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Common Sense Isn't That Common!
Upon entering a
casino, some people leave their common sense safely locked in the trunk of their car, or
tucked securely inside clean laundry up in their hotel-room luggage.
Are ordinary
rules of reasoning and perception switched off in a casino?
It's true that the casino experience is out of the ordinary for most people,
and to some it seems like a fantasy world. It's
a little like Alice stepping through the looking-glass into a casino Wonderland.
The sensory
overload from the lights, sounds and activity overwhelm and sometimes confuse the senses,
because it's nothing like their usual home, work or even play environment. That is when they abandon their normal senses, and
immerse themselves fully into the casino experience.
For most, it's not unusual to feel a sense of euphoria and anticipation
before their first bet. If they surrender to
those feelings, they put more than just money at risk.
Everything in a casino, from the wildly patterned carpeting, to the flashing
lights to the clank, clank, clank "sounds of winning"; everything has been
designed and engineered to provide maximum positive-expectation stimulation and emotions. The casino wants you to feel this way; it's easier
to get the money from out of your pocket and securely into their coffers.
In a casino, Common Sense ain't that common.
For it is in the
casino that you can be guided by the mathematics, but you're on your own to show common
sense, and you need both.
In general, the numbers tell us:
However, in
craps, these math
factors mostly fall in the realm of common sense, in that we have to use common sense to determine when and
how to apply the math.
The last time we
were in Vegas, I met up with a friend named Matt. This
guy is an aircraft design-engineer for Bombardier. He
has led the engineering teams that brought us the Dash 7 and Dash 8 regional airliners
that feed most of the major carriers hubs. He's
the ultimate common sense guy. His logic
is flawless, he's conservative and sober-minded, except in the casino, where he loves the
thrill and risk of gaming.
Matt sniffs the
air to pick up the female love-scent of Lady Luck. Once spotted, he'll salivate like a
male dog who has picked up the scent of a bitch in heat.
The only problem is, that most of the time, the dog-of-hope is kept apart from the
bitch-in-heat-of-luck by a chain link fence-of-abandoned-common sense. Putting lame metaphors aside, once he thinks that
good luck is nearby, he totally abandons common sense to pursue it.
We were playing
at the Mirage. Matt had been playing craps
at a $25 table for four hours, making a Pass Line and two Come bets with 3x, 4x and 5x
odds on every shooter. I was the
only Precision-Shooter at the table. I'd have
a good 15 to 40 roll hand each time, and everyone would make some profit. The dice would circle the table, and there were no
other players who could get past 2 to 8 rolls.
At one point Matt was down $3700, until I once again had a decent roll
that brought him within $100 of break-even. Does common sense say quit and be grateful for
an $3600 recovery, or keep going because another half decent roll now will put him over
the top?
I locked-up a
respectable profit, and chose to take a break. My
girlfriend and I both wanted to change our clothes for dinner, because we had an upcoming
commitment at Kokomo's restaurant in the jungle under Mirage's dome. Matt chose to stay.
After a terrific meal with some really great people, we passed by the craps
pit under its palm-frond canopy and noticed that he was still there. His original $5000 buy-in was now a near-skeletal
remain of it's former glory. With about $150
left in his rack, he looked at me forlornly and said,
"I thought that I could catch Lady Luck, but the
more that I chased her, the faster she ran."
Sure,
occasionally people ignore common sense and sometimes clean up, but that is rare. They also ignore the math, too, but that's another
topic. When we talk about surrendering to
that adrenal rush and euphoria that some people experience with gambling, we are talking
about being seduced by the feminine wiles and spells of Lady Luck. Unfortunately, she can act like a real whore once
you fall under her powerful spell. She's
whorish because she is only interested in separating you from your money. She'll use the free booze, the house edge, the
tease of occasional wins, her womanly charms, your personal greed and misguided
motivations, plus the casinos distracting sights, sounds, and action to disarm your normal
decision-making mechanism. In short, she
will keep your common sense at bay until she has grabbed as big a portion of your bankroll
as possible.
The worst part of all of that is that people like Matt
voluntarily surrender their common sense to her.
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