Letter of Recommendation: Gambling

The brothers Frederick and Steven Barthelme have written that the thrill of gambling “goes so much against common sense that it stays a secret.” (Their lovely memoir, “Double Down,” is a cautionary tale, as are many stories about this pastime. There’s a remarkable amount of good and interesting writing on the subject — it’s the one shelf where Dostoyevsky and Damon Runyon make sense together.)

The most obvious (and probably most dangerous) appeal of gambling is the pure feeling of undeserved reward. Many years ago, with friends at a casino, I quickly found myself up several hundred dollars at a roulette table. One friend — an especially prudent one — surveyed the unlikely stacks, looked at me and said: “That’s what your pockets are for.” I took his point, stuffing the majority of my winnings away so as not to quickly hand them back. The delight of rare moments like that one, I trust, is clear without my enthusiastic annotation.

But loss is also a counterintuitively alluring draw. It’s a good idea to be on speaking terms with bad luck. Not to recklessly court it, but to inoculate yourself with it from time to time rather than trying to avoid it altogether. “I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is 6 to 5 against,” Runyon said, and even those odds might be generous. It’s a fact that we spend much of our time trying not to think about.

It has become a cliché to note that participating in athletic competition is good preparation for life: a way to invest and discipline yourself, and then to both triumph and lose with grace. For the more pessimistic among us, gambling offers even more profound practice, because its wins and losses occur for no reason. Unless you’re clinically crazy, you can’t believe you affect the results of a roulette wheel. To gamble is to give up control. If fortune smiles on you, you can exercise humility in the face of good luck. And when, more often, it crushes you, you are forced to directly confront (and maybe absorb and integrate) how vain all our designs and efforts can be. Something for nothing is a thrill. Nothing for something is a test.

That all of this is often accompanied by a social component only heightens the pleasure. There’s no feeling quite analogous to sitting with several strangers at a blackjack table and razzing the dealer as he sweeps away all of your chips after he has had an outrageous stroke of good luck against long odds. The gallows humor and camaraderie is the closest you might ever get, in the material world, to an audience with a capricious God.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-gambling.html