source:
http://library.thinkquest.org/04apr/003 ... -board.gif
source: http://www.wheeloffortuneinfo.com/Wheel ... -White.gif
Know When To Hold Them, Know When To Fold Them
for release 12-22-06
Washington DC
I'm a fairly discerning individual. I can usually determine the difference between a good cigar and a cheap one, a lady from a tramp, a wine with a cork or a screw-cap.
But I can't tell the difference between gambling and the insurance game. Bookies and insurance agents look like the same people to me.
When a bookie takes a bet from you on a football game, he really doesn't care which team will win. He's covered by the spread and the power of arithmetic.
The odds always tilt in favor of the house. The insurance companies and the bookies will get the vigorish no matter who wins or loses, who lives or dies and who has a car wreck. It's simple math.
The purpose of insurance is supposedly to distribute risk. In gambling this is called hedging your bets. The job of a bookie or an actuary is to balance the possibilities or the risks. Then, no matter who wins or loses, the house makes its percentage.
Perhaps there is a subtle difference between the insurance racket and gambling. Gambling is based on hope and insurance is built on fear. If you place a bet, you hope your team will win. If you buy a lottery ticket, you hope that dollars will come showering down upon you. But if you buy an insurance policy, it is because you fear that you might get sick or have a car wreck or die and your family will be burdened with you funeral expenses. Frankly Scarlett, I don't give a damn what they do with the body. If the landfill is good enough for my beer cans, it's good enough for me.
Insurance has been the ruin of our healthcare industry, just like institutional gambling (casinos and lotteries and bookmaking) has been the ruin of gaming. In perhaps the most primitive of games, marbles, the competitors competed head to head, there was no middle man taking a percentage, if I knock your marble out of the ring I get it and if you knock my marble out of the ring, you get it. Simple survival.
I would be about as likely to buy a lottery ticket as I would be to buy a life insurance policy. Why would I bet that I was gonna die sooner rather than later? At least with the lottery ticket, you have a one in twenty million chance of winning.
I think that the lottery is a tax on stupid and insurance is not much better.
I've purchased perhaps three lottery tickets in my life. I doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the odds of winning are at the very least astronomical.
I was raised to be a gentleman gambler. We were a sporting family. Two of my uncles and my grandfather were professional golfers. My grandfather taught me that winning does not necessarily depend on how well you play the game as much as it does on how well you pick your opponents and how wisely you place your bets. In other words, if you are an insurance agent, you don't sell a flood policy to a person in the lower 9th ward in New Orleans.
In gambling, I have always preferred games of skill rather than games of chance. I would rather wager on my abilities, over which I have some control, than on the random roll of a die.
Merv Griffin is an actuarial genius. He invented both Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. He covered the spectrum of natural human gaminess. Have you ever noticed that there are basically two types of people in this world? There are the Jeopardy people and the Wheel of Fortune people.
The Wheel of Fortune people are the chance gamblers and the Jeopardy folks are the skill gamblers. If you'll notice, the Wheel of Fortune contestants usually work at Walmart and the Jeopardy contestants have titles like, "consultant to the liaison co-ordindinating director of a major corporation or university."
Wheel of Fortune people identify themselves by what happens to them and Jeopardy people define themselves by what they make happen.
There will always be sheep and wolves
There will always be hope against fear
Those that grow wool, and those that shear.
Gaming is a huge industry. There is the video game business, which is already larger than the music and movie business combined. There is the casino gambling industry, for which the Mafia and the Indian tribes thank you. And there is the burgeoning internet world of gaming a gambling, second only to porn.
Gambling is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous of human pass-times. Dice are almost as old as bones.
Now there is even insurance to protect against gambling losses. It's like the mirrors in a barber shop.
I'm not a moralist. I don't think that gambling is evil. I'd be willing to bet that no gambler will go to hell because of it.
Competition is built into our genes. Not just in the human species, but in every species. That's how we got to be species. Competitors survive. Gambling is a civilized metaphor for survival. We pit our skills or our luck against man, beast, nature and circumstance, and in the end. there are winners and losers. You are either a species, or you are extinct.
The Poet's Eye observes that life is a gamble and there is no insurance against evolution or extinction.
Now evry gambler knows that the secret to survivin
Is knowin what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
cause evry hands a winner and evry hands a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.
--Kenny Rogers
