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Any gamblers here?

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Tyler Durden

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24 December 2010
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This may be a rather silly question to ask, given how sensible everyone here must be to spend time on an investment forum, but just wondering if anyone here gambles? This includes sports betting, pokies, casino games, lotto tickets etc.

In a news article I read recently listing the top things Australians waste their money on, gambling was 4th:

1. Credit card interest
2. Tobacco products
3. Household food waste
4. Gambling ($2.57b)
 
Not a silly question at all IMO...
I don't class myself as a gambler as I have being to the Casino plenty of times and not even placed a bet.
However if I have a little money I am prepared to lose then I like to play Blackjack.
There are lots of similarities to trading and lessons to be learned .
 

Other than a very rare flutter, no. I can't see the point gambling when the odds are stacked against you. Although some people regard playing the share market as gambling, over time the odds are in your favour. I would much prefer to have shares in a casino than play in a casino, however on principle I try to avoid companies that make money on the misery of others.
 

Interesting, care to elaborate on the similarities and lessons? I can think of one, which is quit when you're ahead.

I remember watching that movie 21 about card counting in Blackjack, quite fascinating.


Two interesting points you raise: 1) I always thought the odds were against the individual investor, short term or long term, given transaction costs and power of large institutional investors; and 2) morals of investing in companies profiting off vices, which I suppose is another thread for another day.
 
Interesting, care to elaborate on the similarities and lessons? I can think of one, which is quit when you're ahead
Click to expand...

Well psychology/money management/Probability come to mind.
The difference between Gambling/Trading IMO...
Gambling: the odds are always with the house
Trading : you can have the odds in your favour if you have an edge.
Blackjack odds are around 0.5% against you.

Morals well that is more relevant for investors rather then traders.
I don't see that traders have any moral dilemmas we just compete in an amoral world i.e. Brokers/Institutions.
Investors saying they are moral is a little pretentious also IMO.
BTW I do believe Casinos are immoral :bad:
 
I should clarify. I'm not talking about personal morals but investing or trading morals as such.
Well how do you determine a moral investment?
Do most companies have a moral compass ?
I would argue that few do which is a pity.
 

Very interesting. I think in BJ the odds are against you because you get dealt the cards first, and therefore your chances of busting come first? It's amazing how many times I have seen people get 18,19 and the dealer gets 21.
 
Yep, blackjack 2 or 3 times per year for many years, but I have not been in a casino for about 2 years now. A game of probabilities which I enjoy playing because of the challenge, it just happens to involve money which is not an issue because I have it to lose although I don't do that often.

I have kept track of it over the years as a "gambling account. Overall ahead over the years, but if the allowable amount was lost I would give it away. I have no interest in any other form of gambling.

Cheers
Country Lad
 
being a sports fan i gamble fairly heavily (by most people's standards) on sports. i even maintain a spreadsheet where i record every single bet i've made, with aggregation functions compiling various stats and such. i've made over 3000 bets on sports all-time (been gambling for about 7 years), racking up over $100k in total wagers. according to my spreadsheet i am actually up by about a thou overall (though that includes bookie sign-on bonuses + periodic promos like 25% bonus payout on 4 legged multibets etc.)

i don't bet on sports to make money though, but rather to add a bit of spice to matches where the team i support is not playing, and to test my skill at reading the game and the formguide.

i don't bet on lotteries, casino or pokies. don't enjoy those things very much and i know the mathematics is against me in all those things in any case.

i think you've got to treat gambling as an entertainment expense, not as an income source, and budget it as such. Eg. allow yourself to bet x % of your income per month, assume every single bet will lose, do not exceed that %, and treat any bets that win as a bonus and funnel the winnings into savings - do not re-wager the winnings into new bets. once you start treating it as a means to make money, that's when you run into gambling problems.

the house will always have the edge, it's not easy even if you're a good sports handicapper using a low juice bookmaker. you will have a bad streak or bad beat sooner or later, which will make you go on tilt, start making stupid punts on rank outsiders, and probably lose even more. been there, done that i remember i once had a 4 legged baseball multi on at about 8 to 1 - the first 3 teams all won, and in the 4th game, the cardinals had the bases loaded in the 9th with no outs in a tie game. statistically (baseball is big on stats) teams should win >80% of the time in that situation. someone then strikes out and the next guy bangs into a double play sending the game into extra innings. cardinals go on to lose, blowing up my multi. next thing i know i'm on a 10 bet losing streak following a series of dumb bets at long odds...
 
