How to blow 5K in one evening...

[steinhaug]

In contrast to the above post of 42ndSSD's I would like,if I may, take a different stance. I would say that if you have a problem, blame yourself and no one else and accept responsibility for everything. If you do the mistake to put the responsibility on anything outside you for your gambling problem all you really doing is taking the attention off of where it belongs and on to something else which in return will bust you up for good.Let me give you an example.

I agree fully here. There are noone in the universe that can help you - but yourself! Only you can help youself. No other person can tell you, or show you, anything - which will make you do otherwise. For some reason we always need to learn by our own mistakes, we need to be knocked of our big horse! You would think we could learn be looking at other people...

But dont bash yourself to much, what is done is done, you can't change the past - but you CAN change the future! What is lost is lost, but still you havnt lost the money you will be earning tomorrow, next month - next year!

Think of all the happiness and pleasure you can afford with those money - if not trying to double them like history shows you over and over again never works.

Many people think that somewhere down the road someone will come and help me, or that a big win will save me (which we know in turn will trigger higher wagers and in a period of time we will be back were we started). Problem is that people like us do not lear from other mistakes. It's like car accidents, it never happends to me - it only happends to the other people. When your house burns down, that too happends only to other people - like me! But I havnt experienced that car accident yet... But since I experienced the house burning down, I do believe I might have had my share of the statistics. You get the point however. Seeing another person loosing all his money on a slot and being totally destroyed - what do we do? - instead of seeing this as a sign not to play we would see this as an opportunity to win back some of that poor smocks money, since I am su much luckier and better than him.

As mentioned earlier, another crutial part of being able to make changes, is that you need to reach rock bottom. Why this? Again we are back to the fact that we are simple creatures which simply won't take wisdom by other people, we honestly believe we are so much smarter and need to experience for ourselves that infact - we are no better than rest of the crowd!

Some great posts lately people!

 

[gfkostas]

As mentioned earlier, another crutial part of being able to make changes, is that you need to reach rock bottom. Why this? Again we are back to the fact that we are simple creatures which simply won't take wisdom by other people, we honestly believe we are so much smarter and need to experience for ourselves that infact - we are no better than rest of the crowd!

Some great posts lately people!

Some people are on the bottom for ages but they don't realize it and stay there as it requires much willingess to get out of that black hole. A mind at war with itself remembers not 'well being'.

 

[Chill]

For people who have a gambling problem: please, don't ever blame yourself. I know society-at-large insists we all have total free will and complete control over our behaviors, but that simply isn't true. While some people genuinely are self-destructive, more often than not when we decide to try drugs (and gambling is a drug for many) we sincerely believe we're making the best possible decision at that time.

You wrote a good post, but I don't agree on the quote above. Why is it that everyone in todays society needs to blame someone else for their own actions?
If someone drinks and drives resulting in a crash, is it then the brewery's fault or the guy driving the car, or maybe even the car manufacturer?
We all know the answer to that, of course it's ultimatly the drivers responsability.

 

[gfkostas]

For people who have a gambling problem: please, don't ever blame yourself. I know society-at-large insists we all have total free will and complete control over our behaviors, but that simply isn't true. While some people genuinely are self-destructive, more often than not when we decide to try drugs (and gambling is a drug for many) we sincerely believe we're making the best possible decision at that time.

I think he means that we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously in times of crisis and give them space to improve rather than labeling them as impotent. I think society at large insists that we have no control over our emotions and that someone else (psychologist,etc) will get the job done for us. While a sympathetic ear and a good advice can do a lot at the end its you that you have to take a decision to change. When the student is ready the teacher appears.
There are many companies who would like to have profits and we are encouraged everyday on tv adverts to seek our solution in prozak. I heared on TV that 33% of the youngsters in America take prozak. Now that is sad news.
The standards of live in the western world have been raised dramatically. We have mobiles, cars, computers, tv's, etc. and yet all these things can do nothing to make us feel fulfilled. Why don't we undertand that material things cannot make us happy although they are certainly good. We have been bombarded with messages which say look for your differencies between yourself and other people but i think its the time that we look for our similarities. We haven't learned how to look at another human being like ourselves. We have different kind of foods around the world and yet the hunger is the same. We have different quality of water but the thirst is the same.
I gave money to a homeless girl a while ago and she smiled with such a passion and recently I also gave money to my mother to by a coat and she smiled as well....the people are different the smile was the same.
If being depressed requires being mentally active and thinking,which it does, and so does happyness which begins with each and every one of us. If enough of us begin to act in the same way all the rest will follow as it happens today with other things though with the wrong things. We have got to get our head straight and leave all 'these' problems behind. By doing so we can then help others to do the same. We are all in this together.

I think with this thread we do make progress in leaving something behind that will help future addicted gamblers.

 

[Let_It_Ride]

Hey Let it Ride!
Should I get some cramps, we have a landbased casino 5 minutes away from me which I can visit and drink and eat and have lots of fun in. I would never blow 5K on a landbased casino, however with online gambling it's kinda easy as you are playing directly from the bank account - gives me the chills thinking of it!

