I'll have it back in an hour

[Dytchdoctir]

This post by Anakah made me think of of a sighting Ms. Dytch and I saw last year when we were traveling through Lousiana, where it seemed like almost every exit from the Interstate had a gas station and a casino.

As we entered the gas station, the Desperate Gambler (DG) was talking to the gas station attendant:

DG: Please, man, I'm broke. I just lost my whole paycheck, and my wife will be pissed as hell. I just need ten bucks to get home. I'll pay you back next week, I swear!

Attendant: Look, Buddy, I know damn well what will happen if I give you ten dollars. As soon as you have the money in your hand, you'll tell yourself you can go back to the casino and turn it into a hundred, and then in an hour from now, you'll be back here broke again.

DG: Well, you can't win if you don't play.

Attendant: You can't lose if you don't play, either!

[sirwired]

If he's gambled away his whole paycheck, NOT getting home might be a better choice. I mean, you can always hang up on the wife when she reams you out over the phone for being a moron; more difficult to do that in person.

[eltf177]

Not to mention she can't smack you over the head with a skillet over the phone...

[taxguykarl]

you can always hang up on the wife when she reams you out over the phone for being a moron; more difficult to do that in person.

At least until a phone-in fry pan is available....to knock some sense into DG.

[Kogarashi]

Attendant: You can't lose if you don't play, either!

This is my Hubby's and my response whenever someone tries to justify gambling to us. We'd be terrible contestants on shows like Deal or No Deal too, because we'd stop when we had a fair chunk rather than gambling for the whole pot.

[Slave to the Phone]

I used to work with someone who was like DG. He was always telling me that you couldn't win if you didn't play. He was over 65 and living in a camp trailer because he couldn't afford to rent an apartment.

I'll buy raffle tickets for charity. I was planning on donating that money at the event anyhow. I'll buy stupid overpriced wrapping paper to support a friend's child's athletic team. I'll buy raindeer horns to attempt to put on my cats long enough to take a picture. I have plenty of ways to waste my money, gambling my paycheck away isn't one of them.

[CyberLurch]

I'll throw a couple of bucks on a lottery ticket every now and then. I consider any money I spend on a ticket or scratch-off to be 'lost', so if I win something, it's a pleasant surprise. And I haven't won anything larger than $10 in years.

But no way in hell will you ever get me within a stone's throw of a casino. Those places don't make millions every day by favoring the gamblers, and money is too hard to come by these days to be giving it to those casinos.

My work isn't far from a casino, and I get people like the one described in the OP on a fairly regular basis. I sympathize; I know it's an addiction, but you can't help them. Once they've blown their wad, they WILL gamble with any money you give them. Why? Because they have nothing left to lose and everything to gain by returning to the casino. The thought of a conservative approach (accepting the charity and actually using it to get home) is not even present in their head. They understand that the odds are stacked monumentally against them, but somehow that thought doesn't actually register in their decision-making process. In short, they plan to win without making allowance for the possibility (probability!) of losing.

We also get people who are addicted to those scratch-off tickets. There's a woman who wanders in regularly and throws easily $30 each night on those things. Even if she only did it five days a week, that averages over $600 a month. That's more than the payment on my house. She hits a winner every once in a while, sure, but on the whole, she's lost thousands. TENS of thousands.

It actually makes me sick to think about.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

There's a reason I don't gamble. I liked playing video games a little too much as a child. A slot machine is a video game you pay to play every time. Like an arcade game that costs $20 a pop.

I'd much rather get something tangible for my money. Also the accumulated smoke in casinos gives me a headache.

[Android Kaeli]

I gamble once in a while, in the last five years I've been to a casino maybe three times; one of those times was because some of my family wanted me to go to one. Because I never had been to one before. I seriously doubt I used more then $300 in total for all three visits.

I used to get the scratch offs a couple of times a week, I don't do that anymore because I've come to realize how much of a waste of money it is. Now I might get one once every couple of months.

[Jay 2K Winger]

I used to buy lotto scratchers, but I eventually realized that I was sinking more money into it than I was getting back, and so I stopped.

Heh, I always enjoy telling the story of Eagle Dave, a co-irker of mine from the wholesale club, though. ED was addicted to those lotto scratchers. He'd sink probably at least $100 into those every week-- and he'd be getting those $10 scratchers too. Occasionally he'd get something out of it, but he never won big.

Then one week, he got frustrated because he'd sunk more than usual into it and got NOTHING to show for it. Our coworker, RK, encouraged him to try one more time-- "I think you'll win it!" ED said no. So RK decided, "Okay, then I'll play."

She sunk $10 into the same variety of scratcher that he'd been playing, and promptly won $10,000.

[Dreamstalker]

At least until a phone-in fry pan is available....to knock some sense into DG.

*ponders* Modified Pie Face game (or Mindstorms robot), Raspberry Pi and...well, it might be doable via cell phones, landline would be tricky.

Lego could be built to look like a random sculpture, audio trigger from the cell phone...whack

[taxguykarl]

I won't hazard to guess how much P form this thread blows on that nonsense.

[LoTech]

"Trying to get rich by playing the lottery is like attempting suicide by flying commercial airlines."

[mjr]

I knew a guy once who wrote a "lottery" style program for his landlady. He told me she didn't "get" the lesson because it was "too fun to play".

I still can't figure out how losing money is fun...

I also used to work with a guy who waited until the powerball got into the hundreds of millions before he'd play.

Now, I understand that generally 1 is infinitely larger than 0, but if you look at things from a "probability" standpoint, with 0 being "won't happen", and 1 being "certain to happen", winning the powerball has a 1 in 292,201,338 odds.

Or, every "legal age" person in America could buy one ticket, with no non-matching numbers, and there's still a possibility that no one would win.

That's approximately a 0.00000003% chance of winning the powerball jackpot.

Odds of winning anything in powerball are 1 in 24.87, per Wikipedia. Meaning that you have about a 3.5% chance of winning something -- still very, very low.

[Mr Hero]

That's approximately a 0.00000003% chance of winning the powerball jackpot.

Odds of winning anything in powerball are 1 in 24.87, per Wikipedia. Meaning that you have about a 3.5% chance of winning something -- still very, very low.

Never tell me the odds!