The only gambling I do is buying lottery tickets when I’m having the worst urges to kill myself. A little trick to wait just a bit longer. “You can wait until you get the results, it’s only couple days”, and then the worst urge manages to pass in that time. It’s pretty pathetic
Hope things get better, but this is low-key genius
Props to you, it’s not pathetic at all.
Nah, you hold on to whatever hope you have. Stay with us
I think that’s actually a pretty neat trick. So long as not winning doesn’t feel even more crushing.
doing what you need to in order to keep on surviving is the opposite of pathetic. it takes a lot of courage to keep persisting despite the horrors of our world
If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.
I stopped smoking weed during the week so that I had something to look forward to on the weekends. It’s pretty pathetic
not pathetic imo. whatever gets you through the week and allows you to keep surviving is perfectly valid!
That’s smart, it’s a form of dopamine loading, you deny yourself immediate rewards and that builds anticipation, also it lowers your baseline dopamine so that even small rewards feel meaningful, this way you stay off the headonism treadmill and conserve your weed which saves money
thats not pathetic, its a good trick
stay strong :3
You should get like a low maintenance pet, like a fish, snake, or lizard.
Oh I have a half of a zoo here already, it’s what’s keeping me around
I feel the same way with benedryl in that I think of all this shit, fuck shot, but I don’t look at it cuz that illegal in my places, so I just think in darkness as the benedryl make happening better tho my gemson doesnt get hard anymore…
Ublock Origin users:
I forced Chrome to continue using it and it seems to be holding strong so far.
They must make an absolute fortune, because I see so many ads for shitty online pokie websites.
nothing makes money quite as well as separating the foolish from it.
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I always describe gambling as non-alcoholic vodka.
It just does nothing for me and leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
That 6 pack of non alcohol beer I accidentally bought in my fridge about to hit the 3rd year…
Except there’s actually good non-alcoholic beer! Most vodka doesn’t taste like much of anything…
I’m not actually drinking it for the taste.
Never once in my life have I felt the appeal of gambling.
All I needed to learn is that statistically, the house comes out ahead, and that was that.
A friend once insisted on dragging me out to a casino, and I came up with a hare-brained plan for blackjack (since it has the best odds of victory). I decided to double my bet every time until I won. But only up to as much money as I was willing to lose, because there’s a low chance for this strategy to go poorly very quickly.
I made enough money to pay for the entire trip, and then I never gambled again for the rest of my life. So that’s my story of how I came out ahead.
Same. Went to a casino once, pulled a slot machine and won $30. Then lost $30. Never returned to one.
I do enjoy being gifted scratch-off tickets, though, but I won’t spend my own money on them (unless as gifts to others). I manage at a grocery store and I’m often surrounded by people who aren’t particularly wise with money. Every time there’s a big lottery drawing coming up I get to hear from everyone how “THE JACKPOT IS UP TO 30-MILLION NOW! YOU BETTER GET A TICKET! YA CAN’T WIN IF YA DON’T PLAY!”
Yeah, and I don’t burn money if I don’t play, either…
“THE JACKPOT IS UP TO 30-MILLION NOW! YOU BETTER GET A TICKET! YA CAN’T WIN IF YA DON’T PLAY!”
I join in the lottery pools at work, not because I think we’ll win, but because I can’t bear to imagine the horror of having everybody at work win the fucking lottery but me.
Same here. Went with friends mainly so I could get free AC and free food for the day and put a $10 bill into a slot. Won $999.99 and never cared to gamble again lol
I have quite the similar tale. And that was that for me as well.
do yall seriously not use adblockers
Yeah but sometimes they put them in on the server side that’s why I use raid war of parley get 50% off your first prediction with code lemmy
spamton
I probably dont have the gene, but I dont feel cool for not clicking an ad. What I mostly feel is rage that the promotions are so obviously geared towards getting the potentially addicted to try it by offering $100’s of free (bonus) bets.
And at the end they have the audacity to mention a helpline.
I’m pretty sure they’re legally required to display the helpline. No idea how the requirement has survived the current U.S. admin so far, but if these companies had their way, their victims would not be getting help
If the helpline hurt their bottom line, they’d have found a way around it by now.
I think that is what angers me so much, is they mention the helpline and suddenly thier hands are clean of any responsibility.
Probably because Trump’s current casino of choice is Polymarket.
getting ads
Can’t relate.
🗿
…and you can, too, lemmy users!
