I’ve been asked to lend money to gamblers perhaps 50 times. I almost never say ‘yes.’ Of the times I’ve said yes, it’s always been somebody I believe had an edge at gambling. Players without an edge are a bottomless pit moneywise. Even if they pay you back the first time (which they usually do), they’ll be back to ask for more later. And then more still later yet.
I got such a phone call from a woman, “Janice.” In her family, it’s her husband, “Archie,” who has the gambling problem. Janice and Archie have attended my classes over the years and we’ve become friendly. Janice believes in her husband, but every time I see her she looks more and more distraught. The money they had set aside for their retirement is gone. Archie has gambled it away. They used to own their home free and clear. Now they owe more on it than it’s worth.
Janice wanted to borrow $10,000 from me, using some jewelry she says has been appraised for $22,000 as security. She promises to pay me back, $500 a month — plus interest. Archie doesn’t believe he has a problem. He’s just been unlucky for the past seven years. But he thinks he plays well and his results will turn around if they can just get by this tough spot. Archie thinks Gamblers Anonymous is for losers and that he has nothing in common with them.
The phone call where Janice was literally begging for money was heart-wrenching. I had her on speakerphone and Shirley was almost in tears while listening. But we still said ‘no.’ I don’t think this ‘tough spot’ is unique for them. I suspect they have already had plenty of these and plenty more are down the road. I don’t know whether the GA program will work for Archie or not, but enabling him to avoid the inevitable decision that he’s not somebody who can gamble is not going to help him. Although Archie and Janice might disagree with Shirley and me at the moment.
I teach people how to gamble successfully. Relatively few of the students are smart enough and diligent enough to become successful gamblers from taking the classes. Many of the students pick and choose what parts of the lessons they are going to follow. And at least some of the time, people who take my classes get a false sense of how good they really are. Archie is like that.
Archie thinks he gambles intelligently. He doesn’t. He doesn’t pay much attention to pay schedules or what promotions are in effect. He is going to gamble when HE wants to, not when it’s a good deal for him to do so. A casino offers him a $500 television and he plays a game where his expected loss is $2,000 in order to get it. And as we all know with expected losses, sometimes they are quite a bit more than we expected.
I ask myself if I’m responsible for Archie’s fate. After all, I was the one who told him that video poker was a beatable game. While that statement is unquestionably true, there are some caveats that not everybody picks up on.
The truth of the matter is that video poker is only a beatable game if you play it close to the way I recommend. There’s no way I can correctly evaluate how much my students learn, and how disciplined they are going to be outside of the classroom. At the best, all I can do is offer an educated guess as to what their fate will be. And even if they did learn to gamble a little better in my classes, they were gambling before they came to the classes and the longer it’s been since they took the classes, the more likely they are to regress to the ways they’ve always done it.
My educated guess for Archie is that gambling isn’t a good idea for him and that if he wants to keep from falling further he needs to stop gambling. I’ve told him this. He always thanks me for my advice. And it doesn’t change anything.
Gambling addiction demons are very real for some percentage of players. I wish them success at dealing with those demons. We like Archie and Janice, but Shirley and I truly believe that helping problem gamblers is a bottomless pit. We can give them hugs. We can listen to their story. We can take them to dinner sometimes. But we can’t save them.
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