Life is Full of Gambling

Gambling has such a negative connotation in the world, but it is nothing more than risk management: wagering that the chance of success or upside received outweighs the risk or downsides. Society and lawmakers arbitrarily decided to define certain risk/rewards as gambling but others as normal aspects of life.

Most people define gambling as playing a game of chance for money. This myopic definition narrows gambling down to games such as poker, sportsbetting, the lottery, blackjack, roulette, craps, and other similar casino games. However, risk and chance exist in every aspect of life, and money is not the only valuable resource that people can wager.

Investing, The Stock Market, and Buying Real Estate is Gambling

These are low hanging fruit examples. Markets fluctuate, and playing those games result in financial swings for the people who play them. There is a chance the value of the home, stock, or business you buy/invest in could go up or down. The stock market and real estate both qualify as playing games of chance for money.

Buying Auto Insurance is Gambling

Auto insurance could be relabeled as mandatory legalized gambling. Not only are you required to buy auto insurance to drive, but the amount you choose to buy represents your level of risk/reward. Pay for more and you have higher coverage in catastrophic accidents with less disposable income, pay for less and you save money but risk more if something terrible happens. This is nothing more than playing a game of chance for money.

A Woman Going on a Date With a Man

This brilliantly self-aware Louis CK bit on women going on dates with guys is the epitome of risk/reward. Despite their unlikeliness, the risks of going on a date exist, yet for the possible reward of happiness and potential survival of the species women do it anyway.

Seeing Friends and Family is Gambling

Something as simple as going to visit a friend or family member can be relabeled as betting your life for the reward of seeing a loved one.

Every time you step into a vehicle there is a chance that car could crash. I live in southern California, one of the most populated places in the world. If I want to drive to see a friend who lives over an hour away, I am risking the chance of having an accident on highly populated and dangerous roads in order to catch up with someone I enjoy spending time around.

My parents live in New Jersey: if I want to see them, I must board a flying death machine and travel nearly 3000 miles in 5.5 hours. Despite only a small risk of 1 in 11 million, I am risking my life to spend precious time with my family.

Spending Time

I love the phrase spending time. For each individual human, time is his most valuable resource, more valuable than money or possessions; each of us only has a limited amount of time in this universe before we perish. Visiting friends or family is playing a game of chance where you risk your own safety for the reward of better used resources (time).

Accepting a Job Offer

You just graduated college and have been applying for jobs. In the meantime you have been writing articles on steemit and you’ve started to build a following, make decent money, and you are passionate about the platform.

You are offered what you thought was your dream job, but it has long hours and your steemit writing would be completely derailed. Do you pursue your new passion or the job you always wanted? If you turn down the job, the position will quickly fill and your steemit writing may never gain the traction you desire. If you pass on steemit, a chance to get in on the ground floor of something you truly believe in may never come again. Both choices have risk and rewards.

Picking a Show on Netflix

You get home after a long day of work, eat dinner with your wife, and have 2-3 hours before you both fall asleep. These are your most valuable and fulfilling weekday hours, as the rest of the time you are awake you are either working, traveling to and from work, or eating. This is the time you wish to pursue some of your interests, but after work you are too mentally exhausted to do something other than watch a show, so you reserve your weekends for other interests and weeknights for Netflix.

You and your wife just finished season 4 of a show you’ve been watching for years, and you were both disappointed with what you saw and unsure if you should continue. Do you watch season 5 without knowing if it will improve or continue its decline, or do you start a new show that you may not enjoy at all? Remember, these are valuable hours, you only get a few of them a night, so wasting them is something you never recover. I certainly wish I could recover the hours I spent watching Seasons 5-9 of Dexter.

Your choice is a gamble either way.

Do Pure Games of Skill have Gambling?

This is a more abstract and stretch example, but I want to use it to illustrate the point that chance is omnipresent. Chess is a game of pure skill with no chance involved, right? Imagine two recreational chess players are facing each other. Since they play for fun, they make many more mistakes than grandmasters (such as Magnus Carlsen pictured above), but player A makes less mistakes than player B and has the higher rating and is favored to win each game.

In a particular game, player B happens to find the right move after player A happens to make a mistake. Sometimes B sees the winning move sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes A makes a mistake, sometimes he doesn’t. Did chance play a role in this or was it purely skill?

Conclusion

This line of thinking can be applied to just about any area of life. Everything has risk or chance, from the food you eat, to the activities you do, to the people you associate with, to the games you play. Seeing the world like this is initially a challenge, but once you open your mind and see the odds in every aspect of life, this becomes second nature.

As a poker player, it is frustrating to be denigrated and persecuted for a job that is deemed to be gambling while so many other forms of it subtly go unnoticed. Is poker gambling? Absolutely, but so is everything else in life.

Are you a gambler? After reading this, I hope your answer is yes.

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My name is Ryan Daut and I would love to have you as a follower. Click here to go to my profile page, then click FOLLOW in the upper right corner if you would like to see my blogs and articles regularly. My interests include poker, fantasy sports, puppies, health and fitness, mathematics, astrophysics, cryptocurrency, and computer gaming.

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Other articles I've written:
Is Anarchy Necessarily Better?
How Winning Nearly $200k was Mentally the Toughest Day of my Poker Career
Winning 1.5M in a poker tournament at age 22
An Introduction to Mathematics Proofs