How & Why I Got Addicted To Gambling

As I had revealed earlier, I started my journey on online gambling apps about 3 months back.

Although gambling exists in Indian culture since ancient times and is even cited in the legendary Mahabharata epic; it isn't considered an ethical act to participate in.

Today, I happened to visit a Jain Acharya for my anti-dairy awareness campaign. He was giving vows to his followers to not to indulge themselves in smoking, drinking and gambling along with many other vows. Standing nearby, when I heard this, I felt relaxed of the fact that I ain't a Jain follower.😊

Therefore please check with your ethics, religion & morale before you participate in any gambling activity. And not to forget the laws of your land. Many countries don't allow their citizens to participae in gambling activities.

Personally, I don't even know the exact definition of gambling. I generally associate it with high risk & high reward with almost zero labour or productive work. So there is a very fine line dividing investing and gambling. "Low" & "high" are also very subjective words. Everyone wants a fortune but not everyone is willing to take inappropriate risks to get there.

Another thing I felt is that gambling is not just about gains or losses but it's quite addictive. Gamblers keep gambling when they are winning because they derive joy out of it. And they won't quit gambling when they keep losing as they think they can defend their principal by recovering their losses and will fight back to emerge an eventual winner. Who wants a tag of a loser?

But this I had only heard of and wasn't much convinced until I experienced it myself.

I saw a huge profit in trying gambling, which not many think of!

Unfortunately, Indian laws don't permit any casinos. Going to Las Vegas or Macau is the only option to experience casino games. I wasn't much aware of online gambling. A few decades back, there were a lot of State sponsored daily & weekly lotteries. But many people had gone rekt in it so most of the States put a ban on those lotteries. However some States still permit that but they ain't so commonplace now. Yes, horse racing still seems legal, dunno why!

So when gambling dapps started appearing on EOS blockchain, I wasn't any excited about them. But after they introduced there own tokens, I couldn't resist to check those sites. Poker, Slot machine, American Roulette, Black Jack, Lotteries, Dice, Lucky Numbers and many more games were replicating offline casinos.

I reasoned that by playing here, I can save on a Macau trip. So why not have all that fun in my bedroom itself! Even if I make some losses, I'll be in profit by saving travel time & expenses. And I was actually curious about how casinos operate and why they are so tempting to people.

I already had an EOS account with some liquid EOS in it. I just needed to get Scatter to jump start my casino experience. And it was easy-peasy.

I found the Dice game to be the easiest one to enter into. No prior knowledge of gaming required. I just needed to choose a number between 1& 100 and if Dice rolled below my chosen number, I'll win, otherwise I loss. Winning amount multiplies in proportion of the risk I take. Almost every casino website has Dice as entry level game.

I started it with the numero uno dapp viz. Bet Dice and quickly lost all my liquid EOS. Thankfully I understood beforehand that losing is a certainty in gambling games. And I also knew that I wasn't there for earning money. Most casinos have a house edge of about 1.8% to 2.5%. This edge is adjusted in the profit multiplier.

Understanding The Law of Large Numbers

When there is even a slightest margin as house edge, if you play for long enough time, your losses will tend to equal to the house edge of the casino. This is often referred to as (LLN) Law of Large Numbers in Probability theory:

According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are performed.

Every outcome of Dice rolled is generated by transparent open sourced random number algorithm. So there is no place of cheating or bias. So when loss is a certainty, what makes people gamble?

Falling victim to Gambler's Fallacy

Despite knowing that all outcomes are perfectly randomized, the funny thing was that as I played, I started to form patterns in the rolled numbers. And based on that understanding, I started making my betting strategies.

All this while, I was laughing on myself because I knew that all results are perfectly random and yet, I was searching for patterns in it. Not only that, based on those imaginary patterns, I was playing my next moves.

Technically, it is called Gambler's Fallacy. This fallacy wrongly assumes that:

if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future (or vice versa).

I experienced that without falling a victim to this fallacy, it's almost impossible to gamble. If we are playing, we need some control over our moves and some opportunity to prove our smartness.

Ignoring this fallacy, people have devised various betting strategies for gambling. The most popular ones are Martingale and Anti-martingale. People somehow think that they can outsmart the House. I'll talk more about these fallacies and seemingly intelligent strategies in my next post as I've received complaints from my readers that my posts tend to get too long.

I'm sorry, dear readers! Unfortunately, I don't have good communication capability and take a bit longer to express myself. So I guess, it would be good to break this post into a little series of itself.

What do you guys think?

Hope to catch you in my next post.
See you until then!