Thursday, June 12, 2008

A Month's Pocket Money

I enjoy playing poker. I don’t enjoy gambling. Most people think they are the same thing and so did I until I started playing about 4 years ago.

My first experience with gambling was losing a month's pocket money (R50) as a 12 year old at the Westville Fair. I was playing a game of darts which had three stripes… two thick ones in red and blue, and a thin one in white. The board in the front had a red, white, and blue square. If you put your money in the red or blue square and the dart landed there, the `house’ matched your bet. If the dart hit the white stripe, and you had money in the white square, the `house’ doubled it. I was about R20 up at one stage and in a short space of time went from that to nothing. But now my `willingness to take risk had changed’. When I started, I was betting 50 cents or R1, and had made my way to R20 over a long period of time. I then got a little more risky, since it was `the house’s money’, and my bets got bigger. Soon, I was back to even. But my bets didn’t get smaller. I wanted to get back to R20, and I wanted to get there quickly! But it went the opposite way. I liked the feeling of winning, but I didn’t like the feeling of losing. My blood pumped through my veins, I felt like my temperature was rising, and I felt desperately out of control. On top of that, I had no pocket money left.

I promised myself I would never gamble again.

My next gambling experience was when my aunt and uncle took my mom and I to Sun City. My uncle gave me some money which he expressly told me was for gambling, and I couldn’t use it for anything else, and he didn’t care if I lost it. And lose it I did.

At university, some of my friends enjoyed hitting Grand West Casino playing outside bets on the roulette table. I wouldn’t go. Eventually one night, I did go. And I won R700! I treated my 7 flat mates to a dinner, and was rather chuffed, but it wasn’t enough to get me hooked. I had a strict betting rule. If I placed a bet and won, the chip that won the bet was banked… the winnings could be bet again, and I only started with two chips to bet. I couldn’t stand the idea of walking out of a casino having lost a lot of money.

Then one night, I was a friends house and they were playing poker with copper coins. I joined in since it was a R10 buy in or something. I really enjoyed the game, and started finding it very suspicious that Nick (there are so many Nicks who play poker, they have to be given nicknames.) won every single week without fail. He would win with a pair. I would lose. One hand he would win with a straight, and the very next hand when I had a straight, someone else would have a flush. It made no sense! No sense if it was gambling. I soon realized that that is exactly the point. Poker is not gambling, poker is a game of skill.

Well, played properly it is not gambling. The better players come out on top in the long run. Chris Ferguson (a former world champion) says any one hand is probably 99% luck, any one game is probably 90% luck, but over a year, it is probably only 10% luck. I have no research to back this up, but over the time that I have played, I think it is pretty accurate.

Poker pretty much ended my desire to gamble. Just after starting playing, I went to a Comedy Festival at Grand West with my girlfriend at the time, as risk-averse if not more than me being a Chartered Accountant in the making. I really wanted a Milky Lane waffle, and had just R100 on me. We also wanted to just give the gambling a little go… so I decided I would play a little bit, then buy the waffle. I got two R50 chips. I bet on black… it was red. I bet on black again… it was red again. My R100 was gone, and I had no waffle to show for it.

It took me a whole evening to lose R100 to Nick playing poker. Like a little boy who loses a month's pocket money, I didn’t want to play any more.

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