'The Gambler'

Money For Nothing Always Beats Working

Once upon a time I was down in Adelaide and got hooked on Two-Up at the Adelaide Casino. Back then it was fresh and new. I was captivated by the Gamblers' Paradox and spent a goodly number of days chasing odd and even throws of the coin. I won some, lost some, I won some back and even went up high but lost it all at the end of the stay. The life lesson there was "you don't bet against the streak'. I'd spent the week betting for people's streaks to end. I saw 17 events in a row. There's no protection against that.

Anyway, this is partially a movie about the fevered state of staying at the table until you lose everything; but it's also a movie about a profound existential angst about winning and losing.

What's Good About It

It's the kind of anti-hero topic that was prevalent in the 1970s, but has gone away lately. When you consider the polished Marvel studio line of product, it seems highly unlikely that a film this languid and misshapen gets made, but that's part of its charm. A hand can be played in seconds, but the thought that goes into a hand might be eternal. The film goes a good way towards capturing that contrast.

Being a movie about gambling, it does make you think a lot about the many aspects to the phenomenon. I'm one of those people who at once love and hate the gambling experience so it's a film that presents with very mixed emotions for me, and that is probably good.

What's Bad About It

There's a general sense of un-believability about the main character. I guess they were trying to make the point that once somebody is addicted to gambling, they lose sight of things completely; but this main character Jimmy is just a bad gambler. He gets the money that should bail him out, but he blows it playing blackjack in the most self-destructive way.

It's hard watching somebody gamble away their war chest in 3 hands. Repeatedly, Jimmy just doubles down and eventually loses. It's like he's waiting for the miraculous streak of 17 and loses on the 16th hand.

Worse still, the film sets a tall task for the main character, but it also gifts him with a good background that enables him to pay off debts. But he squibs that as well. At some point in the middle, you stop believing in the world the character inhabits.

What's Interesting About It

There's a lot of moralising about gamblers being scumbags, but ultimately the film doesn't work if gambling wasn't so interesting. You can't make a film like this about being a baker or a carpenter. It also gives a slice of just what illegal gambling looks like, as opposed state sanctioned gambling we see in Casinos.

Gambling is an interesting social institution. We demonise it and glamorise it and expect nothing to go wrong. The Packer Casino going up in Barangaroo in Sydney is a case in point - it's allegedly going to target high rollers and won't have many pokies because pokies target the lower socio-economic demographic. In other words it's an establishment that's going to target people with money to lose and that was its selling point to the NSW Government which, acquiesced and handed out the licence without much review or discussion. This was despite the fact that NSW is the most gambling-heavy state in Australia and does substantially more through pokie licences than Nevada does with Las Vegas. But what Sydney really needed on its beautiful foreshore was a dirty big casino aimed at ripping off rich and corrupt Chinese people.
And that's just one place.

Society in general tends to ban gambling in the hopes that it stops people from losing their houses and livelihoods, but it also benefits from the proceeds of gaming enough to keep allowing it to happen. In this film, it is abundantly clear that gambling is a social evil that draws the worst, most violent people into its ecosystem, and then smashes the players who gather like moths to a flame. But if you make it illegal, society would have a river of money flowing through illegal gambling that governments cannot access.

The House Always Wins

Gambling in this film is a lot more deterministic than how it plays out in real life. The House wins in real life, but not so convincingly every two minutes. This is because there is a lot of plot to get through, so the wins and losses have to be played out quickly. By motoring through the actual gambling scenes, the film gives you a strong impression of just how much the odds stack up in favour of the House and how probability theory and odds are two totally different sets of mathematics.

If you play long enough in a casino, you lose. The trick - as they say - is knowing when to quit and this usually means, when you're ahead, or before you've spent it all on mounting losses. The only way you get ahead is by good luck, so you should walk away the moment you've doubled your money. Personally, I'd walk away if I were up 20% because frankly a 20% return in an hour of flipping cards or rolling dice is better than any bank would give you. So watching Jimmy play on and on and on until he lost everything time and time again, just looks insane. However that sense of hopelessness, I guess, is the point of the film. Obsessive gamblers are really sick and have no objectivity about their playing.

