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Regret is a terrible thing. All too often people experience rotten outcomes and allow them to impact everything else going on in their lives.
Smart gamblers know better. People go bust at poker, figure out what they could have done better and work on putting together a fresh stake. Part of winning at the likes of online casinos, is losing.
Don Johnson, the high-stakes gambler who crushed blackjack, took millions out of the casinos. Nevertheless, when he lost, he lost big. But he never let it get to him.
“Don has a stomach of steel,” his sometime collaborator James Grosjean told me. “Don can lose a million dollars and his one question will be, ‘Where’s the steakhouse?”‘
Become a Good Loser
Successful sports bettors get blown out 44 percent of the time, while en route to earning big bucks. But losing that often is part of the process.
“If I get upset every time I lose,” said an NCAA bettor, “I’ll often be unhappy.”
And that does not account for the fact that a winning player who spends time crying over his losses will slow down his ability to bounce back.
So, gamblers have long understood that losing is nothing to get worked up about. Now, thanks to a study done by Kevin LaBar, a psychology professor at Drexel University in the United States, everyone else knows it as well.
Hedge Your Bets
Gamblers understand that no single outcome is wholly meaningful and that poker, blackjack or sports betting is a lifelong game that never really ends.
Driving home the point for civilians, LaBar and his colleagues had their subjects apply the typical gambler’s approach.
- This involved making loads of wagers and spreading out the risk.
- They found these bettors handled losing a lot better than people who made single bets with all-or-nothing outcomes.
- For the all-or-nothing crowd, the regret that came from losing was acute.
- Those who took what LaBar described as a “portfolio approach” were able to be happy for the wagers they won and shrug off the losers.
There’s no word as to whether or not they told their wives that they “broke even” on the nights when they got hosed.
Pachinko Parlors
At any rate, if those gamblers make it into their golden years and happen to live in Japan, they can take that easy-breezy attitude to the pachinko parlor.
Pachinko is a semi-legal game that I have never quite figured out. But
it is noisy and percussive and looks fun.
Described as “vertical pinball machines”, pachinko machines drop buckets of tiny silver balls that can be collected and cashed in for money.
According to the Japan Times, pachinko players in their 70s had higher
cognitive skills than contemporaries who sat around watching TV.
Faced with the choice of one or the other, I’d choose pachinko and hope to figure it out before I keel over.
By the way, you can see a pachinko parlor in action during the great scene from “Lost in Translation” in which Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansen run through one of the joints after being chased out of a Tokyo cocktail bar.
You can also learn how to play Pachinko thanks to our handy guide.
While online poker might not be kinetic enough to make for the background of a cool bit in a movie, it’s probably what I’ll be playing to stave off dementia.
Corralling silver balls is cool – and clearly superior to watching TV – but I’d rather be chasing straights and flushes as a hedge against
senility.
