Hobby Gambling

I work in the hospitality industry, specifically in gambling and gaming. My workplace is a community club with a café, restaurant, dance area, sports betting bar and a large space set aside for gaming machines, or slot machines if you're in the US.

Australia is known for having loads of poker machines (we call them pokies), and they're legal across the state not only within casinos but also in clubs and pubs. Before I worked at this place, I had a few misconceptions about gamblers that, over time, slowly changed as I became more informed and observed more behaviors.

This post won't be so much about gambling addicts, who are often written about in detail and whose ills are the frequent topic of cautionary pieces that society is always told about, but rather about those who are not exactly addicted (although some may be but don't know it), and who are usually regulars but then sometimes disappear for months at a time.

You could call them healthy gamblers, although one could argue that this is at best a euphemism. They're people with strong, stable incomes, who see gambling as a hobby that their losses are seen as the price of the thrill of playing. To varying degrees, they can turn around and walk away from the machine and wear their losses. There are many many more of those kinds of gamblers at our club than there are problem gamblers, who are quickly singled out by the establishment and monitored, as they are a legal liability to the premises.

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In reality, it is upon the healthy gamblers that the industry relies to survive. The problem gamblers simply don't have enough money and lose it too quickly to form any kind of long-lasting source of revenue.

I can't give you any industry-wide statistics for that but I can tell you that at our club, our books don't miss a few gambling addicts.

It's very common for one to imagine an irate gambler getting frustrated that their machine isn't paying out. This is a common scenario that occurs across all levels of players. It's perfectly reasonable too, right? You put money into something that ultimately pays money back out, and when it doesn't, you get annoyed.

Time and time again I have encountered regulars who are having 'good' days and 'bad' days. Logically speaking, a good day would mean greater gains than losses, and a bad day the inverse. However, an interesting observation I noted was that there were also players who incurred considerable net losses over the course of a day, but who also called it a 'good day at the pokies'. This made zero sense to me, as the gambler had lost money. However, the key difference was how they lost it.

Hobby gamblers are paying for the experience of playing the game. They seek the highs of wins that are built upon the thrill of risk and the pain of losses.

When a player puts in 100 dollars and proceeds to lose it all one single stretch without any spins or features (these are the game modes that net the large returns as well as the jackpots), then they become frustrated. The machine took the money without it giving anything back to the player, which the player becomes emotionally invested in.

They were not having any fun.

Hobby gamblers don't mind losing money. They have alot of money. Some are millionaires and their returns on their investments or their jobs nets them thousands at a time. What they do care about is what money cannot intrinsically give them - a feeling. It's simply no fun when the machine takes their day's play money in half an hour, because now what will they do for the rest of the day? However, if it takes the whole day to lose that money, combined with numerous ups and downs (sometimes the gambler will be up on their money), that leads to the thrill of playing, and despite the end day net balance being the same loss, the gambler will walk out happy.

Gamblers never take their wins and leave permanently. Sometimes they do, for weeks or even months, but the money they take always ends up coming back to the machine, and they don't mind that as long as they had a good time losing it.

From some perspectives, these are the truly dangerous forms of gambling for a person. If both an addict and a hobby gambler lose 100000 dollars in, say, a year, the industry doesn't differentiate. 100000 revenue is 100000 revenue, regardless of who it came from. The main difference is that one is more likely to be able to keep putting it in.

However, on the other side of that argument, if it makes someone happy, then that 100000 is the cost of their happiness, and now it becomes like any other hobby that has investment costs. When viewed in this light, is gambling still the malignance on a healthy community that society has come to view it as? I think it's important to make the distinctions and to consider each scenario before forming a judgment.

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