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Preface

As you walk through the doors of a casino, it feels as if you are travelling through a portal into another dimension. It is neither a science fiction parallel universe, nor an exotic country. The sights, sounds and behaviours within the casino environment, including the people you see standing or sitting around a gambling table, are very different from the mundane outside world. As you experience the transformation from outside world to casino environment, you begin to realise that the casino has its own culture with written rules, unwritten social etiquette, and shared expectations of how to fit in.

I am not sure what would strike the first-time visitor the most — the excited energy, the cacophony of sounds (electronic and human), or the money being thrown around like nowhere else on earth. As a first-time visitor, I was awestruck by the money, particularly the large amounts of money thrown onto tables with seemingly reckless abandon. This distinguishes the casino from a bank where people quietly and conservatively hand over cash to efficient bank staff, or a supermarket where plastic cards are used to quietly conduct transactions. In the casino, money is swapped for colourful plastic chips, or casino currency money chips, to be won or lost in a matter of minutes.

Why do people throw money on the table? The appeal of gambling is a promise from lady luck — referred to here as Madam Chance. She is a lady of great allure, entrancing the unsuspecting player with her siren song. The player believes that if they put a sum of money on the table, Madam Chance might reward them with a win of a much larger sum. The amounts involved can be massive and transactions can occur quickly. Seasoned gamblers know that Madam Chance is adulterous. She is fickle — coming and going on a whim — affecting anyone. She will spell-bind players as they wait for her loving charms to multiply their winnings.

If the players paused for a moment they would see casino staff everywhere. These staff include the croupiers, pit bosses, security guards, cashiers, hospitality and public relations. The croupiers (the attendants at a gaming table who manage game play and collect and pay bets — also called a “dealer”) control the individual tables and the relatively small number of people grouped around the table (most games like blackjack or table-based poker have 6 to 8 seats). The pit bosses supervise 6 to 8 tables to resolve errors and disputes and ensure larger sums of money are correctly managed. Security staff monitor the doors and circulate within the building. Each table has a security camera focussed on it for the review of games and behaviour by security staff in other parts of the building. If you are lucky, you might meet the cashiers who convert winning chips back into cash. Then, of course, hospitality staff deliver drinks and cleaners make the building look spotless. Public relations people and other administrative staff work for the casino and therefore also need to be paid. Where does the money come from to pay for all of this? A quick Internet search shows that casinos make billions of dollars in annual profits, much of which is paid to shareholders. Despite this, players believe that it’s not their money contributing to the running of the casino or paying dividends to shareholders. Players think that they will defy the odds and go home a winner.

All forms of gambling exist because the gambling operator (or house) has a relative advantage, and yet people return again and again without taking this logical house advantage into account. A quick Google search will reveal the odds on any game and how different games, or actions within games, have different payout probabilities. You may wonder if the casino pumps a gas which disconnects the brain’s logical processes to put so many people under its spell. Casinos do provide liberal quantities of alcohol to those who want it, but the players arrive already under a spell. All the alcohol does is make the players more reckless when flirting with luck. Madam Chance has the power to control people without the need for witchcraft or chemical influences.

As a psychologist I am a student of human behaviour. I have studied drug addictions and understand what is known about the resulting chemical changes to the brain (an exciting and expanding area of knowledge). I am fascinated by addictions which work on behaviour without physiological alterations, such as computer addiction (gaming or pornography). Therefore, why people engage in behaviours which may be destructive to them is intriguing to me. In this book, I examine the psychology of why people gamble, but more broadly provide some observations on the culture and reasons for gambling patterns. I also provide insight into what underpins casino life.

This book is designed to have a wide appeal. It is written for those of you who will work in the gambling industry, to better understand the casino life you will be a part of. This book is for those of you who seek to find meaning in complex patterns of behaviour. This book is also for those of you who gamble — not as a treatment, but as a window to see what you are doing and how that has an impact upon you.

I hope that this book will also be useful to those of you who help problem gamblers understand gambling and its broader consequences. In Western countries gambling is permitted to exist as a business because it returns profit, but nevertheless is highly regulated. In Australia, every casino has warning signs about gambling becoming a problem, and all Australian states have gambling help hotlines. This book is designed to be of assistance to those people wishing to understand gambling behaviour.

I am a most unlikely student of gambling behaviour. I understand that statistically it is not possible to win in the long-term through gambling and that it is an exceptionally rare individual who is a successful gambler. I had not even entered a casino prior to my 40th birthday. My first visit occurred when pumped up with adrenaline, wandering the city streets to unwind after running national workshops for psychologists. The casino is always open, even in inclement weather. Going through the doors of the casino enchanted my psychological mind in relation to the behaviour of the people inside.

In my forensic practice I see a small but significant stream of people whose lives have been devastatingly impacted because of gambling. Those people often faced legal and social difficulties because of their gambling. Those difficulties included financial ruin, Family Court battles with embittered ex-partners (often feeling let down as a consequence of economic loss), as well as crimes committed in a desperate attempt to finance the gambling habit (often with the belief that money taken from an employer will be used to make a “big win”, enabling them to repay the “borrowed” money). These people were not criminal or antisocial in the normal sense — most of them had not previously been in trouble with the police. They had managed to completely convince themselves that whatever they did was not a crime because the money would be repaid. Curiously, as their difficulties increased and the hole they dug for themselves got bigger, they became more desperate and gambled more, not less.

This collision between my scientific mind and the observations of a clinical practitioner shaped my desire to write this book. A book written from a psychological perspective, but easy to read, would be a useful tool for workers and others to understand why people gamble, and what the dynamics of casino life may be like.

In the first chapter of this book I seek to explain why people gamble and why gambling can become addictive. You might think that this information stems from a breakthrough in new age understanding. Ironically, psychologists studying pigeons and rats in the 1960s learned principles which govern much of gambling behaviour. Pigeons pecking for reward pelts taught psychologists a lot about behavioural principles. While treatment has become more sophisticated, and brain scanning technology allows insight into the parts of the brain which activate during gambling, good old-fashioned behavioural psychology explains a lot.

In the second chapter I discuss aspects of beliefs around gambling. People develop elaborate theories to explain why they try to defy mathematical odds. These beliefs are worthy of discussion as they are the keys to understanding the concept of Madam Chance. She can seduce even the most intelligent person. If you understand how she uses her charms, when you visit the casino you will recognise her in action. The gamblers’ fallacy, a faulty belief explained in more detail later, is as fascinating as it is dangerous. The gambling fallacy is the spell Madam Chance uses.

In the third chapter I examine some of the cultural and behavioural patterns of casino life. A casino is a cultural entity. There are regular visitors and daily and weekly cycles, all of which result in a fascinating array of patterns. As a university student, my favourite branch of psychology was social psychology, and my minor degree was in anthropology. The study of group behaviour and culture have a special place in my observations.

Finally, for fairness and balance, I discuss the available treatments and help for gambling problems. With any addiction, by the time it becomes a problem, the brain has wired in deeply imbedded pathways which are almost impossible to untangle. I also include a few observations about the future of gambling in light of modern computer games altering what people find exciting. Will casino games from the last century survive with a generation raised on fast action computer games?

Key Points

•The casino is another world with its own culture, code of conduct, and patterns of behaviour.

•Gambling exists because the gambling operator (or ‘house’) has a relative advantage. The odds are always in the favour of the house.

•People go to the casino believing that they will somehow defy the odds and win — it will not be their money adding to the casino’s profit. This false hope is underpinned by some particular beliefs.

•Luck allows people to win. While luck may be fickle, it is hope associated with possibility which allows people to override their normal logic.