So much weird shit has happened to me over the last eight years or so that I had completely forgotten about one little piece of my past life until I remembered it after posting my bio from a decade ago.
I had completely forgotten my short-lived and totally unsuccessful career as a professional gambler – mainly due to the fact that I don’t think that it lasted more than three weeks.
Failed Career #1 was as a bank clerk and doesn’t make for a very interesting story. Basically I just hated school and wanted to get into the ‘real world’ and make some money as quickly as possible. In a small provincial town, a bank was one of the better career paths to try and take for someone with limited qualifications.
Working as a bank clerk just wasn’t me at all though as it was nothing but dull and repetitive routine, something that I am very bad at because my mind keeps wandering towards something more interesting. Even at the age of 18, I was desperate for a job which involved my having to ‘think’ rather than just ‘do’.
So I was constantly on the look out for something new to try. I wanted to work for myself even at the 18, even though I knew absolutely nothing about anything at the time, – well, anything that didn’t come out of some ancient school textbook.
Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that my family had been self-employed for generation after generation as well. It must be something in my DNA.
I was a sucker for any ‘Get Rich Quick Scheme’ that was being touted about and saw a small ad that went along the lines of ‘Make A Good Living As A Professional Gambler’. I was hooked and sent away my twenty quid or however much they wanted.
As is usual with most Get Rich Quick Schemes, what I received for my money was a few badly photocopied pages of information. As is also usual with Get Rich Quick Schemes, I was initially rather unimpressed.
The ‘Secret System’ basically worked on the principle that, if you continue gambling for long enough, sooner or later you are going to back a winner.
In practice, this meant coming up with a daily income that you were looking to make, which was based upon the total amount of money that you had available to gamble with. Maybe if you had a grand at your disposal, then you could try and earn twenty a day. This was 25 years ago, remember, and I was an 18 year old kid living at home with my parents. Twenty quid a day was way more than I was earning as a bank clerk in those days.
The gambling was based on horse racing. First you pick a tipster – they said that any of the tipsters in any national newspaper would do. Then you take their picks and try and gamble enough to make yourself twenty quid for the day. If you win, then great! In the more unlikely even that you lose, however, you have to gamble more the next time – enough to win your twenty quid plus the amount you lost on the last losing bet. If you lose again, you have to bet a bit more, and so on and so on.
As I was always pretty good at basic math, I did a few calculations. I worked out that, as long as I could pick a winner once in every 13 races or so, then the system would work.
It shouldn’t be that difficult, I thought. After all, there are only usually 10-15 horses in a race on average and most of those are there just to make up the numbers – there are really only half a dozen with a cat in hell’s chance of winning. And I would be going on the recommendations of a professional tipster after all – someone employed by a national newspaper because of his incredible knowledge that enables him to predict which horse is most likely to win.
By the law of averages, it was definitely going to work. I was going to make my living as a professional gambler! So I quit my job at the bank and headed down to the bookmakers as soon as I had worked out my notice.
It took only three weeks for me to get a bad lesson in the laws of probability. Sadly, horses don’t run on the law of averages. What has happened in the past has no effect upon what is going to happen in the future. The fact that you lost the previous 12 times isn’t going to make it any more likely that you will win on the 13th.
For the first week or so I managed to do just about OK, but then I got onto a real losing streak and the amounts of the bets were getting frighteningly large to the stage where I was on the point of wiping out my entire savings. So I got cold feet at the point where I’d lost half my money already and walked away from it completely, moving onwards into the ranks of the unemployed.
I felt like a complete tit at the time. Over the years though, the pain has been deadened somewhat by the fact that I was not the only person who made the mistake in believing in the system. I read in a biography of Richard Branson that he too tried working the system while he was still a student – at a casino rather than on the horses. He’s always been a lucky bastard though and so managed to get his money back.
In Abel Ferrara’s excellent but disturbing 1992 movie, The Bad Lieutenant, one of the main plot elements is that Harvey Keitel’s character keeps betting on the Yankees (or some other team – can’t remember which) to win at baseball when they just keep on losing game after game until it became a record-breaking losing streak.
This was his reaction:
I know exactly how he felt.
Closer to home, I had a friend who had an Intelligence Quotient of around 160, and Arrogance Quotient of around 180 and a Common Sense Quotient of around 60. He ended up going completely bankrupt even though he had some very successful businesses. Although he never admitted it to any of us, I am pretty sure that his downfall was down to using the ‘Secret Scheme’ as well.
Despite my many vices and a propensity towards doing really stupid things, I have never been tempted to get back into gambling. I think that, in order to be a gambler, you need to be an optimist - you must have to always be thinking, “if I bet $20, then maybe I will make another $20 on top!”
I, on the other hand, being a realist/pessimist, am always thinking, “if I bet $20, then I am probably just going to lose $20.”
After all, anyone with an ounce of sense should realize that there’s a reason why casinos are such money-making machines. And that’s because they win a lot more often than they lose.
However, I am not saying that everyone should avoid gambling like the plague. Another of my friends goes to a casino every now and again and I asked him why he did it when he knew that he was probably going to lose money on it. He told me that he puts a value on how much entertainment a night out at a casino is going to give him – say $200 – and takes that amount with him and not a cent more. Then once it’s gone, it’s gone – and if he actually comes back with some money, then he just sees that as an added bonus to a good night out.
That sounds fair enough for me, and maybe I could see myself doing it that was myself at some point in the future once I have a little more disposable income.
So, please, I don’t want to sound like your mother, but if you are going to gamble, that’s fine, but just do it responsibly and forget all thoughts about making a living out of it (at least on games of complete chance – I do know some people who have done pretty well as professional poker players, but that’s a game of skill as much as chance as far as I understand it).
3 Comments
September 30, 2008 at 10:43 pm
I think most college aged guys go through the phase that they can be professional gamblers; I know I did it about 3 different times and of course it never works. I just have fun with it now.
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October 1, 2008 at 12:36 am
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only naive sucker out there.
Oh well, I guess it’s best that we all learn our lessons early in life before we all have too much money to throw away and cmmitments to take care of.
October 30, 2008 at 12:39 am
[...] the sporting competitions, and having a gamble is an exciting thing, I have to admit, even though, as I have pointed out in a previous posting, it is a complete mug’s game because the house/bookies are always going to end up as the [...]