This film isn't s good as 'Casino' in terms of dissecting the nature of gambling, but it does show how the afflicted are compelled to gamble. Especially how they are aware of the resplendent sublime experience and are going for the promise of the resplendent, sublime win. Jimmy says what he wants is a complete and utter victory or nothing else.

What could that complete victory look like? What we see on the screen is a bit like playing poker eternally to see a Royal Straight Flush come up in your hand, or to keep playing Black Jack for the validation being right when your hand adds up to 21. These unicorns of the game are out there and the afflicted gambling addict is out there hunting for the decisive victory that comes from having such a hand.

The Geometric Progression

Jimmy comes from a wealthy family, is talented enough to have published an acclaimed novel, has a nice job in the tertiary education sector and a flash car. What more could he possibly want? What is the allure of gambling to throw all of that away and chase wins and losses on the green velvet?

Most people in life with regular jobs or vocations earn money in n arithmetic progression. We keep turning up to work, there's a set amount money that is paid towards that work, and we plan and budget around the constant flow of essentially linear arithmetic money. There are very few options for getting your money on a geometric progression. You could earn interest in a bank (I know, laughable in this day and age of ZIRP and TwIRP), and you get a tiny taste of the geometric progression. You could purchase shares into an ETF, and keep reinvesting dividends.

Or you could gamble. Buying lottery tickets and hope for the big win, but if that's too long an odds for you, you can head down to the casino and gamble.

Because the promise of gambling - for gamblers at least - is that you could geometrically multiply the money in your hand. And so, Jimmy in this movie tries on many occasions to double or nothing repeatedly, trying to multiply his money. The logic is unsound even from the point of probability, let alone the odds given to you by the House. It's hard to figure out why then Jimmy goes all in, double or nothing, hand after hand except there is a clue.

The Gambler's Paradox is that if you lose a bet for 'x', then you should come back with '2x+y' where 'y' is little extra the next hand and go again. If you lose again, go '4x +2y' and try again. Eventually on 50-50/Even-Odds games you will win a hand and therefore win back all the money with a little extra interest. (In fact I believe this is how Kerry Packer gambled) To run this strategy there are two obstacles: most casinos put a limit on the table to stop the number of times you can run this trick. The other, of course is your budget (this is why Kerry Packer gambled this way).

Having tried the Gambler's Paradox stratagem quite a bit across several games, I can report that it is a gruelling, boring, tedious, mind-numbingly anal exercise and it requires as much discipline as work itself (if not more), thus taking all the fun out of the actual gambling. I guess to your professional gambler, gambling ain't 'fun'. However, the reductio ad absurdum of the Gambler's Paradox play is that you only need one hand to win it back. So why not play that one hand by putting all your money on black, double it and walk out? And what do you do when you win that one hand?
Go again.

The Unreal Money

The point of the gambling establishment is actually to take you out of the normal life experience as much as possible. This is why the lights flash and move, the music cues pump out of slot machines and if you'e a regular, they serve up free drinks. What they want you to do is lose your rational judgment, and end up in a mathematical abstraction.

What happens when you lose rational decision making and go with the abstraction is that hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of dollars stop meaning what they mean to you outside of the casino.   To keep a grip on the numbers under my thumb, I used to count up the hundreds in guitars. That way I could recall what it felt like to plonk that sum of money down to buy that electric guitar as a teen, and it prodded me towards a greater restraint in how deeply I went. It's subjective, and I'm sure professional gamblers are much better at this, but the point is, if you don't anchor yourself back in the real world, the money gets unreal pretty quickly. The professionals never lose their heads to the flow of numbers and money, and they know exactly when they're going to pull up stumps and walk out of the casino. If there's a lesson in gambling I can relay, that would be it.

The worst thing you can do is think you're going to win back losses with one big hand in a card game. You can run the Gambler's Paradox on a dice or roulette game and get lucky in a day, but a great hand in cards is never going to dig you out of your hole. It's telling then that Jimmy gets out of his hole with one of his creditors through a rigged game of basketball. You don't win things playing by the rules, which tells you the rules are crooked as the leg of a dog.