Hi Kimss, sounds like a good move. I always used to enjoy my nights out to a landbased casino. Ah the good old days, when staff won't let me anywhere near the tables until I had a good dinner or at least a couple of drinks in the bar. The most I would lose there would be 1K in one night and have walked away with 4k profit on many nights, all in cash and no cash in headaches.

It's about time online casinos started tightening up on deposits limits otherwise in the long run we're all going to lose out including the casinos. I know in the UK there were plans to open x number of super casinos but due to concerns over gambling this has now been reduced to just 1 or 2, a great shame.

 

[caruso]

A great shame?? Why??

It couldn't be better news that Tessa Jowell and her lobbyists came up against The Daily Mail in full "crusader" mode.

More sincere advice: if you're going to gamble, take the time to learn about it...if you're going to throw money at something you should at least get the most bang for your buck. I'm certain many people wouldn't dig such deep holes for themselves if they really understood what they were doing--and some might even decide not to do it, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

...and some might decide to do it PROPERLY.

I've always said exactly this myself. Well put.

 

[42ndSSD]

You wrote a good post, but I don't agree on the quote above. Why is it that everyone in todays society needs to blame someone else for their own actions?

Yeah, I kinda wondered about how that paragraph would be interpreted. Sorry about that.

Ultimately we are responsible for our actions, and no one else. But I see a distinct difference between accepting responsibilty, and what most people consider blame.

For me, and I think for most of us, the "blame" word has a ton of negative connotations. Too many of us spend too much time blaming ourselves, our parents, casinos, drug dealers, whomever. We can accept responsibility for something we did wrong without believing we're a bad person because of it.

Shit happens. I suffered from serious depression for many years, tried to commit suicide more than once, spent over three years in mental institutions. My family spent a lot of time trying to make me feel ashamed of myself, a fairly common reaction. Was that going to help? No.

While I was clearly responsible for my actions (despite what some people might claim) I don't blame anyone for any of that... least of all myself. At the time, it honestly seemed the decisions I was making were the best ones available to me. While there were external contributing factors, ultimately my behaviors were (and are) solely my responsibility.

My life is a polar opposite from that today, and I also have to accept responsibility for that. It wasn't friends, or family, or anyone else who fixed things; I turned my life around on my own. But it was a long road full of potholes.

We need to allow ourselves room to learn from our mistakes, and heaping negativity on ourselves is the wrong answer. I strongly believe that I've grown far more from my experiences than most people do through their entire lives, but only because I've been able to look at my behaviors, and the behaviors of people around me, in an objective light.

Problem gambling is a serious problem because we can easily lose much more money than we can ever afford to repay. I know, because I grew up with a problem gambler in the family. (My family is a horde of obsessive-compulsives. I'm 100% sure it's genetic to some extent.)

The real problems didn't start until she started trying to make up for losses she couldn't afford. If she'd had an out, an opportunity to go to someone (friend, family member, etc) and say "Help! I'm in way over my head and I can't pay!" then she wouldn't have gotten into the problems she did. It would've been embarassing, and she may have relapsed, but given enough and the right kind of support I'm sure she would've been OK.

But she, like most chronic problem gamblers, decided more gambling was the only way out; the shame and embarassment of admitting she had a problem was too great to allow any other course of action. And she was trying to hide her losses, as most problem gamblers do.

Ultimately she was able to get financial help--but it came with a lot of crap attached. "You stupid idiot!" sort of thing. That didn't help, her or anyone else. Blame and shame force people into doing ever more stupid things.

I don't have all the answers, probably not 0.00001% of them. But I do know that people who make serious mistakes in their lives aren't bad people. People who can honestly face up to making mistakes and learn from them are much better than most. Stupidity is forever; ignorance is a common condition, easily curable.

 

[steinhaug]

First of all I would like to thank you for a very deep and insightful post, well done 42ndSSD!

Problem gambling is a serious problem because we can easily lose much more money than we can ever afford to repay. I know, because I grew up with a problem gambler in the family. (My family is a horde of obsessive-compulsives. I'm 100% sure it's genetic to some extent.)

Here I have to agree with you. If I look at myself, I have a mother which have serious problems of her own, though it wasnt gambling rather drinking instead. It's still the same, we are missing the natural breaks, or we have the urge for theese endorfins. If I look at my earlier gambling friends, they all came from problem families. I also had three brothers that were maniacs when it came to gambling, so it do run in the family theese extreme obsessions.

Ultimately she was able to get financial help--but it came with a lot of crap attached. "You stupid idiot!" sort of thing. That didn't help, her or anyone else. Blame and shame force people into doing ever more stupid things.

This is so true. If you are lucky to get gelp, it sure as hell doesn't help much if this is the way it's done. When it comes to gambling one needs to keep in mind that gamblers probably have a alot of strings attached all the time in getting from day to dayin the first place due to gambling dept, and we are probably filled with guilt aswell. Those of us having a job are probably some of the best workeds around, working day and night. Then, as we hit rick bottom and see the light in the tunnel, you are met with the same reality which you are already living. You will have to admit all the things of your worst fears, you will have to work your ass of to pay back the "help", and probably with a great interest aswell.

