Word: gambler
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...them walked over to the dealer and asked whether the lady was straight. "Straight?" said the dealer. "She's 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...
...convertible stuffed with $27,000 in cash. This sort of thing may not be real gambling, but it does contribute to a gambling atmosphere. Says one interested witness, the Nevada Gaming Control Board's Wayne Pearson: "Statistically, gambling is the normal thing. It's the non-gambler who is abnormal in American society...
Most people who gamble do so only sporadically. But perhaps as many as 6,000,000 are compulsive. To help them, Gamblers Anonymous was founded ten years ago, modeled after A.A. In chapters in 80 cities, regular group-therapy sessions pile up endless case histories of gambling victims. One compulsive gambler tells of robbing his children's piggy bank and selling pints of his blood so he could have one more fling at the dice; another recalls how he absconded with the money for his father's funeral and blew it on the ponies. "You act just like...
...compulsive gambler is by definition an extreme case, but many of his motivations are shared in milder form by all gamblers. Anthropologist Charlotte Olmsted, who made a study of the subject in Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, believes that "many male gamblers use gambling as a substitute for sex. This is why you see so much of it in lumber camps or among soldiers. It helps avoid a certain amount of fighting as well as homosexuality." A lot of people clearly play for fun or excitement, and only secondarily for the just-maybe chance of winning some money...
Some want to make gambling into a prototype of capitalism; after all, runs the argument, capitalism is based on some form of gambling or at least risk taking. True enough. Thrift and savings are essential to capitalism, but so is daring investment. The gambler's blind challenge of fate is different from the investor's bet on the future. Still, the gambler and the man who "plays" the stock market have certain things in common: a desire to make money without working for it in the ordinary sense, and a desire to reach beyond the monotony of life...