The gambler's reward
PERSONAL COLUMN JOHN ROWAN WILSON
One of the crucial experiences of my life took place in a small casino at Velden, in Austria. I was at that time playing a system, the details of which I now forget, but which depended fundamentally on staking on the colours and doubling up in a rather complicated way when one lost. It is said that the longest run on an individual colour is twenty-six and runs of over ten are very rare indeed. I had been playing black successfully all evening and then, to my surprise and intense distress, I watched red come up twelve times in a row, each time carrying a larger proportion of my dwindling stack. of chips. I was completely at a loss— the system simply didn't allow for this. In a trance-like state, I had just laid the entire remains of my travel allowance on the thirteenth spin when there was a clap of thunder and the lights went out. That was enough for me. In the temporary confusion I retrieved my stake and crept quietly away.
I don't actually claim this as a sign from Heaven, but I definitely had the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was trying to tell me something. That is one of the great things about gambling. It puts one in touch with the Infinite, with the great Principle of Uncertainty which, we are now told, dominates the uni- verse. To a man who has experienced twelve reds in a row, it comes as no surprise at all to hear that the stellar system is flying apart in some totally unpredictable way, or that elec- trons wander round aimlessly like a crowd in Piccadilly on Cup Final night. He has been, as it were, inoculated against the unexpected.
It is, of course, arguable that many of the other activities generally regarded as vices are an essential part of one's preparation for life. Can anyone tolerate, for example, the thought of living with an absolutely truthful person? To tell an occasional lie not only prevents one from becoming an insufferable prig, but it gives one a sympathetic insight into the lies told by other people. If we don't get drunk once in a while, certain recesses of the human subcon- scious will be for ever hidden from us. And it is likely that nothing gives a young man such a lively appreciation of the implications of marriage as the fear that he may have made his mistress accidentally pregnant.
I think I can claim to have conscientiously pursued my education in all these extra- curricular areas, but in none so consistently, or with such great intellectual profit, as at the gambling table. I have devoted a significant proportion of my life to games of chance of one sort or another, and, looking back, I regard the time as well spent. I admit that it is possible to overdo it. Unstable people can find methods of destroying themselves with almost any pleasure, but these are destined for trouble anyway. For an ordinary balanced per- son, it does nothing but good to place himself occasionally in the hands of chance.
The first valuable lesson it teaches him is in regard to the inherent unfairness of life. Most children, either from some congenital drive or because of defects in our educational system, believe very strongly in justice and think they have a right to expect it. If they don't get it, they have a tendency to become bitter and to blame other people. Part of the process of growing up is to become more fatalistic and to accept with good grace the vicissitudes of chance. In making this adjustment, gambling is invaluable. Nobody under the age of seven- teen really believes that if a coin is spun three times and comes up heads, it is still only an even chance on the fourth spin. There is nothing that will really teach him this except losing money on it. But once he has learnt it, the knowledge will always stand him in good stead. If he then spends a few evenings at poker drawing nothing better than two pairs, jack high, and follows it with a losing sequence at roulette, I will guarantee that he ends up a better, wiser, more philosophical man.
He will soon get to know, relatively cheaply, what kind of a man he is. Is he a manic- depressive, punting recklessly one evening and withdrawing into a state of miserable caution the next? Does he suffer from paranoid fears of being cheated, or an obsessional compulsion to bet on certain colours or numbers? Do his natural instincts tell him to cut his losses, or to fight against his bad luck? If so, he will follow the same pattern in his friendships, his business affairs, his dealings with women. If he loses his head in the card room, it is odds on that he will do the same in the boardroom or the boudoir. - He will also learn a great deal about other people. He will find out that there are two main forms of gambling, long-shot and short odds, and that the attitudes behind them are quite different. The long-shot punter is not really a serious gambler at all—he is just buying hope. The amount of money he hazards is insignificant to him. He knows he has practically no chance of getting any return from it, but until the result is out he is able to dream for a while of giving up his job or buying a villa in the south of France. It is this kind of fantasy which is responsible for the popularity of the treble chance. Nobody cares that the odds are millions to one against win- ning. The dream, at least, is free.
Women are almost all long-shot gamblers. When they bet on horses they choose out- siders, and when they play roulette they tend to put small counters on individual numbers. Habitual gamblers rarely do this. Indeed, it seems to be a rule that the more seriously a person takes his gambling, the closer he moves to the even chance. It is interesting to watch this process occurring at roulette. The big gambler usually starts on red or black, but if he does start on the numbers, he gradually, over the course of the evening, plays more and more of them, until eventually he has chips scattered in bewildering complexity all over the board. If his final position is studied he will be found to be betting at even money or perhaps less.
But for the true even chance, the gambler always turns eventually to the cards. The game must necessarily be a simple one if skill is to be eliminated. The choice at most clubs is between chemin de fer and baccarat. These are in essence the same game. They in- volve playing against a banker and seeing which person, on two or three cards, gets nearer to the number nine. Superficially it would seem that chernin de fer should be more interesting, since it is possible to hold the bank oneself, instead of playing, as in baccarat, against the house dealer. But the serious gambler is not looking for variety. Speed of action and the size of the bet are all that matter to him. He prefers baccarat because he does not have to wait for the bank to move round—he can play every coup for as much as he likes. This preference for the simple game and the even chance has a clear psychological origin. The big gambler is not buying hope; he is buying risk. At the even chance he gets the experience not only of winning, but also of losing, material sums. Both experiences are essential to him. If he finds that he wins too easily on a run of luck, his tendency is always to raise the stake to a level which may be damaging to him.
Different considerations govern forms of gambling which involve a measure of skill, and different lessons can be learned from them. Poker, for example, gives valuable instruction in the practical application of mathematics. As Herbert Yardley has pointed out in his classic work, The Education of a Poker Player, bluff plays only a secondary part in poker, and is really only a device by which a player avoids being too easily predictable. The man who con- sistently wins at poker over a period of time is the man who knows the odds on every con- ceivable combination and who relates them to the amount of money out against him on the table. Another characteristic of the expert is a readiness to sit tight and refuse to waste money on bad cards. The amateur and the occasional player find difficulty in doing
They fall victim to a natural, but invariably fatal, craving for action.
These same principles—the careful analysis of probabilities and the ability to keep one's head—are the basis of successful investment on the Stock Exchange. For the fact is that in all fields of endeavour—in business, in sport, in politics, in love—the rules of the gambler hold good. In a single evening at a table, the card-player can learn as much about the mutability of fortune, the futility of human aspirations, the extremities of triumph and despair, as from a dozen Greek tragedies. Indeed, I would like to suggest in all serious- ness that one of our new and more experimen- tal universities should set up a Faculty of Gambling for the study of this important human activity. It would surely make a good deal more sense than some of the subjects they spend their time on nowadays.
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