Alan vs. KJ

[redietz]

When KJ started posting 15(?) years ago, the "woods" were full of, supposedly, winning players. That crowd only thinned out, until a very few remained. In this context, it's easy to see how such a "player" replete with "life story" came about. A few of many such players just never gave up the same spiel. Besides a raft of technical reasons that there's a near-zero chance of such, there are a few basic observations. Eg, why is it that all of the so-called slot pros, expert card counters, and, so on, invariably lead backward and otherwise nutty lives? Neither of them is ever anywhere near normal. Most of them are functionally illiterate, at the level of suckers you'd expect to see in the casinos after dark. It's no coincidence either that they are the only ones on the forums who end up in the endless diatribes (with each other). For sure, anyone whom KJ, say, Crimm, ever "helped out" here and there is long gone.

You're clearly more nuts and as big of a loser as anyone. Slot players barely talk about the stuff. I don't think you even know the lives of most of these people. Reality is you seem too insane to be able to accurately tell much of anything.

Can't you just go back to wherever you spend the previous few months?

I'm the one, a couple of years ago, who spent two days with KJ to go over whatever he thought he was doing. When it came time to pin him down on his changing "numbers", well, he fucked off. How long have you been associated with the online gambling forums? The paths of psychological destruction and ruin run deep. Every type and degree of pattern of such "response". Shackleford had "his" people over there make up stuff about me just to have them ban me, after I posted up a psychiatrist's view of the mental health of a supposed academic who handed out such advice (that it's okay to lose to the casinos as long as it's not all at once.) A while back, I posted up a casino exec's take on how and why slot vulturing doesn't matter because it's strictly low-income. You'd think that if anyone cared, it would have been him.

But, sorry, again, for trying to include some information in my posts.

Hey, Garnabby, my take on things has pretty much always been that casinos are evil bastards and the job is to prevent them from exploiting innumerate everymans.

However, with that specific attitude, the overall context in which I frame things is that gambling is one experiential consumer (call it choice or call it addiction, your choice/addiction) option. There are literally thousands of others, and it may be misleading to lump slots, poker, and sports betting as "addictive gambling" when they are so disparate, while buying fast food, or fossil fuels to drive, may be as addictive in terms of expenditure and repeating behaviors as any accepted "gambling" categories.

So I'm one of those people who thinks that blowing money on gambling experiences isn't necessarily worse than blowing it on SUVs or Big Macs. Because Americans have so much money, until you get to a relatively huge chunk, who's to say this is a good consumer choice versus that? We're exposed to somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 ads a day. If they weren't addictive, they wouldn't be there.

Thus, I lump it all together as addictive purchase of unnecessary things/experiences/services. Who am I to say blowing 10K a year on slots is worse than blowing it on Whoppers and pizza?

My job, as I see it, is to report on the realities of the math, not to tell folks what they should do with their money. The former is objective; the latter is subjective.

I am going to post links to two of my recent responses to an anti-gambling op-ed, which I thought was, as always, short-sighted because it provides no framing of American consumer behaviors. I'll start up a new thread.