Educated Gambling

Is there such a thing? Depends on who you ask. You see, statisticians will explain that there is a way to go about gambling in a methodical way. They aren’t giving gamblers a license to play. They are saying that statistically a gambler can play the averages based on relevant past and known data. This is part of a statistician’s education.

The science funnels into other crafts, such as, economics, finance, and medical fields. Those professions use their trade for good. Economists do what they can with theories for the future and data from to the past to forecast future results. Finance professionals do something similar but typically on a smaller scale. They are typically focusing attention on an industry or company. Finally, the real heroes with this use of mathematics are the medical science professionals. They take data from experiments and use it to test for accuracy with regard to future results. Think of any drug that was approved to cure or alleviate a disease.

Then, you have the folks who are educated gamblers for a living, or at minimum, in their spare time. These cronies are the day traders, sports bettors, and casino players. They have convinced themselves that they use the science that brings good into the world is also beneficial to bring good selfishly into their lives. They tell themselves they are smarter than others, and therefore, they exert a sense of pride over the infidels. You see, they think they’re simply taking advantage of an acquired skill that anyone else can utilize if they deem it worthy.

Everyone has free will, and everyone is certainly willing and able to use what they have for however they’d like. The problem with educator gamblers is they give professionals a bad name. They use statistics and mathematics in a way to selfishly enhance their life, and often refrain from humility when they strike it rich. Their hubris encourages others to feel as if they are missing out, and they try to replicate the success of their predecessor. This now takes someone into the field with likely less acumen and experience, resulting in failure. There’s a reason phrases like ‘the house always wins’ become common.

Again, people have the right to gamble, but in a time where states are legalizing gambling across the board, and sports betting has moved from smokey dark rooms onto someone’s phone, we must understand the dangers that lie ahead. The same goes for the stock market, and individuals feeling they are investors as they day trade and place bets on stocks they know nothing about. Treating the stock market like a casino is always a recipe for disaster. Now that gambling in the form of casinos, sports, and stocks has become efficiently accessible, legislators need to weigh the pros and cons of making these actions readily available for the masses.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s