AG 056: Challenging the Gambling as Entertainment Narrative

Or Listen On…

Full Episode Transcript

Jamie: This is Episode 56 of the After Gambling Podcast, and in this episode, we are going to challenge the longstanding belief of gambling as entertainment.

Hey there, and welcome to another episode of the After Gambling Podcast. My name is Jamie. I’m the host of the show, and the last time I gambled was July 15th of 2010.

Now, in today’s episode, we are going to challenge the longstanding belief and narrative that gambling is a form of entertainment. And I will say right up front that yes, I do think gambling is a form of entertainment, but I think there’s a little bit more under the hood that we need to explore. And I think this is an especially important topic to talk about because so often, as you’ve heard me talk about on this podcast before, we look back at gambling, and part of the struggle to give it up is that we felt like we really enjoyed it.

Whatever the game was, we really enjoyed that game. You’ve heard me say on this podcast before that I really enjoyed poker and that if I could go play poker without having a gambling problem, that I would do it. And today, I’m actually going to challenge my own belief that I’ve had in the past and say that I don’t think that’s true, actually. In fact, I don’t think that I did enjoy poker.

Now, before we dive into why I don’t think that I enjoyed poker, let’s talk about gambling as a form of entertainment. And the one thing that I think is important to do is to break it down into two parts. So when you gamble, there are two things at play, right? You have the game being played—the actual game, whether it’s blackjack or roulette or, in my case, poker. There’s a game being played.

Now, the second part of the game being played is that there’s a wager amount, and everybody plays at all these different wagers. Now, we’ve heard before that as you go along, you need to increase your bets to increase the amount of dopamine hit that you get from placing that bet. And I think there definitely is some kind of chemical reaction at play, and there’s been research that proves that, yes, you do need to have increasing bet sizes in order to trigger those dopamine responses in your brain. And so that’s part of the addiction process.

For this podcast, I think it’s important to focus on those two areas: the game itself and the wager side. Now, on the game itself, this is the part that I don’t dispute—that yes, there’s an entertainment factor there.

Jamie: Especially, I mean, things like poker bring people together. There’s that camaraderie; there’s all that outside stuff in addition to the game. The game was a mental challenge for me. I’ve said before that I enjoyed kind of breaking down—I mean, it was that challenge of trying to take a set of circumstances and try to win, right? I mean, you’re trying to beat other people at the game.

And that’s, in a lot of ways, I mean, poker is no different than Monopoly or playing any type of game, whether it’s basketball, golf, whatever it is, you have this kind of set of rules, and you’re playing against other people. Or even in a game like blackjack, where you’re playing against the house, you’re trying to play a game with the goal of winning.

And so, there is that entertainment factor that comes from actually playing any type of game. And like I said, you also have the social factor with gambling, the people that you’re around. So, there are all those things that play into the gambling-as-entertainment factor.

But on the other side, you also have the wager side, and what we’ll call that is kind of the risk-taking. And I think for most gamblers, this is really the part that is the entertainment part, right? And that’s really one of the reasons I believe that wager sizes start to go up is because you start chasing that risk, and the dopamine hit is from chasing higher and higher risk.

It’s like, “Okay, I jumped off of this small little bench and I landed okay. Can I jump off of one that’s 10 feet high?” And so, kind of those life risks that we have, we’re always trying to push our limits. And that’s really kind of the wager side, the bet size—that’s where the entertainment comes in on that side of things.

And I do think it’s very important to separate these two things because, so often—as it was in my case—I said, “You know what? I really enjoy playing poker. I miss playing poker.” And that’s part of what keeps us in this cycle of addiction, is that we don’t want to give something up that we really enjoyed.

Jamie: But when I break it down and I look back, okay, the game itself—I love the challenge, as I said earlier, and I love coming together with friends. Now, the question I asked myself is, then why didn’t you like it if you were only playing for a dollar? Or why didn’t you play for free?

And poker is one of those things—you can say, “Oh, well, in free play, people don’t value the chips; the chips don’t have value, so they just play recklessly.” First of all, if everybody’s playing just the game and you take the value out of it, it’s like Monopoly. If somebody is reckless, I mean, that helps you win, right? And the same thing in poker—if somebody is playing crazy, you want that person.

I would say people that play… that person is kind of that big risk-reward at the table, but you want them there. You want that fish, that person who is acting irrationally and not playing by kind of the rules or the suggested rules or the best practices, because that’s somebody that’s going to be exploited. They may win short-term, but that person’s always going to be exposed long-term.

So, like I say, back to the free play—somebody’s playing like that, and if all I’m doing is if I just really enjoy playing the game and trying to accumulate the most chips, but the chips have no value, it’s just kind of to win the actual game—the game of poker—then the wager side doesn’t matter.

I should really enjoy playing poker with my friends if it’s just for a dollar, but that wasn’t the case. So that really got me thinking, you know what? I didn’t really love poker, because if I would have loved poker, I would have gone on and played for free. I would have gone on and played for a dollar.

Jamie: And that’s—I mean, when I didn’t have several hundred dollars or thousands of dollars to go play poker, I didn’t go because I couldn’t play at a stake that was high enough that I felt like I enjoyed. And I thought I enjoyed poker only at those certain stakes, but the reality is the part that I enjoyed was the wager size—the risk-taking, that spending money with the thought of making more money.

And so, when you look at it and you say, “Okay, that’s the side that I was going after,” then all of a sudden, the love of the game is just this arbitrary thing—this meaningless thing that we use to justify our behavior that we know is irrational, that we know is just kind of a crazy thought. Why would I go out—and, I mean, for me, I wouldn’t play slots because I wasn’t going to waste my money on slots, right?

