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…
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
I just hope to the universe my nephews are not drawn into this.
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.
Ublock Origin users:

I forced Chrome to continue using it and it seems to be holding strong so far.
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
If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.
thats not pathetic, its a good trick
stay strong :3
Nah, you hold on to whatever hope you have. Stay with us
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
I think that’s actually a pretty neat trick. So long as not winning doesn’t feel even more crushing.
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 stopped smoking weed during the week so that I had something to look forward to on the weekends. It’s pretty pathetic
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
not pathetic imo. whatever gets you through the week and allows you to keep surviving is perfectly valid!
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…
I’ve gambled twice in my life. The first time was sitting in a gas station casino because my buddy’s car overheated on the pass. Put $20 into a keno machine, lost about half of it, realized I could have gotten several beers instead. Got annoyed with myself and cashed out.
The second time was in Vegas. Same buddy gave me a massive hit on a vape pen and dragged me over to a blackjack table. He dumped some chips in front of me things happened, the table was a lot of fun to look at, the dealer cleared her throat in a really annoyed way because I was grooving on the pattern on the back of the cards instead of playing. I handed the chips back to my buddy and told the entire casino I was too high for this shit.
I guess I don’t have the gene. I’ve got an addictive personality in general and that’s been fun to deal with, but I’m glad it doesn’t extend to gambling.
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.
Gambling is like alcohol, some is fun but you need to learn your limits.
If you go into gambling thinking ‘I’m gonna make 100 dollars!’ you’re gambling wrong. If you go into gambling thinking ‘I’m gonna spend 100 dollars.’ you’re gambling correctly.
That’s exactly how I treated my trip. “This trip is going to cost 400 dollars and not a penny more.” The fact that it didn’t was just a happy coincidence.
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.
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’ve had exactly one gambling experience in my life. I went with some friends to a casino in Louisiana and I tried a slot machine. I stuck my credit card in the slot, was debited $5, pushed the “lever” button, and won exactly bupkis. I don’t know what the appeal is but I imagine it involves winning occasionally. I’m going to stick with my 0.000 batting average and be happy.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
you watch ads?
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
The Martingale system is the definitive example of gambler’s fallacy. There’s definitely a “smart” way to gamble, but it generally requires games with a skill element, which casinos specifically avoid for this reason.
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.
stupid, the answer is stupid
at least my gambling comes with animated titty first!
People are dumb animals.
I bet I dont have this gene
You don’t have funny gene too.
Wanna bet?
I see you’re good at recycling.















