Gambling

• 1. Introduction

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  Three things must be present before anyone can gamble: an amount wagered, the element of chance, and a prize. Strip away any one of them and the activity becomes something else. This is the definition that separates a roll of dice from a roll of the eyes. Gambling, also called betting or gaming, means wagering something of value on a random event, with the hope of winning something else of value. Instances of strategy are discounted. The outcome can arrive in a heartbeat, a single roll of dice, a spin of a roulette wheel, a horse crossing a finish line. Or it can stretch across an entire sports season. By 2009, the legal gambling market was estimated at $335 billion. How did an activity older than written history grow into one of the largest commercial enterprises on Earth? And why have so many faiths, courts, and governments spent centuries trying to contain it?

• 2. Dice And First Houses

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  In Mesopotamia, the earliest six-sided dice date to about 3000 BCE. They were not invented from nothing. Those dice descended from astragali, animal bones used for casting lots thousands of years earlier. Gambling itself reaches back at least to the Paleolithic period, before any written record survives. In China, gambling houses were widespread during the first millennium BCE, and crowds bet on fighting animals. Lotto games and dominoes, precursors of Pai Gow, appeared in China as early as the 10th century. Playing cards followed there in the 9th century CE, and records trace gambling in Japan back at least to the 14th century. Poker, the card game most associated with gambling in the United States, traces its descent from the Persian game As-Nas, which dates to the 17th century. The first known casino, the Ridotto, opened its doors in 1638 in Venice, Italy.

• 3. Nations And Their Bargains

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  Queen Elizabeth I chartered a lottery that was drawn in 1569, and gambling has been a main recreational pastime in Great Britain for centuries. Horseracing has stayed a favorite theme there for over three centuries, heavily regulated all the while. Much of the opposition came from Nonconformist Protestants and from social reformers. In the United States, gambling has been popular for centuries and suppressed by law for nearly as long. By the early 20th century, it was almost uniformly outlawed across the country. Pushed underground, it helped spur the growth of the mafia and other criminal organizations, until the late 20th century brought softer attitudes and looser laws. Singapore tells a tighter story. Illegal gambling was common there in the mid-20th century, until regulated casinos opened in 2010 and shifted the government's approach toward responsible play. Where governments tax and license gambling, the bond between state and operator runs deep, supplying significant revenue in places such as Monaco and Macau, China.

• 4. The Rules Of The House

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  In many American states, a person must be over 21 to enter a casino, yet may buy a lottery ticket after turning 18. The gambling age can shift with the type of wager. Legislation generally requires that gambling devices be statistically random, to stop manufacturers from making certain high-payoff results impossible. Because such payoffs carry very low probability, a house bias can slip past notice unless the machines are checked carefully. Regulation tends to produce two side effects wherever gambling is banned: gambling tourism and illegal gambling. The law also draws a careful line around insurance. A bet with an insurer on whether one's house will burn down is not gambling but insurance, because the homeowner has an obvious interest in the home surviving, beyond the money at stake. Both insurance and gambling contracts are nonetheless treated as aleatory contracts under most legal systems. When stolen money funds a wager, the courts have stepped in. In Lipkin Gorman v Karpnale Ltd, a solicitor used stolen funds to gamble at a casino, and the House of Lords overruled the High Court, ordering the casino to return the stolen funds less any change of position defence.

• 5. The Verdict Of Faith

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  The Buddha named gambling a source of destruction in the Singalovada Sutra, and working in the gambling industry is counted among professions that violate the precept against theft. The reach of religious objection is wide. In Hinduism, the ancient Gambler's Lament and the Mahabharata testify to gambling among Indians while warning of its ruin, and the Arthashastra, from around the 4th century BCE, recommends taxing and controlling it. Ancient Jewish authorities frowned on the practice, even barring professional gamblers from testifying in court. Christianity splits on the question. The Bible does not condemn gambling, yet the New Testament calls the desire to get rich to account many times. The Catholic Church holds there is no moral impediment to gambling so long as it is fair, the gambler can afford to lose, stops at a set limit, and seeks entertainment rather than the love of money. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that gambling should be especially forbidden where the losing bettor is underage or otherwise unable to consent. Many Protestant bodies discourage or forbid it outright, among them the United Methodist Church, the Salvation Army, the Church of the Nazarene, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In Islam there is consensus among the Ulema that gambling, known in Arabic as Maisir, is haraam. Where full Shari'ah applies, as in Aceh, punishments can reach 12 lashes or a one-year prison term and a fine for anyone who provides a venue.

• 6. Many Ways To Wager

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  Marbles, Pogs, and Magic: The Gathering cards can all become stakes, turning a player's collection into a metagame of value without a single coin of real money. The forms gambling takes run far past the casino floor. Inside a casino sit table games, slot machines, video poker, Sic Bo, and Pachinko. Outside it live bingo, lotteries, scratchcards, Mahjong, dead pool, and historical card games like Basset and Lansquenet, where the cards are not played but merely bet upon. Coin-tossing games such as Two-up and confidence tricks like Three-card Monte and the Shell game belong to the same family. Betting on horse or greyhound racing ranks among the most widespread forms of all. Wagers run through parimutuel pools, which pay off at prices set by support in the pool, or through bookmakers who pay at agreed odds. Sports betting has grown into a major service industry, and before the internet, millions in the United Kingdom played the football pools every week. Betting exchanges let a person both back a horse and lay it, acting as a bookmaker themselves. Spread betting pays off by the accuracy of the wager rather than a simple win or lose, while arbitrage betting bets on every outcome at once to lock in a known profit regardless of the result.

• 7. The Mind At The Table

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  No betting system can turn a mathematically unprofitable bet into a profitable one over time, yet gamblers keep building them to beat the house. Card counting tracks the ratio of ten-value cards in blackjack, prompting larger bets when the ratio runs high. The Martingale stakes enough each round to recover all previous losses until a win arrives, while the Kelly system aims for the optimum bet to maximize the future median bankroll. The deeper traps lie in the mind itself. Gamblers tend to favor likely outcomes, leaning toward favorites in athletic contests, and they show optimism, overestimating the chance that desired events occur. Fans of NFL underdog teams will bet on their own side at even odds rather than back the favorite, whether the stake is $5 or $50. They also resist betting against outcomes tied to their identity. More than 45% of NCAA fans in two studies turned down a free real $5 bet against their team, caught in a conflict between money and loyalty. The ratio bias adds another twist: people prefer worse odds drawn from a large sample, choosing one red ball from an urn of 89 red and 11 blue over an urn of 9 red and one blue. A 2020 study of 32 countries found that the more gambling activity a country had, the more volatile its stock-market prices, and legalized online sports betting was found to cut household saving and increase financial distress.