I’ve found you can make anyone your suster in your head when the need arises as I do rise to top the thot
I was down in winter once and decided I’d try out the whole gambling thing. Put 50 into some website and lost it all on a shit game.
Why do people get addicted to that? I experienced no joy and the outcome was exactly what I expected.
The good sites will give you a little bit of your money back so it doesn’t seem like complete bull shit and have a lot of “near misses” too.
It can also prey on desperate people who might not usually try gambling but maybe feel like it’s their best option at the time.
I won a tiny bit on the first game (like £10 up maybe) but at no point did I believe that a game of odds would possibly allow me to win anything meaningful.
I would equate the experience to burning a £50 note.
But if you’re even the slightest bit aware of statistics, near misses are exactly the same as complete misses. Seems strange that anyone educated falls for it. Desperation I can understand, especially these days when traditional ways of building wealth are almost as bad as just leaving cash under your mattress.
Because in most aspects of human endeavor close to success means try again. You may say that that’s true, but only for games of genuine skill, and yes, but part of why gambling fucks with our brains so much is that for a lot of people that difference isn’t instinctive.
I tried the online poker thing a little bit. With friends IRL it’s fun but online it’s boring. People work it like it’s their job.
I tried an IRL casino once, won a bunch of money on the first machine and I was thinking I’m done, but had to wait for my friends so I kept doubling a small bet on black on roulette. It landed on red 9 times in a row. It’s all a scam
Sometimes I’m scrolling through Twitch.tv and come across the virtual casina category. Always some streams with people doing some random slot machine game and raving about it. I understand nothing about it.
I’ve heard a lot of the times the odds are stacked in the streamers favour. It’s worth the hit for the casino to get people to join.
They’re also generally not playing with their own money.
People are dumb animals.
I was in Chess Club at school (I know, I know, quite the jock!). We played chess. Then we got bored of chess and played backgammon. And backgammon without a bet is dull, so we started gambling. Then gambling became the point of playing. So we moved on to poker.
I remember one poker hand. The deck was made up of about five different packs of cards. Jokers, black twos, one-eyed jacks, bedside queens, and suicide kings were all wild.
I ended up with a hand of five aces. Two were real aces, three were wild cards. I had to raise. I mean, how can you not raise with five aces? What is the point of playing poker if you don’t raise with five aces? Sadly, two other people also had five aces and one of them had three real aces and only two wild cards so they won the hand.
I lost £20 on that single hand and absolutely hated every single moment of playing it because somehow I knew, deep down, that I was going to lose. That was a lot of money for me back then and there were other, far better things I could have dropped it on - LPs were about £5 back then, video games £10.
But, it was a great early lesson on the ‘gotta keep going’ mindset of the gambler combined with the certainty that I was going to lose my money. I’m glad it happened, despite the short term remorse I felt immediately afterwards. I’m just not a gambler. One of the other kids from that same game went on to owe someone else £300 by the time we left school.
I’ve been to casinos a couple of times but took some good advice with me. Think about how much you’d be happy to spend on a night out. If you were going to an arena concert, or the theatre, or a flash sit-down meal, how much would you pay for the night? Think about a casino in the same way. You take a set amount of money which you’re going to ‘spend’ on entertainment. Once you’ve lost all of that, you leave the casino. If you find youself up on the night, hurrah.
Bollocks. 99% of gamblers stop before they win big. Maximum bet every time. Go big or go home. Just need to secure that one win, then all of the sunken costs will have made sense!
Seriously though, I once bought 20 quid worth of Overwatch loot boxes during playing I felt exactly the same way playing a slot machine. I have been once in my life to a casino because a friend wanted to go. I played the slot machine for 30 quid in total. Both after the Overwatch loot boxes and the slot machine I felt exactly this same mix of anger and shame. But during it was the exact same mentality of, hey, if I just continue, I can win something I want. The realisation came after. And so, by thinking about this experience, I essentially stayed away from gambling for good. Gambling, be it loot boxes, slot machines, casinos or anything else are a cancer upon society, keeping people poor and preying off the hopes and dreams of people with problems.
The people who can least afford it are the ones with the most ‘hope’. Gambling companies prey on hope.
In a side note, I love playing the 2p pushy machines you find in arcades in seaside towns. But I don’t ever think I’m going to win anything.
In a side, side note, my five year old once really, really, wanted a particular toy from one of those claw machines you get in the same seaside arcades. I told him it probably wasn’t going to happen but I landed the toy he wanted first time. I was a god to that boy for the rest of the day!
