Post #87: The Gambler in All of Us (Risk)

2 Feb. 2024

“You got to know when to hold ‘em,

Know when to fold ‘em,

Know when to walk away,

And know when to run.

You never count your money

When you’re sittin’ at the table.

There’ll be time enough for countin’

When the dealing’s done.”

—Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler”

     Gamblers do not commonly enjoy much of a reputation in respectable circles (though high rollers have been known to have a weakness for it at practically all times and places), and referring to someone by that name will not often be taken as a compliment. Insofar as we are talking about questionable characters making a dubious living off games of chance, there may be some solid sense behind the prejudice—and yet there is a gambler in all of us, and has to be.

     Look a little closer, and we are, one way or another, continuously taking our chances in life, and the fact that we are not often conscious of the fact, or clear about the risks we are actually taking, let alone sophisticated about weighing them, does not mean that we can escape from their hazardous embrace. It is the gratuitous, highly visible risks taken for thrills or profit that most catch the eye, of course, but we are throwing the dice in life far more often than we usually realize: whenever we get into a car, for example, or cross a road, or leave the house, or draw breath for that matter, even if our mental peace may require that we not consider too closely how any one of these “gambles” could turn out to be our last, however good the odds in our favor may be. (Germs and pollutants, choking on food and slipping in the shower, mutating cells and cardiac arrest—even the everyday possibilities are endless, to say nothing of the more exotic scenarios. You may not always be the one tossing the dice, at least not consciously or deliberately; but they are constantly getting thrown, whether you see it or not. And as for liking or resenting it, who ever asked you?)

     Let us say you make a point of appraising the risks you run with more than ordinary care and assiduity (not a terribly high threshold, since humans are notoriously bad reckoners of what is and is not relatively dangerous). You always put on your seatbelt in the car, lest you leave it by the window, never to return; you would not dream of getting on a motorbike without a helmet, or perhaps at all; you never skimp on the latex in the bedroom (Vatican roulette they used to call it: a baby in every other chamber). You are bewildered or appalled, not intrigued or fascinated, when you hear that Graham Greene claims to have once played a round of solitary Russian roulette without provocation, just out of a young man’s ennui. (Whether you believe him or not, it’s an instructive anecdote to consider. The height of irresponsibility, granted, but salutary, by Greene’s account: you would only wager your life in this this manner if you didn’t value it very highly at the time; yet coming through the ordeal alive might well heighten your appreciation for its preciousness. So it did in Greene’s case, if his own testimony can be trusted: “The discovery that it was possible to enjoy again the visible world by risking its total loss was one I was bound to make sooner or later.”*)

     Projects, careers, relationships, affairs of every kind, amorous or not—always there is an element of uncertainty and risk, and being a good judge of when to hold to one’s course and when to cut one’s losses is a constant silent partner. “Hold on lightly, let go lightly,” as I’ve discussed in #19, with some reflections on the curious circumstance that a certain willingness to let go and walk away from attractive propositions (labor, love, life itself) can bring unexpected rewards, while clinging unduly, whether to any given set of specific conditions or to existence in general, seems always to come at a hidden cost. Which is not to say that making commitments should be slighted in any way; knowing when to hold on tightly is as important as knowing when to fold lightly and call it quits. The readiness to walk away when necessary, even to run, on occasion, appears to be surprisingly vital, but so is the more obvious grit and stamina needed for toughing things out in life and standing by one’s commitments—when that is the right thing to do. Knowing which is which can be devilishly difficult, sometimes no less so than following through on whatever resolution one takes.

     Marriage, traditionally advertised as a safe harbor, is a most chancy proposition; so is any amorous passion or steamy entanglement worthy of the name. Even flings, so-called, are hardly risk-free. Having children comes with almost intolerable risks; so perhaps does not having them. (Remember #14: whether you do it or you don’t, you may regret it either way.) Getting into one’s car is risky, but so is the route of a pedestrian or a bicyclist; commercial flying, much less so these days, but first you need to make it to the airport, often the most dangerous part of the trip. And who knows what awaits you wherever you are going to. When we are traveling rather escaping or running for our lives (part of the calculus as much as walking or staying), what draws us towards new things and places is not usually their great safety and security, compared to what we are already enjoying at home, but the promise of some kind of novelty and adventure, and be it ever so slight. Adventure, surely, cannot be separated from some element of risk, or it is not adventure.

