Tag: advanced strategy

There are a couple of possible meanings to the word ‘partner,’ and I want to be clear at the start how I am using the word. I’m talking about a life partner. Male, female, same sex or not, married or not. It’s somebody you are emotionally and financially connected with. 

I’m going to be using the term ‘gambler’ to represent the one who is the player and ‘partner’ to represent the one at home. Sometimes you’re both gamblers of course, and we’ll talk about that some other time. 

Some people prefer the word ‘player’ to ‘gambler,’ because they see the first term as playing with an advantage and the second term as playing without. I’m using the term ‘successful gambler’ as someone who gambles with an edge.

If you want to be successful at gambling, your partner MUST be able to put up with financial and emotional swings. If the gambler loses $xxx and the partner goes on tilt and stays there, the gambler is possibly down to the choice of giving up on the dream of being a professional gambler and/or giving up on that particular partner. If children are involved in the picture, that adds complications to the decision.

It often is the case that the non-gambling partner doesn’t really understand the math and variance of the games. This person is forced, generally, to “have faith” in the gambler. This isn’t easy, and certainly many gamblers aren’t deserving of that faith. Most gamblers are net losers. A whole lot more people would like to be successful gamblers than actually are successful gamblers, and it can be very expensive to find out for sure.

I, for one, would probably not be a good candidate to be a partner for somebody else’s dream, unless I understood it a LOT better than many partners do. As a partner I would be looking at such things as:

1. What have the results been like so far?
2. How serious is the gambler going about getting to be a better player and only playing in good situations?
3. Who is the gambler associating with? If the people around your gambler are generally successful and seem to believe in the future of your gambler, that says a lot. If your gambler surrounds himself with non-successful people, there’s a good chance he’s also going to be unsuccessful.
4. How bad are the emotional swings of the gambler when he is losing? 
5. How much of a financial cushion do you have between the two of you?
6. What kind of marketable skills does the gambler have outside of gambling?
7. As far as I can tell, is the gambler honest with me? 
8. Is this gambler, over-all, worth having faith in?
9. What are my options should I leave?

 

(Please note, I have never expected perfection out of a partner — or anybody, for that matter.)

Even with these questions, however, I could be satisfiable. That is, if the gambler appears to be going about it seriously and intelligently, and I really believed I loved her, well, that might be all right.

Some partners aren’t satisfiable. Every loss causes significant worry and stress — and then the fights start. I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist of any sort, but it appears to me that some people are prone to be worry warts. Some people are so results-oriented that they can’t handle the financial swings. 

In addition to being satisfied with the gambler, the partner must be able to support the partner emotionally and possibly financially through the down periods, which will definitely occur. The partner must be able to share the same goals of the gambler. If, for example, the gambler wants to build up a bankroll and the partner wants to spend all “extra” money on (pick one or more: house, vacations, clothes, jewelry, etc.), the two of them must be able to have a serious discussion that leads to an understanding.

I’m not saying the gambler’s goals should necessarily take precedence. I’m saying that if you’re not on the same page about the goals, it’s very difficult for either party to end up satisfied with the partnership.