ago. My work friend is a big gambler and had a free room. I am fairly good with statistics and knew my only hope was to lay a few big bets and hope they paid off rather than let the law of large numbers take their toll. They did and I was up $700 at one point, lost a couple of $100 bets and walked off the tables up $500. I joined a nice party in the dance club and had three ladies hanging all over me the rest of the night while I bought them drinks.
I left the next morning and had to a long commute back to work from there. I ended up with a net profit of $250 after all expenses were paid including the free and very nice room. Will I be doing that again soon? Nope. I can easily make more of that doing legit work on the side and go out close to home. I was happy I made money and had a good time but I know it won’t usually work out that way. The whole industry is built on pathetic exploitation of people.
On the other hand, any consumable on which a person spends money could also be regarded as pissing it away–restaurant meals, a few beers in a bar while you watch a game, concerts, movies, etc. You pay for a few hours of enjoyment but at the end of it your money’s gone–just like gambling in a way. I see casual gamblers as people who simply prefer a different kind of amusement for their money.
I don’t disagree. When I go to a bar, I bring $100. Once I’ve spent it, I’m done drinking, and it’s time to go. If you can go to a casino with the exact same mindset, that’s *spending *money on entertainment. If you hit the ATM, that’s when you start *losing *money.
I just don’t enjoy any aspect of the experience. I don’t care for gambling, and I know enough about it to realize that games of chance are weighted against the gambler, and games of skill (e.g., poker) require far more knowledge and patience than I have.
I can understand the sentiment that gambling losses are part of what you pay for a weekend’s or evening’s enjoyment, but I don’t get enough enjoyment out of gambling to make it worthwhile for me.
I also don’t particularly care for an industry which makes a lot of its money on people who (a) don’t know enough to realize that it’s a losing proposition, and (b) can’t afford to lose the money.
Interesting observations-here in MA, we have decided to allow three casinos-and one “slot parlor”. Odds are that the slot parlor will be at the Suffolk Downs ractrack (AKA “Sufferin Down”) in Boston.
If you go to this old (1935) horse race track, the odds are that the average age of the attendees is north of 65. You are right-there are very few young people who understand handicapping, or who enjoy a day at the horse races. Its a very difficult thing to learn, and the old timers who know it are passing on.
I’d be surprised if Suffolk Downs survives another 10 years.
I haven’t been young for a good 10 years, but I still feel the same way about gambling.
If gambling is entertainment, then it competes with all other forms of entertainment for your disposable income. So, it has to be more fun, on a per-dollar and/or per-unit time basis, than other things. It isn’t. It’s a money-burning boredom engine. The fun is in winning, not playing, and you have to grind out perfect played hands to have any chance of winning. That is not my idea of a good time; it sounds like doing taxes in your head for hours at a stretch, with a relatively small payoff at the end. And if you’re unlucky, you bust anyway or they throw you out for card counting.
It seems like the video game business (especially MMORPGs) is preferred by young people who enjoy doing repetititve motions for long stretches of time in a semi-social setting for minimal or purely psychological gains. Good for them.
If gambling is a way to make money, then it has to pay better than other jobs. It doesn’t. I’d rather get a night or weekend job washing dishes and not thinking too hard. After a month, I’d bet (ha!) that I’d come out ahead and not have a headache.
Also, casinos range from septically skanky to middle-America faux fancy. They almost universally reek of smoke and have an atmosphere of desperation, self-delusion, and fake fun. It feels like the kind of thing that’s enjoyed by people from a very different culture, that I don’t want to join. The kind of folks who enjoy package tours, or cruises, or touring performances of musicals. I’d rather go to a nice bar, or the zoo, or a museum, or my house.
At least with Warcraft you’re just out $15 a month after spending every free hour in front of a flashy screen pressing buttons over and over. At Vegas who knows how much money you’d piss away? With Warcraft you’re just pissing away your life, not both your money and your life.
Warcraft definately can press some of the exact buttons in your brain that gambling does–maybe this mob will drop that one item I want, and when it finally drops you immediately start hoping for the next drop. But again, this only costs $15 a month.
I’ve been dragged out to the casino about half a dozen times in the last year. It was a nice place. It was very busy every time I went (on ordinary week nights and a couple of weekends). Each time, I put $50 of my grocery money on the card. EVERY single time, I lost EVERY CENT within the hour. So I would go and walk around or sit in the ‘lounge’ listening to some ‘lounge’ musician, waiting for my companions to be finished throwing their money away, too. Bored out of my mind! I could have sat out in my car all evening shredding up fifty dollar bills for the same great casino experience. Though I would have missed the ‘lounge’ lizards.
People have said here that casinos are full of people in the fifties and above. OK, I wouldn’t know- never been to one and don’t have a burning desire to. So what was the average age thirty years ago? I don’t remember people gambling much when I was you…an occasional poker game in high school for a couple of bucks. maybe a bet on a football game (lost $5 betting the Vikings would cover the point spread in Super Bowl IV-their 23-7 loss pretty much cured me of betting). But gambling back there was rare. Las Vegas was about it and flying was expensive back then. Do people gravitate to casinos as they get older (can’t do things like climb mountains anymore)?
I kind of surprised that today’s youth doesn’t have much interest in gambling. From the hysterical columns that Phil Mushnick writes in the New York Post about how ESPN is corrupting the youth by having poker tournaments, I assumed it was as common placing as smoking a joint during a movie on campus when I was young. Evidently not.
But the OP specifically talked about casino visitors only, and not gambling as a whole - and several dopers already pointed out that there are other ways of gambling besides casinos where indeed a lot of young people are.