On
luck and "winners" ...
The major mistake a lot of gamblers make is their
belief in "luck."
A disturbing result of
the research of psychologist Willem Wagenaar shows
that many people believe that chance and luck are
different
things.
People trust a lucky
number, a lucky rabbit's foot, or some other lucky
thing to make them rich. U.S. psychologist Wagenaar
and his associates found that people believed ``You
should wait until luck happens, and in that sense
it is much like chance. On the other hand you can
lose your luck easily by using it unwisely. You can
also fail to utilise it, when it happens, for instance
by not even noticing that this is your lucky day,
or lucky deck, or lucky dealer. In this sense, the
utilisation of luck is more like a skill.''
Many also believe that
luck is more important than skill and more than twice
as important as chance in determining the outcome
of a gamble.
In reality, most gambles are determined entirely by
chance, with no influence of skill or luck. Yet greed
makes us believe that there are moments when the universe
or some cosmic force wants to make us richer.
This belief in luck indicates
a failure of parents and schools to teach the basic
truths and facts necessary to avoid fraud and deception.
Gamblers' belief in luck and in the influence of skill
in using their luck makes them susceptible to deception
and manipulation by lotteries, casinos and other gambling
establishments.
The second major mistake
that people make, and which increases their tendency
to gamble, is called "availability error"
by psychologists.
This is the common tendency
we all have to focus only on good, unusual, or easily
remembered experiences, forgetting the bad, common,
or less available ones. For example, hearing that
someone has won the lottery sticks in our mind more
than hearing that someone has lost the same lottery.
We remember winners
more than losers, and mistakenly think that the chances
match our memory. This explains why people put more
money into the pokies that are in large groups, where
they can hear and see signs that others are winning,
rather than into lone machines, where they have no
recent memory of someone's winning. And people consistently
do this, despite the fact that the odds are just as
bad for the group as for the lone machine.
Memories of winners
are simply more available for the large groups than
the loners.
We may also think that
if we know or have heard of a winner it must not be
very hard to win. Many people have a story about how
their Aunt Mary or their brother-in- law's boss's
friend once won the jackpot in the lottery or a pokie.
But there are several things that are omitted from
such stories. Most important is the fact that Aunt
Mary also lost thousands of dollars in the slot machines
and lotteries both before and after winning her hundred-dollar
"jackpot."
Many so-called "jackpots"
are really only small prizes that barely cover the
cost of playing, and which serve to entice people
to continue playing and losing more money. They take
advantage of our tendency toward availability error
and exploit our memory of the one "win"
while encouraging us to forget the many losses.
The same can be said
for people who chase quadrellas and super 6 jackpots
all of the time rather than regarding them as recreational
bets - remember - for fun?
Moreover, when we hear
the story of our brother-in-law's boss' friend's win,
we tend to assume that because we have heard of this
person and have some connection to him or her, however
remote, winning must be more likely than we had thought.
But we never hear the
story of our co-worker's Uncle Mack who lost a thousand
dollars playing multi pick entries in lotto.
And if we wanted to hear
all the stories of the times that our relatives' acquaintances'
friends or our friends' acquaintance's relatives lost
money while gambling, we would have no time for anything
else. Indeed, by such a chain of associations you
can hear the story of essentially every other person
in Australia.