But the reality is slots offer me that same risk capability. I just used a love for poker—I’m using air quotes here—to justify my risk-taking and to justify the fact that I didn’t want to give it up. But now, looking back, I realize I didn’t love poker at all.

So, it’s become a whole lot easier to kind of move on and say, you know what, that’s a time and a place and something that I don’t need back in my life because I wasn’t enjoying the game of poker. I was enjoying the risk-taking, and the risk-taking is the irrational, destructive part of the gambling. It’s definitely part of the entertainment—don’t get me wrong—there is that dopamine rush, that thrill. It’s just like jumping out of an airplane.

But I think too often, we get those two things mixed together, and we say, “Okay, hey, I really enjoyed this game,” whatever it was, when the reality is, no, we just—we loved, I mean, dumping money in. I mean, if we had the opportunity, if we were walking down the street and we could throw a hundred dollars into a crowd with the hope of somebody giving us two hundred back, then we would try that. I mean, it’s just that dangerous risk-taking behavior is what we became addicted to.

Jamie: So what do you think about this? And if you like this thought, I encourage you—I just picked up a book for my birthday, Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Quit Gambling. And I will be the first to admit that I thought so many things about this book just on face value. One, I thought it was clickbaity—too good to be true. I wish they would actually change the title, just because I think it pushes some people like me away that look at it and say, “Well, that’s going to be too good to be true. It’s clickbaity; it’s probably not very good.”

And in actuality, I’m only about a fifth of the way through the book. I bought the audiobook—it’s like seven dollars on Amazon, which is a great deal, so definitely go check that out. But listening to the book, it’s weird. It’s like just listening to myself, but in a little bit more structured manner, I suppose. Obviously, the author’s put a lot of thought into pacing the information and putting it out there, but all the thoughts—I mean, if you listen to this podcast and if you’ve listened from the beginning, you’re going to listen to the audiobook and say, “Oh yeah, we talked about that. Oh yeah, we talked about that. Oh yeah, we talked about that.”

So I think almost all the topics that I’ve listened to so far have just been reconfirmed in his book. And so I definitely think it’s an awesome book to pick up. And this is one of the areas that I credit one of the Reddit users—I’m kind of getting back to this podcast; I think I promised this one a few episodes back—that I would get it, look into the book, and see, because it was challenging that love for the game.

And I think this is such a huge hangup that so many of us have or had in the past, that we were convinced that we didn’t want to give it up, and the big hangup in giving it up and quitting gambling was that we loved the game. And when we separate those two things out—separate the money from the risk-taking—I think we’ll see that what we really were drawn to and addicted to was the risk-taking. And the game itself, once you took away the money, the game really wasn’t any fun at all.

Jamie: So, I hope this helps you. I hope this kind of triggers some things, gets your mind spinning a little bit, thinking, “Okay, if I really love sports betting, then why don’t I just bet a dollar?” Because if you love sports betting, then you’ll just bet a dollar, because doing the research and all that type of stuff that goes into it—the goal of it is just to try and see if you can win, if you love the game. But if it’s all about the money, then that’s a whole different thing.

And I think that’s also where we can agree that chasing that risk, chasing that high from the risk, is extremely dangerous. And that’s a part of entertainment that gets out of control. And I don’t think—I don’t think the industry would push “Hey, risk-taking as entertainment” to that level that they do when it’s a game and associated with a game. And I think that’s part of the hook, is that we convince ourselves that we will miss the game, when the reality is, if we ask ourselves if we quit, would we miss chasing that risk and trying to throw a hundred dollars in to try to make five hundred?

The reality is, no, we don’t miss that part of it. So it makes it a whole lot easier to quit, a whole lot easier to stay quit, and say, “I don’t need to go back to that, because I didn’t like it as entertainment. It wasn’t entertaining. I only did it because I thought it was a way to make money, a quick way to make money.”

And so, once you look at gambling in that way, it loses its appeal, because the house wins, the odds are stacked against you. So if you’re looking for ways to make money, gambling is one of the worst ways to go about doing that. There are plenty of other, better ways—like work, side hustles, all those types of things. Cutting your neighbor’s grass is a whole lot better way to make money than gambling.

Jamie: That’s it for today’s episode. Let me know your thoughts on this. Do you agree? Do you think this is important—that we focus on splitting the entertainment of gambling and identifying the entertainment that we got from gambling, whether it was from the game itself or the wagering, the risk-taking? Was this something that was helpful? Reach out to me, let me know.

And then also, if you have been listening along, if you’ve gotten some value out of this and you haven’t already, I would really, really, really appreciate it if you could go on iTunes, rate and review the podcast. It helps other people find it. So yeah, any type of review, and I’ve been reading some of them, catching up, and I’m blown away by some of the comments. I’m very humbled by some of the comments. It’s really, really cool to see that gambling counselors are actually suggesting the podcast to their patients, people they’re working with. It’s really cool, really humbling, like I say.

And I’m just a guy with a gambling problem. And we’ll transition into that—so please go see those people. I will throw the credit back to those—go see professionals, go see a professional therapist, talk to an attorney, a doctor, whoever you need to get professional advice because gambling is a serious condition and you deserve to have the best treatment possible.

And then finally, the music for the show is Something Elated by Broke For Free and is licensed under the Creative Commons license. My name is Jamie. Last time I gambled was July 15th of 2010. Thanks for listening, thanks for tuning in, and I will see you in the next episode.