     We are quite right to fear risk, most of the time, because by its very nature it threatens us with loss, which not only hurts much more than gain pleases, but also has a closer connection to the business of survival for which we are all so deeply primed by our evolutionary heritage. So long as we are getting by already, a gain is unlikely to become an existential matter; it is an extra, after all, in a situation where we are already surviving. But take that away, and who knows, we may find ourselves in real trouble, danger even, possibly threatened with the loss of life itself.

     Granted, civilized conditions do not normally confront us with quite such catastrophic calculations; but the dreaded possibility, perhaps some kind of genetic memory, linger in our bones. Were we less inclined to such fears, we might not find ourselves alive today at the end of a frightfully thin and improbable line of uninterrupted survival and procreation, every generation anew, without fail, from time immemorial. Let the chain be broken even once, by way of dying or leaving no progeny, and it is all over, in terms of leaving a track in the greater record of life. We are all gamblers, then, procreators or not; our ancestors differed from others mainly in that for them, a number of key throws came out right, whereas for many of their competitors in the struggle for resources, mates, and life itself, they did not.

     It has been said, by way of economic theory (keyword Frank H. Knight), that entrepreneurial profit is the reward for risk taken, and in that sense we might all be called entrepreneurs of sorts. We gamble on more or less risky career paths, for example. The actor who makes good is a kind of jackpot winner who gets to pocket, as Adam Smith observed in his Wealth of Nations, the reward that so many others who spend their working lives waiting tables must forgo. The mating contest, whether we like to think of it that way or not, is eminently a game of chance, and nothing perhaps sets the successes apart from their frustrated counterparts so much as the willingness of the former to take bold risks and live by the results, while the latter shrink from such potential embarrassments and rejections and are left behind reciting their What ifs and If only I hads.

     The gods of love and war tend to get paired in mythologies around the world—Ares and Aphrodite, most prominently. One reason must be that both “games” get played for very high stakes indeed—the harrowing risk of heartbreak by Cupid’s arrow on the one hand, or the hardly less daunting prospect of death or disfigurement in the line of duty on the other. “Nice guys finish last,” as conventional cynicism has it, not so much because of their niceness itself, but because they do not usually possess the nerve of their bad-boy counterparts. It is the impressive boldness and the exciting daredevil attitude (the motorcycle factor), not any badness per se, that is doing the work here. If a nice guy could project the same kind of strength and chutzpah, and not come across as needy and clingy and timid instead, or overeager at best, then his good manners and caring thoughtfulness would work in his favor, not to his detriment. Goodness really is good, as Machiavelli himself insisted in all seriousness; it is just not enough. There’s some excellence required too, some dash and flair, and a readiness to play rough and tumble with Lady Fortuna if one wishes to win her favors. (No need to envy the daredevils overmuch: they end up as roadkill, or behind bars, or dead in a ditch or trench, about as reliably as they end up getting the girl, arguably for more or less the same reasons.)

     “Every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser,” the song proclaims in another line. That may be overstating things a little, but it contains an important kernel of truth: a skilled player can do much, at the poker table of life, even with the worst cards, an unskilled one, precious little even with the best. You can try to bluff your way through, or call the bluffs of others. Either way, everything turns on risk. Not that the gambling types are to be held up for emulation; their thrill-seeking and ever-unsteady ways bring daunting problems of their own, moral as well as practical, and that they do not often break even in the end is as notorious as their triumphs and escapades when they are temporarily riding high on Lady Fortuna’s favors. What they do understand, however, better than most, is the inevitability of taking risks in life, even if they may be far too prone to straining their luck.

