Poker
fromPsychology Today
1 day agoWhat Old Psychology Can Teach Us About New Betting
Modern betting platforms leverage psychological factors to attract users, leading to widespread financial losses despite their appeal.
Travel fatigue refers to the cumulative physical and mental drain that comes from crossing time zones, sleeping in unfamiliar environments, and competing on compressed schedules. It is not just about being tired from a long flight.
Pi is an infinitely long decimal number that never repeats. How do we know? Well, humans have calculated it to 314 trillion decimal places and didn't reach the end. At that point, I'm inclined to accept it. I mean, NASA uses only the first 15 decimal places for navigating spacecraft, and that's more than enough for earthly applications.
From Plato to Charles Barkley, great minds have warned about the destructive power of gambling. The way societies have usually managed the vice is to cordon it off. It's legal, but contained to disreputable places, such as red-light districts, riverboats, and Nevada. This was true in much of the United States until 2018, when a Supreme Court ruling opened the door to legalized sports betting nationwide.
Sometimes the reason pi shows up in randomly generated values is obvious—if there are circles or angles involved, pi is your guy. But sometimes the circle is cleverly hidden, and sometimes the reason pi pops up is a mathematical mystery!
BJK tracks the MVIS Global Gaming Index, giving investors a single-ticker way to own the full gaming value chain. The top five holdings represent 34% of the portfolio, spanning gaming REITs VICI Properties and Gaming and Leisure Properties, Australian manufacturer Aristocrat Leisure, Macau operator Galaxy Entertainment, and Las Vegas Sands. The fund also carries exposure to sports betting through Flutter Entertainment and DraftKings, plus lottery operators and gaming software developers.
Before you read any of this, use this article for entertainment purposes because it discusses risky gambling in a hedge against buying tickets to see your Washington Nationals. This idea came from Twitter/X's, Crabcakes&Football, an account that frequently gets salty about the Nats. And that account certainly isn't alone in the growing pessimism. A discussion with constant curmudgeon, @dclandofnerds, led to an X.com discussion (see below) that led to this article.
The oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was rumoured to have said that his three rules for how to become rich were: Rise early. Work hard. Strike oil. It's one of those eminently quotable remarks because it captures something we all know to be true, that luck and chance have as much to do with success as anything else. Yet we don't value people for their luck.
The Core Financial Reality Gambling debt (judgments, payday loans, emptied 401k) $150,000 Current household income (single earner) $68,000 Husband's potential income (when recovered) $95,000-$110,000 Additional secured debt (house, vehicles) $142,000 Total debt burden $292,000 The critical issue isn't the debt size, it's the income gap. On Heather's $68,000 salary alone, they're carrying a debt-to-income ratio over 3:1 on gambling debt alone. The $53,000 and $19,000 judgments likely carry 8-12% interest rates, while payday loans typically charge 15-30% APR.
On October 1, 2022, something strange happened in the Philippines: 433 people won the jackpot in the local lottery. For this particular lotto, six numbers ranging in value from 1 to 55 were randomly selected, and the 433 winners all matched. Even more bizarre, when arranged in ascending order, the winning numbers were: 9, 18, 27, 36, 45 and 54. In other words, the winning numbers were multiples of 9 (9 1, 9 2, 9 3, etcetera).
Online poker is a game of intensity, wit and strategy. It demands quick thinking and constant decision-making. Players need to have an astute ability to use their intuition and evaluate all the given information under immense pressure. For most players, their dips in performance around the table are primarily affected by choice fatigue rather than the presence of excellent opponents or bad luck.