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But casino gambling--including slot machines--has almost nothing to do with chance. You are as certain as can be to lose if you play long enough. With betting

But casino gambling--including slot machines--has almost nothing to do with chance. You are as certain as can be to lose if you play long enough. With betting on things like the Scottish referendum there is a chance for an informed bettor to best the game, and people actually do this. There have been cases in Canada of people making a living on sports betting, to the extent that they got in trouble with Canada Revenue over whether their winnings were due to "chance" or "skill" (which are taxed differently.) Bookies cannot be experts on everything, so particularly for a one-off like Scottish independence the odds of an informed bettor making money are not bad. So the comparison of gambling behaviour depends very much on the kind of gambling being done. If it is conventional casino gambling it is simply losers paying to lose--the converse outcome is simply too low probability to be worth mentioning (for comparison: sure... it's possible to jump out of an aircraft without a parachute and survive, but it isn't an eventually anyone ever takes into account when faced with the practical choice, so it isn't clear why anyone takes into account the possibility of being a winner when faced with the choice of casino gambling.) In sports betting and betting on odd-ball events, on the other hand, it is at least theoretically possible for a well-informed bettor to win (but realistically: you are probably not that bettor, so it pays to be very cautious and never, ever bet more than you can afford to lose, because you will sometimes lose.)

dragonwriter 12y ago
> But casino gambling--including slot machines--has almost nothing to do with chance. Yes, it does. > You are as certain as can be to lose if you play long enough. That doesn't mean that the individual instances of gambling have nothing to do with chance -- its a product of the aggregation of the effects of chance. Given an infinite number of iterations of any random gambling scenario, you are eventually going to hit a losing streak sufficient to consume your entire bankroll (the size of the bankroll relative to the stake in any given iteration affects how many iterations it takes before you are more likely than not to have hit this point, but that's about it.) But the existence of this effect (Gambler's Ruin) doesn't mean that the type of gambling has nothing to do with chance -- indeed, it only applies because gambling is about chance.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> But casino gambling--including slot machines--has almost nothing to do with chance. Yes, it does. > You are as certain as can be to lose if you play long enough. That doesn't mean that the individual instances of gambling have nothing to do with chance -- its a product of the aggregation of the effects of chance. Given an infinite number of iterations of any random gambling scenario, you are eventually going to hit a losing streak sufficient to consume your entire bankroll (the size of the bankroll relative to the stake in any given iteration affects how many iterations it takes before you are more likely than not to have hit this point, but that's about it.) But the existence of this effect (Gambler's Ruin) doesn't mean that the type of gambling has nothing to do with chance -- indeed, it only applies because gambling is about chance.