What kind of nonsense poker has that many wild cards
The kind of nonsense poker that 14-year olds play with a deck made of four or five different (and not necessarily complete) packs of cards. That’s what kind. It was mostly for pennies and therefore silly fun. This game was different.
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Not the point of your story, but when the hell were LPs and video games that cheap? I would think that any time that LPs were that cheap would be before video games even existed.
Early 1980s. LPs from Woolies, video games from Boots or WH Smiths (I think mostly Mastertronic titles for £2).
More than once I swapped the £1.99 price sticker on a budget game for the £9.99 price sticker on a premium game, mostly in Boots or WH Smiths in Dumfries. Fun bonus fact. This was in the days before EPOS systems and barcode readers at the checkout. Only a bored teenager on the till between me and illicit Commodore 64 glory. I do still wonder if anyone ever bought any of the cheap games for the full ten quid though.
Note: not all Mastertronic games were bad. I loved Kikstart, Finders Keepers, KP Skips Action Biker with Clumsy Colin (I had to look that one up), and The Last V8 - though I think maybe the Last V8 was in their premium £2.99 range.
I feel like we were getting scammed in the US then. I, in the US, was paying over $20 for Atari 2600 games and over $50 for some fairly early NES games. I know Mastertronic was mostly for cheap Sega games
tbf, the fact that promoting this is legal in the first place angers me
It’s not in the developed countries, it’s a no-brainer, really.
It’s getting approved in more and more western countries. Lobbying is a powerful tool…
in estonia a sports stadium is named after a sports betting platform💀
It is in the UK, and it’s pervasive as fuck
Yeah, just like I said.
I bet I dont have this gene
Bit depressing to think that there are people having their lives (and often the lives of those around them) ruined by gambling… Even more depressing is the fact that there are companies freely exploiting the previous fact. What a time to be alive…
What are you even doing that you see these ads. I hardly see any ads.
Ad block your home internet and phone yall. Life changing.
I use adblockers and cracked apks whenever I can but some mobile games still have ads. Any advice on getting those blocked anyway?
I use Adguard dns on my phone, and don’t see any in-app ads.
Thats it! thanks :)
Rooting your phone is generally the only way to get rid of those types of ads.
I think a pi hole would do it, no?
Not all, no. DNS level blocking gets a lot, but not all. I use a pi hole at home and it didn’t manage to get a lot of in-app ads, but once I rooted then things got a lot better.
Could possibly be block lists, but I’m not sure.
If you watch any sport, most of the ads are for sports betting these days
It’s so wild to me that there are still people out there rawdogging the Internet
I play WordFeud with friends and see the kazzzhhii ads after 50% of my plays. (Didn’t wanna spell it correctly and give them even more web presence)
Podcast commercials
I am this person. How anyone could be interested is beyond me.
Boomers with too much time amd money, cos they could afford to retire at 50 and still have enough money to waste on stupid things
I was going to ignore this but God I really hate the ignorance in this statement. I’m genx. Gambling affects everyone. There are plenty of kids and teenagers and christ that’s who’s being targeted.
Yeah - the old, retired people wasting money on slots is definitely a thing, but another side of the market are people who are desperate and don’t see any way of elevating themselves out of poverty except to win big.
And gambling companies are 100% willing to take advantage of those people and take whatever they have.
Yeah if anything gambling is the hot new addiction for young people. Gen Z drinks less, does less drugs, and even fucks less, but they gamble more. As a millennial I remember when gambling was mostly old people at casinos, but that’s not the face of modern gambling. These days it’s online casinos and sports betting apps. It’s increasingly stuff like polymarket.
Yeah boomer hate is in vogue, we would have thought only boomers would get distracted from class wars by gen wars.
I think it’s because it’s much more visible in boomers as they’re more likely to be gambling in casinos whereas I’d bet (ha) the majority of betting is online these days.
Go into any casino and see what the age distribution is, in my experience the majority are boomers.
Exactly, they’re trying to get the new generations as interested as the ones on the way out. It’s addictive and now there’s algorithms to make you ‘win’ just enough to stay hooked. That combined with being able to gamble on more than stocks, there’s bound to be a huge shift either direction.
I never knew gamlering like some but I know it is in my brain, as when I ate out of garbage in homeless i was like “each one is scratch offer” and so it was like tickets evety time I look in can
