Headline June 29th, 2012 / ''...Is This A Game Of Chance?.. Sire!..''

"...Is This A Game Of Chance?.. Sire!.."

She is pretty and looks to be thirty something, hails from, Indiana, and for ten years has come to Las Vegas annually, for four day binges. She plays roulette and blackjack when she chooses to lose. When she wishes to win, she works five days a week at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange playing small stocks. 

I ask her if she ever plays the huge Chicago commodities market. She recoils in horror at the idea,--that's too risky. She is addicted to the puzzles of probability, and that feeds her love of roulette. She is like so many other players who feel they have a handle on the odds when in fact they do not understand how much the odds are stacked against them. 

Roulette players are infamous in this regard; every player figures that if a number does not come up on the wheel for an hour or so, then the chances of its coming up have vastly increased. Probability theory, however, posits that the wheel has no memory, and past spins have no bearing on future spins. 

In short, nothing you can observe or know can ever alter the odds, and the odds are always in favour of the house. The players somehow know this fact but never believe it. None of us do; that is why people play the roulette and the house wins.

She is a sensible woman with a quick mind, and New York-New York which opened at midnight on Jan 3, 1997, is so cutting edge that it does not even have a poker table. It is virtually wall-to-wall machines. She is appalled by its meagre accoutrements, a small glen of roulette, bacarat, blackjack and craps in the squalor of Central Park and the rest is wilderness of machines. 

She has a card from the casino that will give her some perks, a meal here, a Pizza there, and if she engages this card with a machine, she will be tracked for all her doings. If possible, nothing is left to chance. And she will never learn that at the end of the day the payout is a Dog. Haha! 

So, reverts this brilliant write and observes: Our rich past has always created a tension within us. We are a people of virtue and hardwork given to the pleasures of the flesh and the jug. Sometimes our very appetite become unendurable, and in those episodes of rapture over manners and morals we smite the demon within ourselves. 

In the history of American Gambling, the signal moment occurred in 1835, in Vicksburg, Mississipi, when the town collectively looked into the mirror and realized that it had become the veritable vice and gambling capital of the great river. So it lynched five gamblers, tarred and feathered a bunch more and gave up its evil ways, atleast until sundown.

But now, but now, I tell this beautiful lady that we are sitting in the future, the new economy, the lottery economy. Hahaaa! Just so, remarkable! Thanks !WOW! And catch ye all morrow. 

Good Night And God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless