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That One Hand Against Mike
I could spend this entire entry writing about how much of a dick move Mike pulled playing poker at Paul's place. I could do that. Seriously, what the fuck? I say "All in", and he calls, and because he didn't realize i had several thousand in chips he was able to talk his way out of it because he was drunk and was yelling? And what sort of dipshit am i that i allowed it? Well, not that i'm a dipshit, Mike was my ride home, and the last thing i need is for him to have a bad beat and bitch about it for the next several weeks.

This shit only happens at Paul's place by the way. For whatever fucking reason, Mike will yell and complain and act like a fucking asshole when he loses at Paul's. Not with the Asians, not at Forty's, not at Foxwoods. Hell, even when he loses at a game he's hosting, he just punches the wall, but doesn't yell and complain like a drunken asshole.

So, for the few that read this and weren't there, here's the hand that occured.

I'm dealt Ace of hearts, jack something. The flop goes heart-heart-heart. Me and Mike are really the only people in the hand. I check it to Mike, who bets $900. I decide that i got the 4-card nut flush draw, so, if i'm going to lose, i'm going to lose trying to double up. So, here's where it gets interesting. I say "All in", and flip 2 red $500 chips into the pot, because before i go all-in, i need to call Mike's bet first. Mike, for whatever reason, thinks i just went all in for that $1,000 in chips, and now thinks he only has $100 left to call my all in. But i had plenty of money left over. I wasn't trying to hide my stack of chips in anyway. Besides, this was about 10 hands into a new game, and i wasn't involved in any hands, Mike should have known i had a bunch of chips.

Once again, because Mike thinks i'm all in for just an extra hundred, he CALLS and shows his hand, Ace-9, no hearts. And there was no 9 on the flop. I have him out kicked, and even if he were to get his 9, if it's a heart, i win with the flush. I'm so pumped that Mike calls, that i also show my hand, and for the first time, Mike sees the $5,500 or so in chips that i have, (we started with $7,000 in chips, i really didn't win or lose any hands, and i had maybe $1500 in the pot) and he flips out.

"NO, NO, NO, NO!!! That's total bullshit! I didn't call that! I never would have called that if i knew he had chips!" Now, that would be true, Mike would never call a $5,500 all in bet with only ace high with a three hearts on the board and Mike having no hearts. He would have folded.

Mike is obviously pissed, and he was in a shitty mode because he was bubble boy in the previous game (which, i happened to split with Adam, so i was already up for the night playing poker) and now he was beyond on tilt. He was at a Columbine High School level of pissed off psycho. It really should have been a great lesson on be careful when you call someone's all-in, or always check how many chips someone has when they do say all in.

But, i was a pussy about it, and really just wanted Mike to shut the fuck up. When everyone at the table went mute not knowing what the hell was going on in the hand (not sure if this was true or if people also just wanted to stay away) i let Mike just fold his hand to me and i'd win the current pot.

Because of this, i was on tilt for the rest of the game. In the end, Paul knocked me out when i slow played trips on the flop and allowed him to river a flush on me. And guess what? Because of these two hands, Mike and Paul ended up playing heads up for the money, with Mike winning. Fucking bullshit.

Once again, when Mike wins, he's all smiles and petty talk. When he loses, he's a pissed off asshole who won't shut the fuck up about how he lost. I don't know why there are seperate rules for being a fucking asshole when you lose, or do they only apply to Mike.

(END OF RANT)

Other than that, interesting conversations about candy flipping, playing 80's "Wheel of Fortune", staying up until 5am, and Paul ordering way too expensive pizza. I was able to get my bottle of Smirnoff back, watch the Bruins game that i missed, and because this all happened on Friday, it didn't effect how i had to go to work this Sunday morning.

Mike, who drove us home around 9am the next day, really needs a GPS. He missed the Rt. 2 exit ramp, then, took the next exit instead of driving a little bit down to take the 117 exit which he knew. When we somehow ended up in Bolton, we spot a sign saying "Ayer, Rt. 2", but instead of going that direction, take the Clinton/Worcester direction. For whatever reason, we took an extra 45 minutes to drive home. And even at that, when i told him to go a certain turn to quickly get to my place, he didn't, even though i needed to make sure my rent was out there for noon time Saturday. However, Mike eventually made it all up by making me breakfast. Not sure if that breakfast was really worth the $120 in profit i could have won seeing that Mike did win that in the second game, but it was nice. And i got to hang out with Becca and Marley, hear how Thanksgiving went for other people, and watched "Doubt", which i still believe the priest didn't do anything wrong.