Maby we all should be happy that we get help, I know. I was not one of them getting the help, though I remember like 6-7 years ago when I hit a rock bottom and asked for help. I asked for everything, but my losses were not big enough for help. At that time I had lost around $200.000, but by dept was only $50.000. Again, because I have a good job and make money, their offer was to nullify the $50.000 in trade for my salary the next 5 years, I would then only get the miminim $ to live for in those same years.

What this accually tells me, if you need that kind of help - you might aswell get all the loans in the world and try a last time before you settle yourself in the bottom, because you are going to stay there for many many years.

Now - at this point we relook at this :

For people who have a gambling problem: please, don't ever blame yourself. I know society-at-large insists we all have total free will and complete control over our behaviors, but that simply isn't true. While some people genuinely are self-destructive, more often than not when we decide to try drugs (and gambling is a drug for many) we sincerely believe we're making the best possible decision at that time.

This statement can make sense, but not for everyone surely. Blaming yourself will in the long run only make you depressive, since you can blame yourself for ever. Often your surroundings will stimulate you to keep on gambling asweel. This can be that your family tries to ignore that fact that you are gambling, friends loaning you $1000 for a cup of coffee (trying to bring some humour in here). I'm sure if you tell your landbased casino personel that you have a gambling problem - nothing happends.

Lets twist the situation :
Take a heroin addict. If you ask him to do something stupid in trade of a free hit from you, if he does it - do you thing it's reasonable that he is to blame himself for being stupid? I believe the answer is obvious, no. If the question was popped at an earlier stage in the drug addiction, the answer would absolutely be yes - but not now.

I believe we could do the same example with gambling. Should we blame ourself for gambling, for keeping up the good old tradition of loosing all of our and the people around us's money all the time? The fine tradition of constantly being annoyed on ourselves for being that stupid - again, and over and over again... No, infact I don't think so.

An erlier post I wrote in this thread I wrote this :

beating up becomes no more than a shrug on you shoulders and you telling yourself a simple "Damn, I did it again.. Oh well, Ill get a beer and a cigarette instead...".

My point here is that I no longer blame myself, I except the fact that I have very little control over my gambling addiction, especially inside a casino. But we are now 15 years into the addiction, if we were to jump say 5-10 years back in time I would absolutely blame myself.

I don't have all the answers, probably not 0.00001% of them. But I do know that people who make serious mistakes in their lives aren't bad people.

Absolutely, people make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. This is the way life works, we try something - we will fail - we learn from our failure - we move on. Cause and effect. Sure, many of us have a damn hard time understanding the learning part of this. People who learn from their mistakes and move on, tend to lead successfull lives with great support from friends and family since they have such a "superior-knowledge" of human-matters (not sure of the translation here... Hope you get the drift of it).

My point to this is, if we just get a grip on ourself - in a twisted but very true way we can learn and experience from our gambling something which can make us so much richer in knowledge and understanding than a person without an addiction ever will be able to!

 

[caruso]

An interesting, if sketchily detailed, account of someone owing $21,000 to Firepay on the back of bounced cheques to fund gambling purchases.

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[oldmanhank]

I'm new to this forum but I have been gambling online since July of 2004. I started with poker and over the next year or so I made a nice stash of cash. I made enough to pay off my education loans and then some. I then discovered casino-on-net.

I quickly stopped playing poker and began playing casinos. I generally tried(and still do) to play only with a bonus as it seemed to be the only way to gain an edge with the casinos. Although I am up from playing casinos this way, I would be up significantly more had I stuck to the game plan. I find myself playing without a bonus from time to time and have recently began to play well past the wagering requirement . Unfortunately, poker just doesn't do it for me anymore and I can't seem to get myself back into the groove after playing hundreds of thousands of hands of BJ/VP.

That is basicly why the bonus is there and why most places are so giving of them on a monthly/weekly/daily basis. The chance is high that even the most seasoned gambler(or bonus whore) will become the next cash cow for the casino. A bonus is nothing more than an investment in our addictions by the casino.

The point of my post is to say that even with the best laid out plan, gambling will get the most of us in the end. That is the nature of the beast. The more you play, the more you WANT to play; And the more you play, the more you pay.

 

[gfkostas]

The more you play, the more you WANT to play; And the more you play, the more you pay.

Sad but true

 

[caruso]

That is basicly why the bonus is there and why most places are so giving of them on a monthly/weekly/daily basis. The chance is high that even the most seasoned gambler(or bonus whore) will become the next cash cow for the casino. A bonus is nothing more than an investment in our addictions by the casino.

Well put. I hope casinos read this and learn that the way to make as much money as possible is to give away as much in promotional incentives as possible.

They'll get us all in the end.

 

[Sodax77]

...Some great posts lately people!

I thought same thing

After all...

We are human beings ...behind these nicknames