I used to spend a lot of time gambling, mostly Pony's and Casino, for about 6 months in my late teens i was actually making 5 or 6 times my weekly working wage gambling...haven't gambled seriously for something like 15 years.

The last time i was at the Sydney Casino (coerced out by work mates) i found myself not wanting to gamble, when asked why i simply replied that i had 120K in the stock market and that i was gambling every day so didn't feel the need to play around with a few 100 bucks in a casino.

I have found the stock market to be a much better vehicle for gambling than the Ponys or a casino...with the market to get a result every 15 seconds or so every day the ASX is open, and if you don't like the result you get to spin/go round again free of charge, again and again and again.

Buying shares is somewhat of an open ended wager, a bit like buying shares in a race horse or in the gambling business...time is your advantage as you get to decide (mostly) when the wager ends.
 
I like the punt but I don't classify it as an entertainment expense...actually a way to make some easy coin with relatively little work.

If you know your sports well and can read plays and understand what is happening; then things like basketball and AFL are not all that hard to pick results. Once you throw a few fairly safe multi's together you can get a decent return.

The problem for people is when they think that outsiders will win more often than not and when they put together multi's and they do:
- Too many legs
- Throw in stupid legs to get the odds up

Side story; once met a guy on a plane ride who was a 'professional gambler'. He was saying some years he could get up a mil and the next year drop 600k! ...he seemed pretty calm about it and said it was all mathematical...
 
I've gambled about half a dozen times. A couple of times on the Pokies just with a bit of loose change for a bit of a joke (once because I'd never done it before, another because I was with someone who had never done it before, and both times it seemed like the most insane waste of time imaginable), once on the pokies because I was given a free voucher to play and I had time to kill so though I might as well (afterwards I thought I'd have been better off flicking myself in the eyeballs to kill time), and three times I've played roulette, which I've actually enjoyed thoroughly. I used to go to the casino with friends from time to time but the geek in me saw that once my money was on the table it was statistically worth less than when it had been in my hand a second earlier, so putting it down made no sense, but after a few years I thought I'd give it a go, and was amazed at how much fun I had. I put down $50, made about $300 after lots of ups and downs, kept giving chips to a friend next to me and my sister who was with us that night, and after they'd lost over $100 each my luck ran out too and I went bust. I put another $50 down and it was very much the same again. $100 was a lot for me to lose back then as a uni student, but it was more than $100 worth of fun. For the first time I could understand the appeal, but I saw the danger and didn't want to make a habit of it.

The next time I gambled was in Los Vegas a few years later when an airline mishap stranded me there overnight (I was supposed to go straight to Florida where I was supposed to make it to an expo where I was working, but fortunately my boss was with me so I didn't have to make up an excuse). The airline wouldn't pay for a hotel and I figured that being stranded in Vegas overnight meant surely I was supposed to stay up all night drinking and gambling, which I did, and had another very memorable night. At one point I was down over $300 (relatively painful for me at the time) then won about $1,000 US dollars on one spin and cashed in soon after, giving me a bit of extra spending money for my time overseas. I left Vegas very tired, extremely hungover and a little richer.

I often got the urge to gamble again after that, but thought it best to resist. I then started trading, which more than satisfied the urge to regularly experience big gains and losses!

It was another few years before I gambled again, which was a few months ago. I was in Adelaide one Saturday night with nothing planned, so I hit the town (amazingly good night life for such a dull city!) and part of the night involved injecting $100 into the local economy via their (excuse for a) casino. I put $50 down, got up to almost $100 (at which point I would have cashed in), then went bust, put down another $50 and went bust, and figured I'd call it a night for the gambling.

