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Compulsive Gamblers Do not Have a Gambling Problem |
If you have ever been to a casino and watched (really watched) other people in a casino, then you’ve likely seen all sorts of indicators of problem gambling. Maybe you didn’t recognize it as problem gambling, maybe you did. Either way, it does exist but one factor may be more evident than a problem with gambling. It’s a winning problem and it’s a growing problem in brick and mortar casinos.
Having just returned from a casino trip with my husband, I was able to get the ins and outs of gambling as I always do while we drove home. My husband, forever the pessimistic gambler, enlightens me with this each and every time we leave a casino destination. He had spent his entire trip observing how many people walked away from different tables a winner and how many walked away as losers and came up with an astounding 98% and would you like to know where he saw the majority of the casino losers? He saw more losers at the blackjack table than any other table in the casino.
On our drive home, my husband began to rant and rave about how hard it was for the occasional gambler to walk into a casino and a few hours later, leave as a winner. While he went on with his theories and assumptions, I began to think about the area of compulsive gamblers. If 98% of the people my husband encountered during several days of casino gambling were in fact losers, how many of those losers were compulsive gamblers? And out of that number, how many of those compulsive gamblers would be classified as compulsive or problem gamblers, if they were winners each and every time they gambled? I don’t think you would classify a winning gambler as a problem gambler would you? I know I wouldn’t.
After a lot of thought, I remembered the old jokes such as “I don’t have a gambling problem as long as I’m winning” that often stood out on T-shirts. This seemed to be the case in modern day gambling. If no one who gambles and who wins while gambling has a gambling problem, then everyone who gambles who has at some point experienced a significant loss, would at that point and time be considered problem gamblers.
Three hundred or so miles after I started thinking about this topic, I decided that there may not be such a thing as problem gambling. Oh sure there are people with obsessive compulsive disorders who are always going to exhibit some unhealthy behaviors in all areas of their lives, including gambling. However, as far as pathological gambling, I don’t know about all of that nonsense. For the first time in my life, I saw the negative side of gambling, if only for a split second.
Casinos don’t provoke problem gamblers, compulsions do as with OCD. And the only problem that casinos do provoke are problems among gamblers who are not winning. If a gambler can’t win, especially if 98% of them can’t win, then there lies the problem. Maybe the games just aren’t fair and perhaps, no one has or ever had a gambling problem. The only problem these folks ever had was a simple problem that the casinos could certainly fix. It’s called a winning problem and with my husband’s calculation of 98% of casino patrons losing, I’d say it’s a pretty significant problem! |
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