In sports, Bruins won last night, which is good. Peyton Manning and the Colts remain perfect, which sucks. And the Patriots play Monday night, which is ok, until i have zero sleep for Tuesday morning.

My Thanksgiving went by just fine. Even though we had a baby and dogs, it wasn't that bad. And secret santa happened, and i'll have to do my "what i want for christmas" entry pretty soon. This year, it's a $100 for secret santa, so no use putting down a PS3. But to make things fun (or evil) we're doing a $25 Yankee Swap. Which is basically getting an unexpected christmas gift you like until someone pulls the "Fuck You" card and you end up with a pot holder and matching apron. I can't wait to see how badly this will go.

Brian's Big Thought of the Day:

I think for Christmas, i should give Mike a kick in the balls. He fucking called me, why didn't i just be a dick and told him tough shit? After all, there was a 5% chance he could have won.

What do you think–is gambling a sin?

In his massive book on The Doctrine of the Christian Life, John Frame argues that gambling is often wrong, but not always.  He says gambling can be linked to the worship of chance; it can be addictive; it can involve covetousness; it can be a waste of time and money; it can be thought of as a substitute for useful work; and it can fall under the control of organized crime.  So although Frame doesn’t think gambling is sinful in all circumstances it “is often or generally sinful, given the conditions in which we live” (806-807).

Even if plunking down ten dollars in the office pool may be harmless, the gambling industry certainly isn’t.  And Christians ought to do more to speak against it.

Anyone unsure about the negative affects of the gaming industry and the sophisticated tools they use to entice addictive behavior should read Maura Casey’s devastating essay, Gambling with Lives, in First Things.

What can casinos, like the garish new Firekeepers Casino down the road from me, do to your community?  Here’s Casey:

The Atlantic City beat cops spoke frankly about the rise in crime they witnessed after the casinos opened in the late 1970s, and others were equally blunt about the decline in the number of local businesses, the continued decay of urban neighborhoods, and the stubbornly high unemployment in the wake of casino gambling. Subsequent studies would later prove the point: In 1976, when New Jersey voters approved casino gambling in Atlantic City, unemployment in the city was 14.7 percent; in 1997, it was 12.7 percent. During those two decades, the number of locally owned businesses in Atlantic City dropped by half.

What can casinos do to your personal life?

A friend of mine told me that to escape the burdens of motherhood she would go to the casinos at 2 A.M. to gamble until 6:30 A.M., when she would go back home and get her kids ready for school. Until the day she didn’t go home in time—unable to stop playing the slots. A worried state legislator called to tell me her husband emptied her sixteen-year-old son’s college fund to gamble at the casinos. A bank manager told me about a customer who inherited $1 million and—aided by using the ATM machines at the casino to withdraw money—gambled it all away. A woman who worked at my daughter’s day care moved her family to Florida in a desperate attempt at a geographic cure after her husband drained money from his ten-year-old’s savings account and couldn’t stop going to the area casinos.

So why haven’t more civic, political, and religious leaders spoken out against the gambling industry in an effort to stop its expansion?  Again, Casey:

Part of the reason that gambling spread so far and so fast is that the industry markets its product as just another form of harmless fun. In a brilliant move, the industry coined the term gaming as the euphemism of choice. Organized religion was slow to challenge the spread and, even today, rarely speaks out. Most of all, government has become predatory in its use of gambling as a worry-free method of increasing revenue without raising taxes. Indeed, the states have moved from granting permission to cheerleading. Government boosterism has legitimized gambling, eroding what few moral scruples remained on the part of average people against engaging in a behavior that, just a few decades ago, would have been considered largely unacceptable.

In addition, the positive impact of casinos—thousands of jobs, construction spending—is simple to measure, lending itself to triumphant press coverage and promises of easy prosperity. In Connecticut, the casinos are credited with creating 30,000 jobs directly and indirectly. But putting a price tag on the social costs tied to gambling has proved a more complicated task. What price should we pay for addiction, embezzlement, child neglect, increased debt, drunken driving, and suicide, as well as for the prevalence of problem gambling? Governments duck the challenge. Even Connecticut, which to its credit has produced several gambling studies over the past thirty years (the most recent of which came out in June), has consistently refused to tally the total social cost of gambling.

But, you may ask, aren’t the addicts to blame for their problems?  So some people don’t know when to stop.  Why does that make the whole industry suspect?

Decades ago it was widely assumed that gambling addiction took fifteen or twenty years to develop in men (and gamblers were once nearly all male). But those were the days when the primary pursuits of gamblers were such games as craps, roulette, poker, blackjack, or even betting on horses. In this context, the long time necessary for addiction to develop made sense. How often could a gambler bet on a horse? Or a sports team? At most, the event frequencies of the average gambler would occur perhaps fifty or a hundred times a day.

That may sound like a lot, until you consider the slot machine, the modern marvel that has done more to spread gambling than any other invention in history—which has been compared, understandably, to crack cocaine. An experienced gambler can bet 600 to 900 times an hour on a modern slot machine. That’s a lot of event frequencies, and the main reason that people are becoming addicted in far less time. This is especially true of women, who, unlike those in previous eras, are now as likely to gamble as men.

For reasons that are not clear, women take less time than men to develop addiction. Female casino customers are more likely to avoid competitive games than are men and are often drawn to casinos by a desire for escape, which slot machines facilitate. Experts say many women gamblers, who prefer slot machines, can become problem gamblers in just three to five years.

The slot machine, which is at the root of so much addiction, is responsible for 70 percent of the gambling revenue in Las Vegas—and the percentage is higher elsewhere. Slot machines are vacuum cleaners designed to swallow money, yet they remain among the least reported, least understood technological innovations influencing modern life.

So how do slot machines manipulate men and especially women into addictive behaviors?  Casey one last time:

Along the way, the casinos paid for considerable research into how to increase the length of time gamblers stay at the machine—since the longer that patrons play, the more they lose and the more casinos profit. The chairs at slot machines are ergonomically designed to be comfortable, with no hard edges that could decrease leg circulation, Schull observes. Screens slant at 38 degrees to prevent slouching. Game controls are within easy reach, as are computerized menus to have food and drink delivered without leaving the machine. Some have television monitors to keep players from exiting the area to catch their favorite shows. Slot machines have many different themes, mimicking game shows, cartoons, or favorite sitcoms. The sound of jingling coins, the bells, the volume of noise, the flashing lights are all designed to encourage patrons to play, and play, and play…

The real genius of the gambling industry was to combine B.F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning with intense research on how and why gamblers play on the machines. Every casino has a rewards card (Foxwoods’ was once called the Wampum Card, but now it is called the Dream Card), which the gamblers insert into machines at the beginning of play. The gimmick is that, when customers use the cards, the casinos pay them a small amount for every hour they gamble and send them special offers, the value of which escalates the more they bet. In the process, casinos gain a treasure trove of information.The data culled from customer cards at Harrah’s, for example, helped the gambling chain amass a staggering database on 16 million gamblers. The casinos set calendars and budgets that predicted when certain gamblers would show up, how much they would spend, and their “lifetime value” to the company, according to Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman and the Race to Own Las Vegas, the 2008 book by Christina Binkley. Company computers produced “behavior modification reports,” suggesting which gamblers would respond to the offer of a free hotel room and which ones would prefer free gambling chips. The computers measured the “velocity” of gambling based on how often gamblers hit the buttons on slot machines, and Harrah’s used the data to entice them to gamble even more. The company measured how often casino patrons visited, and it called them with free offers if the research indicated they were “overdue.” High rollers had always gotten such careful attention, but Harrah’s showed that paying attention to the low-rolling majority of gamblers would make casinos even more lucrative.

Slot machines have long been programmed to show “near misses” and give gamblers the impression that they came this close to winning, the better to encourage them to keep playing. The machines give back enough money in the process to make gamblers feel like winners even when they are losing. But Harrah’s developed the technique of intervening when reality began to dawn on gamblers—when they lost so much the experience was becoming negative. The company tracked, in real time, customers’ losing streaks and would send “luck ambassadors” to perk them up, give them a token gift—free lunch or some free credits on the machine— to reduce their perception of losing and keep them gambling longer…

Those who defend gambling say that it should be a matter of free will, just like any other adult habit. But when a customer is pitted against researchers armed with psychological techniques, marketing studies, and computer analyses of a patron’s own behavior for the express purpose of extracting ever larger amounts of money, how much choice is really involved?

Of course, addicts are still responsible for their choices, but Casey’s point is well-taken.  The slot-machine is not a toy, or as it is so often dubbed, a bit of harmless entertainment.  It is a learning machine intent on finding your weakness and exploiting it.  Casinos exist to take your money.  They make no product.  They do not create wealth.  They do not contribute to the public good.  They hurt communities, hurt families, and by design try to hurt people by making them into coin-dropping addicts. Christians interested in seeking the shalom of their cities should do what they can to oppose the proliferation of casinos, lotteries, and the rest of the gaming industry. They could start by not showing up.

It may seem like I’ve quoted the whole essay, but I haven’t.  Be sure to read the whole thing.