Successful Gamblers
- The answer is a little different to you may expect! Professional gamblers share a common trait; not following the crowd. In this Q & A session, Caan answers.
- Kerry Packer was a media mogul from Australia and a legendary gambler. He died in 2005, aged 68, and will be remembered for many reasons. He was a successful and wealthy businessman and also founded World Series Cricket. For many, though, it his gambling exploits that will live long in the memory.
Claude Monet’s used his winnings to quit his job as a messenger and to focus on. Archie Karas is considered by many as one of the best gamblers in history. He is famous for the longest and largest documented casino gambling winning streak in history, known as The Run. Karas arrived in Las Vegas in December 1992 with just $50. By the beginning of 1995, he won more than $40 million. Gambling is a serious business and involves a great degree of risk. You make one wrong move and yocould end up losing all your money.
If you want to be a successful gambler, you need to do what successful gamblers do. Perhaps more importantly, you need to develop the same characteristics within yourself that these bettors also have. As you’ll see, these might not be the qualities that you think they are.
First, let’s talk about defining “success” and “successful.” You’ll notice that I didn’t say “winning” gamblers. That’s not every gambler’s goal, and for the purpose of this post (at least), I’m going to define being successful as achieving your goals.
If your goal is to sit in the casino, have a good time, lose no more money than you can afford to, and have a shot at going home with a jackpot, playing the slots might be the perfect strategy for you. You don’t need much knowledge of probability to succeed if that’s your goal.
On the other hand, if your goal is to enjoy meeting some new people, you might enjoy a casino game or a gambling game with a more social aspect. Maybe you’d make a good poker player, even if your goal isn’t necessarily to win money at the table.
For years, I’ve been playing poker as an almost break-even player. My goal is to sit around, tell some jokes and stories, and enjoy the camaraderie I find at the table. I also want to go home as a net winner about half the time.
The characteristics below would help any gambler succeed, regardless of what their goals are.
1 – Successful Gamblers Aren’t Afraid of Math
It’s hard to succeed if you don’t have a basic understanding of gambling math. That’s hard for a lot of people, especially in the United States, and especially in our modern environment. Many people just plain hate and fear math.
But when it comes to analyzing bets to see which ones are good and bad, you can’t do it without the ability to do some math. If you’re afraid of math, then you have no chance of discerning the good opportunities from the bad opportunities.
In fact, even if you’re a purely recreational gambler, you need to be math-savvy enough to tell if you’re getting your money’s worth in terms of entertainment. If you can’t do math, how do you know when you’re overdoing it?
This might sound funny if you’re good at balancing your checkbook and handling basic consumer math. But I’ve spent some time working in education, and you’d be surprised how many students can’t even handle basic arithmetic like addition and subtraction.
Since all probabilities deal with fractions, decimals, and percentages, you need to be a reasonably facile mathematician to have any hope of succeeding at any of your goals. Advantage players (like poker pros and blackjack card counters) absolutely must have a command of the arithmetic behind the games.
It’s not enough to just know how to play the games or to just have a feel for the games. To really succeed, you must know how to handle the numbers behind the games.
2 – Successful Gamblers Also Aren’t Afraid of Risk
Have you ever heard the following expression?
“Scared money always loses.”
There’s a reason for this. That reason varies in its particulars according to the game you’re playing, but the bottom line is that you can’t win or become a successful gambler unless you’re willing to take appropriate risks.
Let’s look at an example.
You’re playing Texas hold’em, and you’ve been dealt pocket aces — the best possible starting hand in the game. But you’re playing at a full table where no one will fold no matter what you do preflop.
In that situation, your pocket aces are going to win about one-third of the time. Two-thirds of the time, you’ll lose this hand.
Some players think that their goal is to get everyone to fold preflop when they have pocket aces. The best possible scenario for you, though, is for everyone to call your all-in raise preflop.
Yeah, you’re risking losing your entire stack, but consider what your long-term results will look like.
You have nine players in the pot. Let’s assume they all have $100, so you’re looking at a pot of $900.
If you play this hand three times and win it once, you’ll win $900. The two times you lose, you’re only going to lose $100 per hand, or $200 total.
There’s a reason that tight aggressive players are the most feared poker players at the table. It’s because they’re not afraid to risk their money in a positive expectation situation.
The situation I described is an outlier. It’s an extreme situation.
But it illustrates the point well.
You’ll usually have a smaller edge in these situations, but the key to winning at poker is to repeatedly put yourself in these kinds of positive expectation situations.
That’s true in other kinds of gambling, too.
No risk, no reward.
3 – Successful Gamblers Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness sounds like some kind of new age thing that people who take yoga talk about. It also sounds sort of insubstantial and impractical.
But mindfulness might be the most important quality to develop in yourself if you want to be a successful gambler.
Mindfulness is a state of being where you’re paying 100% attention to what’s happening right now in front of you. It’s the opposite of daydreaming — the opposite of distraction. If you’re daydreaming and/or distracted, you’re more likely to fail at your goals as a successful gambler.
This is as true for a slot machine player as it is for a poker or blackjack player, even though your goals are different from one game to another. I’ve seen slot machine players hit the spin button repeatedly without even looking at the results on the reels in front of them.
For someone who’s playing a game for the almost sole purpose of entertainment, that seems counterproductive, doesn’t it?
After all, isn’t it more entertaining to pay full attention to what’s happening on the screen in front of you?
I seldom play slot machines because I’m more interested in Texas hold’em.
But when I do play slots, I try a couple of techniques to ensure that I’m getting 100% of my money’s worth.
For one thing, I count how many spins I’m making on the machine. I also watch every win tally up on the counter, even if it takes a little while. These sights and sounds are the reasons I’m playing the game, after all.
Why a poker player or blackjack player should pay attention is so obvious that I’m not even going to get into any great detail about it.
How do you develop mindfulness?
Consider a meditation practice.
And just pay attention to what’s happening in front of you. Mindfulness is a skill like any other. It can be learned, and you can improve at it.
4 – Successful Gamblers Have Good People Skills
In some gambling situations, having good people skills is obvious. For example, if you’ve played much poker, you’ve probably noticed that more money flows around the table if you’re at a friendly, light-hearted game. You can either add to that atmosphere or subtract from it.
In other gambling situations, having good people skills is less obvious. I hate to keep banging the slot machine drum, but isn’t that a situation where people skills don’t matter?
That might seem like the case initially, but let’s consider a couple of things.
Most slot machine players I know enjoy the free cocktails that are served while they’re playing. Who do you think the cocktail waitresses pay more attention to?
Do you think the surly guy who frowns, doesn’t look the waitress in the eye, and doesn’t tip gets much service?
How about the friendly gal who smiles, looks the cocktail waitress in the eye and smiles, and tips generously?
I’ve seen gamblers putting ten times as much money into action as me get completely ignored by the cocktail waitresses just because their people skills were lousy. On the other hand, my people skills are excellent. We can credit that to years of sales experience. Cocktail waitresses take excellent care of me.
What about the blackjack player who’s counting cards?
If he’s friendly to the dealer, is the dealer less likely to shuffle the cards on every hand?
I’m not sure, but I suspect he might play a little deeper into the shoe for a guy he likes than for a guy he dislikes.
And when it comes to the bigger comps, like rooms, food, and entertainment, you’ll get better perks from a casino host if the host likes you. This can result in hundreds of dollars of value over the course of a year or two.
5 – Successful Gamblers Stay Healthy
You can’t consider yourself successful at anything if you’re in poor health. You might think that as long as your mind stays sharp, you can get by being a little overweight or in poor physical condition.
The wise among you already know that a healthy mind lives inside a healthy body, always.
If your physical health is poor, your mental faculties will suffer.
Many of my readers don’t need to worry about staying healthy because they need to worry about getting healthy.
You don’t have to let this take over your life, and you don’t have to be intimidated by the prospect of it. Baby steps are a better idea for getting healthier than taking huge, unrealistic steps.
I have a friend who weighs over 700 pounds. He’s not tall, either. He’s almost completely bed-ridden. The only time he gets up out of bed is to walk to and from the bathroom.
We spoke a couple of days ago, and he’s decided to do something about his condition. He’s starting by just walking around his apartment once a day. After he’s done that for a week or two, he can move up to two or three laps around the apartment.
He’s also taken steps toward eating healthier. He still eats Hamburger Helper, and he still eats large portions of it, but he’s switched to the 97/3 ground beef, which is so much leaner and healthier that he’s started losing weight already.
He’s also cut back on the amount of sugar in his tea.
No matter how poor your health is now, there are steps you can take to improve your physical health. Don’t be surprised when your results as a gambler improve, too.
6 – Successful Gamblers Are Realistic
You can’t become a successful gambler if you live in a fantasy land. I have a friend who’s convinced that he’s psychic. He picks up vibrations and energy from people. He thinks he does, anyway.
He’s welcome at my Texas hold’em table anytime.
Successful Sports Gamblers
I’m realistic. I don’t think I have any supernatural powers. The laws of chance and probability work for me just like they do everyone else. I don’t have some kind of special gift that tells me when I should deviate from basic strategy.
You should educate yourself about probability and how it works. You must understand the concept of an independent event. You should also understand concepts like short-term deviation and the Law of Large Numbers.
Maybe most importantly, you should understand the concept of the gambler’s fallacy. This is the ultimate in gambling realism.
Here’s the premise that people falling for the gambler’s fallacy are buying into.
They believe that past events affect future results, even when those results are independent events.
Roulette is a classic example.
The probability of getting a black result on a roulette spin is easy to calculate. You have 18 black numbers out of 38 total numbers. That’s 18/38, which is also 47.37%.
But what if black has come up five times in a row?
What’s the probability of getting a black result on spin #6 in this situation?
Some people would say that black is hot, so the better bet is on black. Other people (most people) would say that red is due, so the better bet is on red.
Both sets of people are wrong.
Every spin of the roulette wheel is an independent event. What happened on previous events doesn’t matter.
You might say that it’s unlikely that the ball will land on black six times in a row, and you’d be right.
But you’re not betting that the ball will land on black six times in a row.
You’re betting on the next spin, and the probability of that spin is unaffected by what happened on the previous five spins.
The roulette wheel has no memory.
That’s just being realistic.
7 – Successful Gamblers Think Long Term
Successful gamblers are a lot like investors, especially advantage gamblers like poker players and professional sports bettors. They’re practiced at taking advantage of small ROI’s and doing so repeatedly.
But in the long run, the Law of Large Numbers suggests that the longer you play, the closer your results will get to the mathematical expectation.
For example, if you’re a poker player who’s better than the other players at the table, you can still go home a loser after a single session. You could even be a net loser several sessions in a row.
That’s just short-term variance, though.
If you’re really a better player than the other players, your advantage will eventually materialize in the form of real money.
It doesn’t matter that you went all-in with pocket aces on the previous hand and lost. You know that by putting your opponent all in, you were getting the best of it.
And you also know that if you do that repeatedly, eventually you’ll wind up with a profit that reflects the difference between your skill levels and those of your opponents.
What difference does it make if you lose a hand when you have an entire lifetime of hands in front of you to make up for it?
Conclusion
If you want to be a successful gambler, you should start by taking a careful look at your goals and your ability to achieve them. Not everyone has the discipline required to be a professional poker player or a successful card counter. In fact, most people don’t.
Set your goals according to what you know about your temperament and your skills. Play to your strengths.
If you don’t have it in you to be a pro poker player or to fool with any game that involves a skill element or a decision-making element, accept that and stick with the games that are entirely random.
No matter what your goals are, though, the seven characteristics in this post will help you achieve them:
- Math Friendly
- Risk Friendly
- People Friendly
- Mindful
- Healthy
- Realistic
- Long-Term Oriented
Some of these might seem more obvious than others. Math, obviously, is critical to become a successful gambler — after all, that’s what probability is all about.
Math isn’t enough, though. You can still be afraid of risk even if you understand the math. You might be so socially awkward that you enjoy far less gambling than your money should afford you just because the casino employees treat you differently.
Meditate, and you’ll be better able to pay attention to what you’re doing. Eat better and get more exercise, and you’ll make better gambling decisions, too.
Maybe most importantly, be realistic. If a game has a negative expectation, don’t expect to win in the long run.
And you should always keep the long term in mind when you’re thinking about gambling. That’s how you make better decisions.
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I spent the next few years interviewing some of the most successful gamblers in the world. These are people who earn at least a million dollars a year from gambling. I’ve noticed that they have several things in common, characteristics that distinguish them from unsuccessful gamblers, and indeed from the rest of the population at large
Some of these characteristics seem to be fairly hardwired. These people seem to be born this way, and you can’t necessarily get there by practice. Other characteristics, however, are habits that can be acquired by hard work. So there is hope even for those of us who aren’t natural born gamblers. We can at least learn from those who are. And this learning can affect the bottom line.
Not rain man
The first thing that struck me about the gamblers I interviewed was their facility with numbers. I don’t mean that they were mathematical geniuses. One or two were, but most had no great knowledge of math. They were all, however, comfortable with numbers. It was largely an emotional thing; numbers didn’t scare them. And though their algebra might be nonexistent, their basic arithmetic was excellent. And that can certainly be acquired by sheer practice.These men (for they were almost all men) were not highly qualified. Again, some were, but others had left school by the age of sixteen. It seems that formal education is largely irrelevant when it comes to gambling successfully. The skills for winning at poker or picking the right horse are not generally acquired in the classroom. To get good at gambling you have to go to the casino, or play for hours online.
One very successful Blackjack player I interviewed started his gambling career while at college in Las Vegas. He was bored by the classes and started skipping school to sample the casinos instead. He still graduated, because he was smart, but by the time he left college he had racked up many more hours in the casino than in the classroom.
The average IQ of the gamblers I interviewed was no greater than the average IQ for the population at large, but they were all what one might call “street-smart.” They had a kind of native cunning that many educated people lack. This can be crucial for making a living from gambling. It’s one thing to know basic strategy in Blackjack, which anyone can learn with enough study, and quite another to know when the dealer is sneaking a peak at your cards, which requires a knack for spotting a suspicious situation.
Skin in the game
They also had balls, if you’ll excuse the expression. They risked large amounts of money. They had skin in the game, and were prepared to back up a good strategy with serious cash. And this sometimes meant to going out on a limb, like an entrepreneur investing in a new idea.When Jim (not real name) decided to get into horseracing, he knew it would take him a while to build a good model, so he raised several hundred thousand dollars from friends and put in another two hundred thousand himself. Then he moved to Hong Kong and spent two years developing the model without placing a single bet. All that time he was living off the investor’s cash, like a startup burning through its initial venture capital. Only when he was sure of his model did Jim start placing real bets, and before too long he was earning many millions of dollars per year.
To say that Jim had skin in the game would be an understatement. He was betting all his savings, not to mention those of his friends. He was prepared to take a huge risk if the payoff was right. And it was.
Fourthly, all the successful gamblers I interviewed were able to put their emotions to one side when making a decision. They weighed up the odds calmly and carefully. They did not get caught up in a surge of enthusiasm, nor discouraged by a run of bad luck. They stuck to their strategy despite the fluctuations of fortune, and only modified it when they identified a technical weakness.
Attitudes to winning and losing
This in turn meant they didn’t get nearly as much of a kick out of winning as your average punter. An occasional gambler plays for the thrill of an occasional payout, and shrugs off his or her losses. With successful gamblers, it is the other way round; the wins aren’t much fun, but the losses are painful. This is precisely why successful gamblers learn from their experience, while less successful ones don’t. When errors hurt, you strive to avoid them. When you just shrug off your mistakes, you are not so motivated to learn from them.
I remember sitting with a very successful sports bettor one day watching the horse races he had bet on. He hardly looked at the television, only sitting up occasionally when the results were announced. He was recording it all on video so he could watch it later if he wanted. He called most of the races correctly, but he barely even managed a smile when he chalked up win after win. Only on the few occasions when he lost did he show any emotion, and then it was a huge shout of anger. He would literally kick himself for getting it wrong. And then he would watch the videos of the races he had failed to predict correctly, over and over again, trying to figure out if this was just a random error, or whether there were some crucial factors he had left out of his calculations.That’s not to say that successful gamblers don’t enjoy winning. It’s just that it’s a much less visceral thing. A rooky gets an adrenaline rush every time he or she wins. For an experienced professional, it’s more like a slow-burning cigar. He or she relishes the cognitive pleasure of beating the system, or outsmarting an opponent; more like a sophisticated Bond-villain stroking his cat than a fist-pumping football fan.
Discipline and hard work
The seventh trait that successful gamblers share is a talent for discipline and hard work. All the gamblers I interviewed spent hours gambling every day, almost every day of the year. They spent long hours studying too. Blackjack players studied different forms of the game, analyzing the subtle changes in basic strategy required by changes in the rules. Sports bettors built complex models to predict the odds. They were effectively scientists, only their research was aimed at making money rather than curing cancer or discovering a new planet. “We’re smart enough to work out how to win,” commented one gambler to me, “but dumb enough to think it matters.”Successful gamblers also keep records of their bets, games, wins and losses. They study these records to identify their mistakes, and change their strategy accordingly. This also means they know exactly how far ahead or behind they are at any moment. If you ask a gambler how much she has won so far this year, and she replies, “Oh, about $2,000,” then she’s probably a bad gambler, and she’s probably wrong. If, however, she replies, “I’m exactly $1,403 ahead so far this year,” then she’s almost certainly a much better gambler.
This leads on to the last characteristic shared by successful gamblers; they don’t lie to themselves. They know when they are winning, and they know when they are losing. They don’t pretend they are ahead when they are not. They don’t kid themselves they are good something when they aren’t. They know their weaknesses, and don’t bet when they don’t have the required expertise. They aren’t big-headed and they aren’t vain. They are brutally honest with themselves.
Take the famous Irish gambler JP McManus for example. As a teenager, JP worked as a farmhand and labourer, but would head off to the bookies as soon as he finished work at noon on Saturdays and spend his meager weekly earnings betting on horses. He wasn’t very successful at first, but unlike most gamblers, he learned from his mistakes. After building up a fortune from betting on horses, he applied his risk intelligence to a different kind of gambling - trading currencies on the foreign exchange markets. His personal fortune is now estimated at over one and a half billion dollars.
The thing that most struck me about JP when I interviewed him in 2011 was his willingness to admit his blind-spots. “I know what I don’t know,” he said. For example, when playing backgammon, he would make a few deliberate mistakes to see how well his opponent would exploit them. If the other guy played well, JP would stop playing. That way, he didn’t throw good money after bad. In other words, JP knew something that most ordinary gamblers don’t - he knew when not to bet. This turned out to be a common trait among the successful gamblers I interviewed. They all knew their strengths and weaknesses very well.
Recap
To recap then, there are nine characteristics that successful gamblers have in common:1. They are comfortable with numbers
2. They tend to be “street smart”
3. They have balls
4. They are able to put aside emotion
5. They get less of a kick out of winning, but more pain from losing
6. They get a different type of kick out of winning (more cognitive)
7. They have a talent for discipline and hard work
8. They keep records
9. They are self-aware
Some of these traits are easier to acquire than others. If you are one of those people who can do complex equations in their heads but can’t spot a pickpocket who’s about to steal your wallet, then you might never acquire the kind of “street smarts” that others seem born with. But record-keeping, and hard work, are evidently things that anyone can do if they put their mind to it. As with most things, practice is the key.
Risk intelligence
As I interviewed successful gamblers from around the world, and built up my picture of the characteristics they had in common, I began to wonder if there was a special kind of intelligence for thinking about risk and uncertainty – something that wasn’t captured by traditional IQ tests. I now think that there is such a thing. I call it “risk intelligence.”Successful Football Gamblers
For some people, the word “intelligence” suggests something innate and unchangeable. You are either born smart or stupid, and there’s not much you can do about it. This may be true for IQ, but it certainly isn’t true for risk intelligence. There are many aspects of risk intelligence that can be improved, given the right practice.
The key words are “the right practice.” This means not just gambling, but doing it systematically and learning from it. There are some people who gamble for years without getting any good at it because they never reflect on their mistakes. To practice gambling properly, you must take a few leaves out the book of the successful gamblers, and imitate their behavior.
These lessons, by the way, also apply to things are not often considered to be “gambling” at all. Decisions about financial investments, for example, or about buying insurance, can benefit as much from good risk intelligence as decisions about which horse to back in a steeplechase.
Successful Professional Gamblers
The most important thing to start with is to keep records. Each time you bet on a horse race or a football game, or play some hands of blackjack or poker, make a note of how much money you bet, and how much you won and lost. Keep other stats too, such as how long you spent gambling (so you can work out your hourly profit). Many websites can give you tips on what stats to record.Successful Casino Gamblers
It’s not enough just to keep records; you have to study them too. Expert handicappers don’t stop thinking about a race the moment it is over. Instead, they reanalyze their handicapping after the race, trying to figure out why their predictions were wrong, or why a particular horse's speed was different from what they had predicted.
Learning from mistakes
Few of us make such good use of our mistakes. It requires patience, focus and a resolute determination not to be swayed by what psychologists call 'hindsight bias.' This is the universal tendency to think, when we encounter new information, that we really knew it all along, and to deny ever believing in something when we discover that it isn't true after all. I must admit that this is one of my pet hates.The saddest consequence of hindsight bias is a diminished capacity for surprise. In order to be surprised, you have to be aware of the mismatch between the evidence in front of you and your previous expectations. If you deceive yourself into thinking that the evidence is, in fact, just what you had expected all along, you won't experience that curious mental jolt, that sense of wonderment at the unforeseen, which is both pleasurable in itself, and absolutely crucial if learning is to take place.
Records are useful here too because they prevent hindsight bias. It’s easy to say you knew it all along if you don’t have any records of your erroneous predictions. But if you’ve written down your estimates and forecasts in advance, you have to accept that you were wrong. And then you can begin to learn.
To conclude, then, successful gamblers share a number of characteristics that distinguish them from other gamblers and indeed from the population at large. These characteristics go a long way to explain their success. By cultivating these characteristics in yourself, you too can become more successful at both gambling and financial investment.
Dylan Evans is the CEO of Projection Point and the author of Risk
Intelligence: How to Live with Uncertainty (2012). He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and has taught at King's College London, the University of Bath, and various other universities around the world.