     The “gambler’s fallacy” by which a string of losses is expected to reverse just because it has continued for an unseemingly long time, is a mental trap. It does not matter how many times in a row heads have come up in a set of coin tosses; the odds are still fifty-fifty every time anew, and the chances that the series will continue for another throw is just the same as that it will end. When behind, gamblers have a way of making uncharacteristically desperate bids in order to catch up with their losses; this too, a most dangerous mental habit that has caught the attention of psychologists and economists.**

     Breaking bad should not, either here or anywhere else in my musings, be taken for a recommended strategy in life. It’s not that all gamblers are bad, even the professed ones. The bad, however, whether the appellation be taken in a more serious or a more lighthearted sense, are all gamblers, because they are taking on organized power, the Casino as it were, knowing that the playing field is necessarily slanted against them, because the licensed operator always takes his cut, and a hefty one. When fighting the rules, or the law itself, it is not enough to win once; you have to keep winning. In the end, the odds are bound to catch up with you and the house, or the law, almost always prevails. Which is not to say that big bets to the contrary never succeed, only that they will not often do so time after time.

     Whatever deserves to be said to their discredit, however, gamblers may understand more intuitively than most of us, and perhaps accept more truly, that life is by its very nature a rollercoaster ride, and that we have nothing to complain of on the downward slope. Dealt a terrible hand, a true gambler will smile inwardly and make the best of it, undaunted; losing everything for the night, or being altogether ruined, he might even be able to shrug and accept the calamity as the cost of doing business in his line. Thus, even while taking chances that we might shun and forcing the pace much more than sober souls could condone, gamblers may have a better sense of the nature of the game. Wins may be our lifeblood, but they are never to be counted on; losses and setbacks, however painful or even catastrophic, are merely the other side of the coin. The throw of the dice, repeated often enough, must yield snake-eyes as inescapably as double-sixes.

     Gamblers realize, like other kinds of players, that you cannot have your mind fully on the game (thank you, Alex!) when you are “counting your money,” that is, thinking about the outcome and worrying yourself about possible gains or losses. (Of course you need to have a sharp sense of how much you can afford to wager and lose—but that’s already covered by knowing when to fold, and when to quit.) While the game is still on, perhaps for as long as life itself lasts, there are more important things demanding your attention; the score will be kept for you, no need to worry about that, and you will have time enough to tally it all when the whistle sounds.

     Gamesters are not known, it is true, for holding on very well to their winnings; this, at its worst, one may deplore as patent recklessness and wretched irresponsibility, but it has a more profound side, at its best, in how it bespeaks an unusual degree of freedom from the desperate clinging and clutching that commonly besets the rest of us. Why claim as your own, a gambler might explain with as much personal conviction as Epictetus or the Bhagavad Gita, something that does not really belong to you? What you imagine you are owed, the well-earned fruits of your actions, are nothing but temporary gifts, or rather loans, transient blessings by the grace of Lady Fortuna, who may call in the debt any time she pleases.

If instead of grasping at it all so relentlessly, you can learn to let go lightly, without resentment or regret, whatever you have set free may prove that much readier to return to you by unexpected channels, or perhaps something else in its place, and who is to say that it might not be something better? When it is all taken away, as it must be sooner or later, do what you may, the gambler should be readiest of all to fold his hand with a smile, get up from the table, and walk away to whatever it is that may or may not await. Being a betting man, he may put his last money on what he deems the most probable outcome, or perhaps the most hoped-for, but not without keeping his mind open as to the rival possibilities.

(This one goes to Chris, once more.)

*See “Russian Roulette” in The Portable Graham Greene, edited by Philip Stratford (Penguin 2005), pp. 8–10.

**Thus for example chapter 10 in Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving (Penguin 2016). Compare also pp. 313–14 in my “Christmas 1914 and the Peace that Could Not Be,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, vol. 34, no. 3 (Aug. 2023), where I use the dynamic to help explain why the First World War was protracted for so long to all sides’ great detriment.