Word: bets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...crazy!" As for Kennedy, he won $65 in two nights and bought a lucky shirt-green with white polka dots. On the last day he had the classic gambler's experience. On the way to the airport, he stopped in the lobby for a last turn at roulette, bet the birthdates of his six children, won, kept on winning. "I couldn't lose," he recalls, "and I had to leave." Finally he bet his own birthdate-and lost...
...Shark-as he likes to think of himself-is hooked, at least temporarily. So are 86 million other Americans, who this year will bet on everything from nags to numbers, pinochle to pinball machines.* Everybody wants a piece of the action, including the politicians. In 1964, New Hampshire became the first state in this century to legalize a lottery, followed this year by New York. But even the most unscrupulous bookies, whose average "vigorish" (profit margin) is 10%, would blush at New York's 70% lottery rake-off. The fact that state lottery tickets are sold in the marbled...
Gambling has existed in every society. The American Indians bet on the different markings on concealed wooden disks, the ancient Siamese on which mussels would open ahead of others. Some scholars connect gambling with soothsaying, calling it a secular form of divination...
...favor man-against-man games such as blackjack; intellectual types and women more passive pursuits such as roulette; craps, with its rattles, pitches and shouts of "Baby needs shoes!" attracts the assertive male. As for horseplayers, according to one sociologist, about 60% are lower- and middle-class men who bet long shots "to assert their ability to make individual decisions in a depersonalized society...
...nonetheless concerned: the emphasis on building up industry is a calculated gamble that industrialization will raise the standard of living for all Mexicans before the day the peasants lose their faith in the Institutional Revolutionary Party. There seems no early cause for the party leaders to hedge the bet; last week, in legislative and gubernatorial elections across Mexico, P.R.I, candidates took 90% of the vote, winning all but one of the 178 seats in Congress...