I discuss the mechanics behind gambling and that it is actually a way to get rich… as long as you are the game-maker.

Gambling

Jenny is quite an ordinary person. She is in her mid-twenties and lives in a small town in the mid-west. Jenny dropped out of high-school to start earning money. But she was quite unlucky in that she did not really find a job. A few years ago, she even gave up looking for a job. Since then, she spends most of her time loafing around on the sofa and watching TV.

A short look at her puffy face tells you everything: She has no real friends, no ambition, and no aspirations. She is boring. Her life is boring. Even the TV-show she is watching is boring.

While she sits here, the look of her eyes suddenly changes. Something on TV catches her attention. It is the drawing of the Classic Lotto 47. Usually she never gets excited when the six numbers are drawn. Jenny has been playing the lottery now for years. Once she got three numbers right and a few times two numbers. But this time is different. The first three drawn numbers align with three of the numbers she ticked on her lottery ticket. Now the fourth number gets drawn and this one too is marked on her ticket. Her hands begin to tremble. Heavily puffing she sits up straight on the couch. Number five is drawn. This one is marked on her ticket as well. She starts to sweat. Her heart beat quickens. She stares at the screen with eyes wide open as the sixth number is drawn. The camera zooms into the number on the ball. Jenny cannot believe her eyes. All six numbers are correct. She hit the jackpot. Instantly she takes out her smart-phone and looks up how much money is in the jackpot this time. The website loads. She waits sweating and with a beating heart. The number shows up on the screen: $5,600,000. She almost passes out. Only one thought crosses her mind now: She is rich. Crazy rich.

Theory:

A lottery is a perfect example of accumulating or redistributing money. Take ten of your friends. Let everyone pay $1 in a pot. Give each of your friends a number between 1 and 10. Generate a random number between 1 and 10. And, give this person the $10. Instantly this person is $9 richer. The principle is: take money from many and give it to one.

Take 1,000,000 friends instead of ten and do the same thing again. One of you will be a millionaire afterwards.

Unfortunately, this way has a major flaw. The lottery principle only gets interesting when thousands or millions are playing. At the same time, the odds of you being the one with the lucky ticket will decrease with every person you add. By adding a million people this chance diminishes so drastically that the chance of being struck by lightning is greater than the chance of you winning the lottery.

It gets worse. To accumulate enough people to make the price of a lottery or any other game of chance interesting enough, a game-maker is needed. The game-maker is the person who collects the money and assigns the winner through a random process. This game-maker does not make the lottery for fun. He does so to earn himself a living. There are two ways he can do that. In a pure lottery setting he makes his money by simply pocketing a share of the collected money. To illustrate this, let us compare it with our 10 friends who pay $1 each. In this case, the game-maker would assign the winner only $8 or $9 dollars and keep the rest for himself. Most state-owned-lotteries are even worse. They not only keep $1 or $2 for themselves, but even up to $5 out of $10.

In any other gambling setting the game-maker takes part in the game as the »bank«. At the same time, every game of change with a bank is adjusted so as to keep the odds in favor of the bank. So the true winner is always the »bank«.

There are many different ways to gamble for money. Some of them make you believe that you can influence the randomness of the game by drawing a ticket (lottery), choosing a number or color (roulette), pushing a button (slot machine) or deciding if you want to take another card (black jack). But in reality the odds of the game are set. And, they are set against you to make you lose in the long run.

For further clarity on this point: There is a slight chance to get rich by gambling. But the odds are stacked in a way that makes it quite unlikely for you to be the one to hit the jackpot. Most likely, you will end up being part of the crowd who is giving their money to the one person who accumulates it.

And, in reality this is not only one person who wins, but two: the one lucky individual and the game-maker.

The bottom line is that you either need to be the game-maker to get rich or someone who cheats the game-maker. But both of these are ways that do not belong to this section, for they do not depend on sheer luck but on other factors (Way 4 or Way 5); factors, we will discuss later on.

(Footnote: But what about those professional gamblers, who do not cheat the system and still get rich? A closer look at these people shows that they never play sheer games of chance. Rather, they play games where skill is a dominating factor, like Pool or Poker. By doing so they chose another way to get rich. Way 3)

Pros:

The easiest and fastest way to get rich soon is to win a lottery.

Cons:

There is only one slight problem: getting the right ticket.

To be continued (Part 2/11)