Gambling, card playing and luck

According to some reports, a record $98.9M was bet on the Super Bowl in Nevada.  I shudder to think of how much was spent not only nationally, but internationally. 

Gambling is an addiction for some, a pastime for many.  I've never been much of a gambler.  I joke that if the lottery hits $50M, I'll bet $5, because for less than $50M, it's just not worth it to me.  That may sound high and mighty, but it's actually part of my fight or flight mechanism. 

Chance has rarely favored me.  I'm not good at odds, I can't count cards, so it's something that's completing without my control.  I don't like not having some say in the outcome of something.  If it's a matter of my skill or knowledge, that's one thing, but where arbitrary chance dictates most of the play, I don't enjoy it.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my best buddy Jeff and I went to the county fair.  We went to a booth that had this mini bowling pins set up much like they would be in a bowling alley.  I think they were no more than eight or nine inches tall.  From the ceiling of the booth was a miniature (to scale with the pins) wooden bowling ball hanging by a string.  The object of this game was to take the ball at the head of the triangle of pins, swing it gently around the back of the triangle so that it would hit the front pin and bowl a strike.  I tried it once and thought it was impossible.  Jeff also tried it and got one strike after a few tries.  The kicker, however, was that to win, one had to bowl ten straight strikes using this method.  That seemed absurd to me.

Jeff wasn't fazed and jumped right in.  Try as he might, he wasn't able to hit more than eight or nine in a row.  I thought something was fishy because Jeff was getting eight or nine and then would lose.  We were both too young to realize that the game was probably rigged.  Eventually, Jeff had to borrow money from me because he owed the guy $63, a king's ransom to a fifteen-year-old.  Although I can't confirm it, I believe it was at that moment that I swore of gambling.

I don't play poker; I can't even tell you the rules beyond a couple of hands.  I don't know exactly what it means to call (Despite this, I love the movie Rounders; go figure).  I don't know how to play craps.  I barely understand blackjack.  Roulette is a mystery to me.  I don't understand some of the betting mechanisms used for sporting events.  I wouldn't even know where to go to find a bookie.

So when people bet exorbitant sums on sporting events I just shake my head.  Some say that it heightens their enjoyment of the game.  As a former athlete, that just sounds absurd.  I prefer trying to figure out the strategies being used by the rival squads and how to beat those strategies.  I manage the games as if I were involved.  That's where my enjoyment comes from.

Karen loves to play cards.  Her family is a huge card playing group.  They don't play for money, as far as I can tell, but they play it for hours on end and enjoy it wholeheartedly.  They also play games with which I've only become familiar with recently.  They've been playing them all their lives.  My problems begin with knowing the rules, which escape me, but even when I seem to have a grasp of the rules, the deal always leaves me without any plays.

The same thing happens with Scrabble.  Strategy and words are two things that interest me, yet I have to be one of the all-time worst players in Scrabble.  If the goal of Scrabble was to get as many similar tiles as possible, I'd win every time.  Here's a good sample of the kind of letters I'd get:  K, U, T, T, P, D, M.  Unless I can use a word from Tagolog, I'm out of luck.

So betting on sporting events seems to me to palpably stupid.  People get so worked up about the outcome of games -- even certain events within a game -- and rightly so, because they ridiculously bet thousands of dollars and then lose.  There's the horribly sad story of the Colombian soccer player who scored an own-goal in the 1994 World Cup that cost his nation a game and was murdered by angry gamblers after he returned to his country.

Give me chess or cribbage.  Yes, there is an element of chance in each; chance determines who gets the first move in chess and cards are used in cribbage, but there is much more skill involved in each.  And I would never gamble on either game.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles