Newbies to Professionals

[Triple B]

At first there is the new gambler. They have almost no experience. The first time is an exploration with the usual curiosity that this is meant to be some form of entertainment. So the first time they go into a casino, it is with the expectation that the time they spend, will eat all of their entertainment money that they are already willing the spend.

They have no idea what to expect as far as what is about to hit their senses. If they have a big win they will be hit by adrenalin and dopamine in their blood systems. That will be a new experience for them and will set a foundation for wanting it to happen again. There is one problem with that though. It desensitizes a person to losing. If they keep coming back to the casino for more, they will begin to experience it on the drive to the casino. Their minds will have already left the logic center behind and moved into the pleasure center and reward parts of the brain before they even get there. This is a proven conclusion of psychological research.

Now being a newbie, the new player has very little logic to go on anyway. But if they are a table gamblers who like Roulette, Blackjack, Baccarat, or Craps and some of the other table games, then they have yet to discover what most players call gambling systems and fallacies.

The mother ship of all systems is the famous Martingale System, known simply as the “Marti.” Basically it’s a rule based method that says to double your last bet after a loss. You do this until you win. This concept of placing doubling bets is known as a belief system where the expectation is that a certain thing can’t keep happening. For example 11 reds in a row on the Roulette table means that black is due. This is what is known as “Gamblers Fallacy.” It also appears in another belief known as the “Hot Hand fallacy.” Both of these positions of thought are classified as “Magical Thinking.”

So the first few years of gambling are spent on experimenting with the Marti and every other rule based gambling system they can think up or get their hands on. They try different obscure progressions that are the most unlikely sequences of events being the only thing that can kill these negative progressions off. That’s expectation, wishful thinking, and also fallacy all based at the same time on things that have been proven already to never work. Yet, these systems are either free or sold all over the world and have been for hundreds of years. This process of seeking a mechanical system goes on until they give up on gambling altogether or at least give up on rule based, mechanical methods. Some gamblers are stuck in this phase for decades.

That’s the point where almost all gamblers give up and quit. There is a next phase though. That’s where the gambler stops relying on these mindless rule based systems, because they know that they don’t work, and they move on to elaborate money management (MM) methods combined with bet selection wisdom. These more experienced players frequent the major online gambling forums in search of gambling wisdom. They learn about loss limits, win limits, smart expectations, bet selection secrets, mathematical probability, and self control issues. They also discover eventually that there are two major directions of thought regarding probability. There is the frequentist absolutist side verses the Bayes' theorem or Bayes' Law side that believes in conditional probability. These math experts on the absolutist side are called the mathBoyz. They ridicule anyone that disagrees with them. Such is the nature of discussion forums on the Internet.