[saretired]

The one time I was in a casino I accompanied a coworker who gambled to one of the low dollar casinos in Colorado. What I noticed were poor people who came with $100 and wanted--or needed--to leave with $200, and of course the business model says that very few of them did. I bought a $10 bucket of quarters out of boredom and after 10 or so minutes I had $11.25, which is an incredible annualized return but not what gamblers are looking for. I noticed people going from one machine to another--"this one is cold", "maybe this is the right one", etc. It was very sad, and I learned that low dollar gambling can be insidious when the players are poor and look to the casino for money they need. The big dollar losses may make better headlines, but the self-delusion and suffering are the same.

[gozur88]

The difference is when you have no savings and minimum wage is $10/hr (or whatever), you can recoup a $100 loss in a couple days. I used to play poker with a woman whose husband lost decades worth of savings.

[saretired]

Not to minimize that person's loss, but 60% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, and I don't assume that the people I observed only went once to the casino. Minimum wage earners tend to have nothing left over by the end of the month. My point was only that it's not the dollar magnitude of the loss that matters, it's the ability of the gambler to sustain the loss whatever the dollar amount.