Every time I've been gambling I've had a lot of fun, laughed with over the top glee when I win, lament with exaggerated emotion (sadness, somewhat genuine but with a heavy sardonic overtone) when I lose, and generally make a fun game out of it. If it wasn't fun I wouldn't do it, but I'm always amazed when I walk through a casino (generally I'm not gambling), the people look so bleak, like zombies or dismally upset and desperate fools. That negative feel of most of the crowd tends to keep me away most of the time.
 
you have to be VERY good to consistently make money betting on sports. you have to overcome the bookie juice plus the bookies are extremely knowledgeable themselves. almost like trading against a market maker in a way.

from my statistical sample (over 3000 bets), the favourites are actually worse bets to make, they win less often than the odds would imply they should. in contrast, marginal to moderate underdogs (2.01 - 3.00) do quite well. especially when the underdog is playing at home. i suspect the reason for that is often the favourite ends up at shorter odds than they should be because people want to feel good by backing a winner so they often blindly back the favourite.

and one other thing. once you win too much - some bookmakers will ban you from betting! they can be spoilsports like that.

so for me, gambling is just for entertainment. the stock market is where i try to make money.
 
Yes , I've always had a keen interest in the law of probability. As a young fellow I spent many hours with other guys at work in the lunch hours and breaks developing and honing our Blackjack skills. We had it pretty much down pat but realised you had to go the tables as a team. Just going to the casino and playing with public won't work. We also developed a system to play a game at the Casino called Sic Bo , basically they roll three dice and you can bet on certain outcomes( try this at home : roll three dice and see how many times a double comes up..interesting) . We didn't make our fortunes but had some fun , I left the job and lost contact with the other guys so that was that. I have never been near a Blackjack or Sic Bo table again.
These days I spend my spare time researching methods that helped David Walsh and his buddies amass their fortunes. The system is for placing bets on horses , small returns many times over. It's a work in progress and a bit of fun so far. Like anything else only put out what you can afford to lose

BTW for those who haven't heard of David Walsh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector)
 

It's true that you have to be VERY good consistently to make money. You also have to be extremely diligent and wise.

I bet squarely on the AFL as I believe it to be the most consistent and with good opportunities to cover during the game. The way line bets change during the games is fantastic to cover swings.

I also run less common bets to get better returns.

I.E Fremantle vs Brisbane on the weekend. The win was paying $1.06 for Freo or the Freo/Freo double was $1.12. The quarters were even higher.

Lump a few of these together wisely and you can be pretty successful.
 

unless you are really good, live betting against TAB juice (or any other aussie bookie juice for that matter) over the long run is just throwing money away IMHO. i assume you are using betfair or some type of betting exchange to do that? aust bookie juice is garbage - you rarely see better than the equivalent of 1.91/1.91 line odds.

i only bet with aust bookies if they have some special bonus bet type promo going on AND their odds on the team i want to back are close to what i can get at pinnacle - which is where i place most of my bets. pinnacle often has 1.95/1.95 or 1.96/1.96 lines, which makes a huge difference over the long run. i've not found any better than them. sort of like the IB of bookmakers if you will. and although they're mainly US sports centric, they almost always have thinner spreads on aust sports than the aust bookies do!
 
If you are good there is definitely money to be made on the horses.

Not sure if ill be able to post this, but there is website called puntersparadise.com.au. You can buy tips off of people and the site keeps tracks of all the bets that are sold so you can track tipsters performance.

I followed this tipper "spartacus" and made quite a bit of easy money (and I was using a retail online betting site, would of done even better with betfair). Unfortunately he has retired from the site but I still check in every now and then to see if he has started selling his tips again. You can still go to the site and look at his results. (He had 3 years I think of consistent profits)

I have no idea about horses, but for those who do they can definitely make consistent profits
 
I cannot even remember the last time I had a bet or simply bought a lotto ticket. It would have to be in the early 1980's I think.
 
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