For the past two weeks, I’ve been riffing on Frank Kneeland’s comment that he wants gambling to be as stress free as possible. Below is his promised rebuttal.
To Stress or Not to Stress, that is the Question?
by Frank Kneeland
Casinos the final frontier. These are the voyages of Frank Kneeland. His 21 year mission: To seek out new plays, new opportunities for income, and boldly attempt to go where many have gone before…without stress. ~FK 2011
The primary source of stress in gambling is risking your money. So what do we know about risk? Well first off, don’t take Asia. Seven extra men at the beginning of every turn, but you can’t hold it. Second, it is believed by anthropologists that risk seeking is an evolutionary trait, passed on to us by our risk-taking ancestors. Let’s look at this with what we now know about plate tectonics, climatology, and biology. It wouldn’t really matter where you lived on Mother Earth if you and your descendants stayed in one place long enough; it would simply be a matter of time before all of you were wiped out by a volcano, tsunami, drought, asteroid impact, Republican convention, plague, etc… Only by spreading our genes and traveling far afield did we as a species have a chance for long term survival.
The mechanism evolution uses to ensure species survival is essentially the shotgun mentality. Fire enough pellets in a wide dispersal pattern and hopefully a few will hit the mark. This is highly successful and prudent—unless you happen to be one of the individual pellets destined for a journey to oblivion. Somewhere during the decline of our amygdala inspired instincts and the development of our forebrain driven society, we gave up smelling each others’ butts as a standard dating practice. I would like to continue that journey away from the thrall of our lizard brains to include not jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. Risk taking once helped our species survive, but it always did so at the cost of the individual. As an individual, I choose to “just say no”.
Recently on vpFREE I stated that gambling should be a 0% stress activity. It was an incomplete statement. As Mr. Dancer very accurately brought out, there are many unavoidable aspects to gambling (and life in general) which are stressful. It is those unavoidable stresses that prompt me to eliminate any that I can. One removable stress is the fear of loss and risking your money. When I made the comment that gambling should be stress-free, it was only this aspect of it to which I was alluding. Risk is one of the very controllable elements of our profession. You can alter your denomination, game selection, your play-number on a high progressive, your starting bankroll, number of partners, etc… And you can come up with a formula where the chances for loss are so small as to be inconsequential.
How risk averse am I? On a scale of balsa to snakewood, I’m about teak. I wait far too long to tell women I love them. When I leave the house I check my door twice to see if I locked it. I keep spare underwear in my car. Before I sit down on a progressive, I make sure I have two relief shifts scheduled, and enough money on hand to go six cycles without hitting the jackpot. Hard to believe I’m in this profession at all.
Have I ever met anyone more risk averse than myself in pro gambling? Why yes, I have. One of our team scouts, Jeff Tannin (The Mole), never played with his own money and primarily made his income from the 2% finder’s fee he got for calling in plays. No risk! Another friend “Larry” played exclusively match-play fun-book coupons with his wife, where they would bet black and red on roulette. But that wasn’t good enough for Larry, he also put a small bet on the 0 and 00 just to make losing impossible. You laugh no doubt. Would you still be laughing if I had opened Larry’s story by telling you he just bought his 5th house and averaged $46,000 a year playing nothing but fun-book coupons without a losing day in his career?
The Price
All things in life have a price, even if the price isn’t obvious. So what is the cost of risk aversion and safety seeking in gambling? Well, mostly time and money. It takes a lot more leg work and scouting to find the best overlays, leaving little time for playing. Also, equations don’t really solve themselves. Double checking your numbers takes twice as long. Risk dodging is math intensive. To avoid risk you end up passing up many plays, forever consigning them to the realm of stories that didn’t happen to you. You’ll agonize at the potential successes you’ve denied yourself. Of course you’ll also revel at the bullets you’ve dodged. You’re trading money for safety and peace of mind—the trade is a costly one.
As a professional gambler I chose to make perhaps 25% of what I could have made, thus reducing my risk to as close to 0% as was possible. For me this decision was a good one. Obviously, for Bob it would not have been. Larry & his wife were happy walking up and down the strip 16 hours a day every day without days off for ten years. You might balk at that kind of effort for $3.94 an hour. The point is, they made a living in casinos with 0% risk. It can be done.
So what should you do? You should do what’s right for you, knowing that gambling can be lucrative, but also stressful if you take more risk that you can weather. Don’t play over your head. And if you are really worried about losing all your money gambling you should know: all that is required to avoid that knot in the pit of your stomach is to back away from the machine. Nobody has to gamble: it’s a choice.
~Frank Kneeland