(en) the luck stat
For the dozenth time, it all came crashing down on the second ante because I couldn’t make enough chips. I blame it all on luck; if I had the right jokers, I could’ve multiplied my chips more! They just didn’t give me the correct jokers!!
Life is painful when you’re on the purple stake and too stupid to choose anything else other than the checkered deck and make nothing else other than flushes. But I keep on trying and retrying the same flick, over and over, praying that I’ll get lucky (with the jokers… and Jupiters) and hit it big this time.
Yes, I’m talking about Balatro. Thankfully, I’m not gambling my life savings away, as the chips are bought in using exactly 0 quids and can only be cashed out as nerdy bragging rights.
But some people do gamble their wealth away. Online casinos are popular with the wrong crowd in my country (and its surrounding neighborhoods, a.k.a. Southeast Asia) and it’s become a big problem.
By “wrong crowd”, I hear it’s mostly popular with poor people. Well, I guess on the other side of the spectrum, rich people would rather gamble using stocks and cryptocurrency instead… Anyway, being someone of the middle class, I can empathize with neither of them. I just don’t have enough disposable money to consider using them for… speculative endeavors.
I think rich people can afford being more frivolous with it since they have a sturdy financial safety net to soften (or rather, most likely almost negate outright) the blows of their losses. But the financially poor people are probably gambling away their own safety net itself. Why the fuck would anyone do that?
Housel, in The Psychology of Money, said that (paraphrased heavily) it’s difficult to understand how other people use their money because we all grow up differently, and because of it we can have vastly differing perspectives on money. He gives an example case of lottery tickets: Americans who spend $400 monthly on lottery tickets are mostly people who cannot come up with $400 in an emergency. One possible reasoning being: some people have a financial situation so bad that saving never amounts to anything and seems like a futile practice, and its very tempting for them to just spend the meager bits they can spare on a possibly life-changing gacha roll.
Maybe that’s also why those unfortunate souls in my country are so invested in their online casinos. I guess I get the reasoning of why they’d even consider playing it…
But that is probably not even half of the equation. Lottery tickets are one thing, and online casinos are another. Never tried both of them myself, but I’ve heard that the latter can be very predatory, and they are specifically engineered to be so, because they can–they’re illegal and unregulated, unlike the former (acting as if there are legal lotteries in my country. Probably not. I dunno).
What kinda predatory practice? Not saying I know anything (like I said, I’ve yet to try online casinos), but for one, I know a certain feeling from playing Balatro: “I can win big, I just need to get lucky!!! And if not, next time for sure!!!” I’ve heard this is how online casinos rope in people into becoming slot machine addicts: they dangle in front of you the possibility that the next spin will be the big win you so covet.
But it never is. I know both Balatro and online casinos are rigged. The difference being, one of them doesn’t try to absorb the numbers in bank account. I can keep spinning and spinning and replay the same shtick for eternity and localthunk (the guy behind Balatro) gets zero dollarydoos from me.
But it never will be like that. Because Balatro is poker with choices, and one day I will be too fed up from losing the same way for the hundredth time and I’ll try something new. Maybe play risky and aim for straight flushes. Or ditch the checkered deck and play a tarot-focused one.
But do online casino players have that option?
Maybe they get no option aside from paying cash and pulling the lever. Maybe the timing of their lever pulls and button presses mean nothing and it’s all just a ruse by the casinos. Just shiny colors and playful sound effects to make them feel like players… when in fact they are the one being played, ever since game one, all along.
So don’t play slots, is what I want to say. Get good at something multiplayer, like poker, and start earning by sheer skill. One day we’ll laugh in the face of The Needle, together.