memes

He's not an alcoholic. Alcoholics go to meetings.

Seriously though, if anyone feels they MUST do some optional thing its likely time to take a break. That goes equally for something you consume or something you do.

There's a study on this... I o py remember it pretty vaguely, but the tl;dr was that if people win at gambling it doesn't hold much appeal -- the initial drive to continue gambling only comes after losses. Something about 'making up for' anything you lost drives the addiction behaviour far more. This struck me initially as kinda counter-intuitive (you'd think that people were more motivated by behaviours with positive outcomes, right?) so it always stuck in my head...

This is the reason behind it

Its not so bad in Australia these days, depends on which state you're tin too but yeah, fuck gamblibg.

Best thing that could have ever happened to you. If you won it 'big' you'd have ended up losing way more than 300 bucks. A moderately priced lesson.

I went to the casino with friends around 12 years ago. We agreed to get a few coins (around 20€ or so) at the beginning, play them and leave once we run out of coins.

Everyone lost their coins except me, I left with like 27€. It was the only time I went to the casino.

So now I can never go in a casino again ! I have a perfect record, I've always won against the casino and I intend to keep it this way my whole life.

One time a coworker asked me and another friend to go to the casino with her, her mom and her boyfriend after work and me and my friend said yes. We arrive and when we walk in we are told "if you sign up for our players card you get 20 dollars preloaded for free"... What the hell why not, free 20 dollars. Everyone besides me and my friend had one already so we said we'll meet you inside once we get the card.

So we go to the counter and fill out their one page form, take maybe 10 minutes being generous. We get the card and go to walk onto the floor, keep in mind this place only had machine games, no tables or anything and my coworker is walking out with her family. "what's up? I thought you were playing." she responds "nah, we are leaving, we already lost $1500"

Somehow they lost $500 each in under 10 minutes... I still don't know how.

Addicted to money in all forms

They should get that into the DSM

I had friends who used to play online poker in uni. They'd have 5 or 6 screens open at once and just play the dominant strategy for each hand. Was good for some extra beer money.

Also work with a dude who is a former professional poker player. Although when he explained his schedule to me it sounded a lot like a regular job. Good years he could make £40k out of it but not crazy money.

I spent like $2000 playing Star Trek Online. Lockbox keys, lifetime sub, all sorts of ships, items, and boosts. They introduced Mark XIV equipment with a gambling-based crafting system. You could spend dilithium (which you could buy with $) to have a chance to upgrade your equipment.

The straw that broke me? Their shitty customer service. I wanted to gear up an alt and give them the Jem'Hadar battleship with the Jem'hadar attack ship so they could launch the attack ships from it as fighters, which you could do if you had both. Problem was some ships were account bound, and some ships were character bound, and I lost track of which was which. I ended up claiming the box for one of them on the wrong character. Easy fix, right? Well not every MMO is run to the same standard as Blizzard. Craptic absolutely refused to help me. So I cut ties.

It was after that, when I experienceced withdrawal, that I read about gambler's fallacy and sunken cost fallacy and I really analyzed why it hurt so much to leave behind my addiction. I never went back, because I know that whole game is run like a casino. They do everything they can to hook you in.

It’s fucked how normalised it is for betting and gambling to advertised.

Yeah, most predatory apps are almost like cheap ripoffs of refined system casinos got down to a science.