On a recent cruise, we left Miami on a Saturday (Eastern Time zone) and our first port of call was Costa Maya, Mexico (Central Time zone) on Monday. Sure enough, to make sure that “ship time” matched the time on land, in our “Freestyle Daily” newsletter for Sunday it told us to move our clocks and watches back one hour before we went to bed Sunday night. Most of us figured out that we would be told to move our clocks the other way Thursday night, after we had returned from our final port of call.
We could, of course, have been instructed to leave our clocks alone until Friday night and make the adjustment then. This only affected what time it is on Friday aboard ship, and since everybody else on the ship would be on the same time, it’s no big deal. If you’re going to eat dinner at 6 o’clock, and everybody on the ship agrees when 6 o’clock really is, there is no problem. The only time a problem would occur is if half the ship is on Eastern time and the other half is on Central time. In that case, there’s a possibility of being an hour late for dinner. The big advantage of making the switch Thursday night instead of Friday night is that travelers have an extra 24 hours to adjust to what the time will be when they disembark. When you’re trying to catch a plane, it is very useful to know what time it is.
To be absolutely correct and match up with the outside world, we probably shouldn’t have changed our clocks until mid-day Friday — which is when we crossed the actual line that separates Central time from Eastern time. But this would be WAY too confusing. We avoided this by pretending to be in the Eastern time zone on Friday morning even though we really weren’t. At the 7 a.m. exercise class (never a well attended event), no smart instructor would tell the class that it was really 6 a.m. according to the outside world. Aboard ship it was 7 a.m. Period. Everybody was pretending the same thing — and most didn’t even realize they were pretending.
So how does this relate to gambling? I’m glad you asked. It relates to bankroll — which is what we call the amount of our total wealth that is reserved for gambling. Almost none of us keep track of our gambling score lifetime-to-date. I keep records on Excel and know my score year-to-date (i.e. since midnight New Year’s Eve), but I certainly don’t add it to my ending score in 2010, 2009, 2008 . . . 1973, 1972, which is how long I’ve been gambling professionally. (For some of the early years, I don’t even HAVE records. It took me awhile to learn the value of keeping records.)
Even if I had this number at my fingertips, it wouldn’t be particularly useful — other than perhaps for ego-stroking purposes. Far more important is my total current bankroll — which includes all of the winnings noted above, but also has been affected by various expenses along the way. (I was a big winner at gambling in 2008, for example, but the stock market debacle more than erased whatever I won in casinos that year. There have been other years where I was a small winner in the casinos, but a big winner in the stock market.)
For most people, however, the important number seems to be how much they are up or down since they got out of bed this morning. People will be delighted if they are $300 ahead or depressed if they are $300 behind — but for most of us, this really shouldn’t matter.
Let’s say your total bankroll, however you define it, is $52,583. You win or lose $300 today. Does that change anything relevant? I don’t think so. Whatever gambling opportunities you could afford yesterday, you can still afford today. And yet people have large emotional swings over this meaningless number. (To be sure, winning or losing $40,000 on that size bankroll would be meaningful. For this article I’m assuming you’re betting small relative to your bankroll size.)
The amount you are up or down today is as meaningless as whether the entire ship is on Central time or Eastern time. It is EASIER to start from zero every day. But useless.
Let me phrase it differently.
Two people have bankrolls of $10,000 and $80,000 respectively. The first person wins $300 today. The second person loses $300. Who’s better off bankroll-wise?
With this example, it should be easy to see that the size of your bankroll when you went to bed last night is far more important that the size of the change of your bankroll since you got up this morning.
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