A Tax on Ignorance

This article was originally published by me on July 24, 2012. Someone recently commented on it to me and I went back to check it out. I feel the article has stood up well over the past seven years and is worth revisiting, partly because many of my readers today weren’t readers way back then. Plus, I wish to extend the story next week.

I was reading a 2011 interview of Edward Thorp, a mathematical genius who created the first widespread blackjack card-counting system (Beat the Dealer) some fifty years ago, and then published a methodology for investing in various markets (Beat the Market) a short time later. He is widely credited with being the first “quant,” which is someone who uses advanced quantitative models for deciding where to invest.

He was interviewed by a group called “Investment Management Consultants Association” as part of their “Masters Series.” This organization is associated with both the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a group of academics with top-notch credentials.  

Most of the interview concerned financial investing, but there were a few gambling questions as well. In particular, Thorp was asked why losers at gambling don’t simply quit.

Thorp said, “It seems to me that people are not just wealth maximizers but seeking to maximize something else, whether they do it accurately or inaccurately, whatever their total satisfaction is from whatever they’re doing. I imagine that’s the explanation for why people will gamble and lose money. They supposedly get an entertainment payout. Part of it, though, is that gambling has a tax on ignorance. People often gamble because they think they can win, they’re lucky, they have hunches, that sort of thing, whereas in fact, they’re going to be remorselessly ground down over time.”

Thorp was not speaking about or to advantage gamblers. Although there are a lot of smart gamblers that read my articles, Thorp was addressing a group of people who were accomplished in financial investing, but likely were not particularly knowledgeable about gambling. These people probably believed the house ALWAYS had the edge. For the vast majority of gamblers, this is a realistic thing to believe.

Although it’s possible that Thorp has never played video poker and almost certainly was not thinking of that game in particular when he addressed these writers, I found myself thinking about how Thorp’s comments applied to recreational video poker players.

There are “smart” recreational gamblers. These players know they are taking the worst of it but enjoy what they are doing and don’t mind paying for it. This is actually a rational way to act for some people. These players believe becoming skillful is too difficult, too time consuming, too boring, or too whatever. These players pay for their gambling excitement. Thorp wasn’t talking about this group of gamblers either because these players are not ignorant about their chances. 

There is a large group of video poker players who simply do not believe that pay schedules matter very much and that strategy is mostly common sense. These people believe they will win if they’re lucky and lose if they’re unlucky.

These players often use systems to limit their losses. Some of them believe that if they refuse to lose more than $100 each time they go gambling — but their potential win is unlimited — that this, then, is a good money management system. Others use variations on the Martingale systems. These systems can usually book a small win, but the occasional big losses wipe out far more than those accumulated small wins.

Still others believe in changing machines if either the machine has just hit a jackpot or has been too stingy in paying out jackpots recently. Both reasons are equally fallacious.

These people are not necessarily stupid (although some are). They have their strategies for playing as they do. They just don’t have the knowledge to realize that their strategies are largely worthless. And they don’t understand that this lack of knowledge dooms them to being a long-term loser.

A lot of these players defend their strategies and will argue with anybody who attempts to explain what modern experts believe is the correct way to think. In the days of Internet forums, everybody has the right to post what they believe. If you’re just beginning, you don’t know who is knowledgeable and who isn’t.

Gambling’s tax on ignorance is quite high. It is especially high for those who don’t believe it exists or think that they are immune to it. Most people who know they aren’t knowledgeable play for small stakes relative to their total wealth. To lose a lot, somebody either really must think that their system works or that they really know the right way to do it. And when the ignorant bet big, the results almost always involve getting into a financial hole that keeps getting bigger and bigger over time.