In October 2023 I went to Las Vegas for the first time as an adult, and was introduced to gambling. Up to that point I'd never really gambled. Poker with friends didn't really count, it just added some stakes to increase the fun and retain interest in the cards. Risky investments, like shorting $DHI and buying the $BLZE IPO, were the closest to Vegas I got prior to going.
Vegas gambling was really interesting and novel to me. Trying a variety of games in a variety of casinos, with a variety of friends and around a bunch of types of strangers, showed me a lot of different reasons that people gamble. It also served as an exploration of my own approach to risk. I actually found Vegas to be beneficial because I left with a better understanding of what risk profiles I enjoy. Aside from the gambling itself, there were also things I enjoyed getting exposure to that happen adjacent to gambling.
There's a couple elements adjacent to Vegas gambling that I enjoy, some of which are:
I had the most fun in Vegas sitting around the machine craps or standing around the real craps table with friends, all of us engaged in the outcome of a game of chance, while being served free drinks with a DJ playing a set. Socializing is good. Free drinks are fun, to the extent that they taste good and drinking is enjoyable. And it's exciting to take risks together!
The casino offers games for every risk appetite.
After checking into the hotel me and a friend went to a casino in search of a pai gow poker table. I didn't know what this was. My friend explained that he likes pai gow because in pai gow money moves slowly. Most of the time the outcome is a push (no win or loss). This allows you to play for a long time, creating an experience that emphasizes hanging out, drinking, with some element of risk to add excitement.
After gambling for a week in vegas and then doing a bit online as well, I have arrived at a similar conclusion. For me, gambling is most enjoyable when the outcome is mostly neutral and you can play for free.
After returning from Vegas, I tried a few different online gambling experiences.
The reason I was in Vegas was to attend a demo event for an upcoming VR game being developed by a studio that most of my friends work at. Thus, all of us are VR enthusiasts and when we got home we started looking for a way to replicate the casino experience in VR. There's a game called Vegas Infinite that implements a virtual casino; the available games include slots, blackjack, poker, crash, roulette, and craps. You get a random amount of the in-game currency each day for free. We played that for a while but after some time we all stopped. The reason I personally stopped was that while I enjoyed the social aspect, after playing virtual craps for a few hours there was no excitement in it. Mentally the wins and losses didn't mean anything, the currency is totally useless anywhere outside the game. You can't even use it to purchase cosmetics in the game. It's just a number that goes up and down. If the game allowed you to purchase cosmetics using your winnings that might offer some engagement, but it doesn't. The virtual currency is completely worthless even in virtual terms, so any games that use it have absolutely zero stakes. The social aspect became boring because the focus of the socializing was on the worthless virtual currency. It's not like we were having conversations about something else and just using the virtual gambling as an excuse to occupy the same virtual space. I still log in occasionally to collect the daily currency drop, just in case we ever want to play poker as a group or something, but that game isn't interesting at all.
This section is entirely hypothetical, as I would never actually engage in cryptocurrency gambling. It's just how I imagine it would go if I were to do such a thing, and is written in that style.
There are various websites that implement cryptocurrency gambling. These are only available outside the US but are accessible via VPN. After Vegas Infinite became boring, and having a few hundred USD worth of various crypto that I haven't touched in years, I decided to try gambling with it to see how it made me feel. Games I tried included dice, plinko, and a simplified version of roulette.
At first this was fun. Gambling with a fungible asset means there's actually some stakes involved, inasmuch as winning increases your ability to get actual stuff, and losing decreases it. This resulted in being more invested in the outcome, making the game more exciting. However, after a while this too lost its luster. After some reflection I think this happened for two reasons:
1. The amounts I gambled with are completely immaterial to me. The maximum I ever staked on any one bet was $10 with a maximum payout of something like $30. I spend $30 on curry delivery without a second thought, I really don't care about those amounts. The maximum I ever had deposited in the site wallet was $300 - even if this was stolen by the site operators I would not care. Ultimately there was still not anything real at stake.
2. Losing streaks hurt more and were more tangible than the excitement gained by winning streaks. Winning gave a brief dopamine hit but similar to cigarettes and poppers, the most enjoyable part was the microsecond after winning, and then the feeling was gone. I've learned through life experience that this sort of pleasure is ultimately more of a drain than anything else, and that knowledge plus the knowledge that house edge meant that a net loss was imminent made me unable to enjoy it. Personally I think that to get any concrete enjoyment out of pure gambling - meaning the activity itself without elements like free drinks, socializing, etc - you have to lack a visceral understanding of house edge. If you understand house edge then you know in your core that all wins are just local fluctuations in a graph that trends down, and that sucks.
3. Lack of any of the social elements or perks like free drinks or music meant that only the core activity of gambling remained.
That said, I still enjoy short sessions of online gambling on games where most of the time you push. This minimizes the negative feelings of a loss, while still retaining the excitement of volatility, and rewards you with the excitement of the occasional win. You still lose in the long term, but there's a sweet spot where you can gamble for 2 hours straight with a $20 stake and walk away with $10 that makes spending that $10 a worthwhile price for the 2 hours of entertainment. 1)
All of these experiences together led me to my personal viewpoint of gambling, which is that it's a good way to do two things:
Gambling with the intention to win money is a fool's errand. That is not an opinion, it's just a fact. Playing any game with a house edge where your enjoyment is predicated on winning is a waste of life. As a shared activity, played responsibly, it can be a great way to socialize. And played alone, responsibly, it can be a fun diversion not too dissimilar from playing a video game.
As a random thought tacked onto the end here, I bet that some people would be better off gambling than engaging in activities that are actually gambling but given the label of investing. For example, some options trades are realistically just pure gambling, but because it's done on an asset market where people also make rational investments it lets people rationalize the behavior by calling it investing. Such behavior might be less destructive if the label on it was “gambling”, with all the social trappings and pressures (ie, expectations of appropriate risk management) that come along with that. But then, either you know you're gambling or you don't, and if you're self aware enough to acknowledge that you're gambling maybe you're better off doing it on the market where it's legal and where you're less likely to be judged for engaging in it.