To Live on Two Edges: Gambling for a Living
Gambling for a living is “living on the edge.” It’s twofold: you’re living on one edge because you have no job or career. You’re also living on another edge. In gambling, the house edge refers to the pointed advantage of the house, i.e. the casino or bookmaker. To make a living gambling is to live at the precipices of these two edges at once.
Nothing Is Free of Risk
2020 peak COVID I started wagering with the slew of “Risk-Free” bets offered by sportsbooks like DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and others. Like any too-good-to-be-true notion, calling these bets “Risk-Free” is tightrope deception on the part of these bookies.
Here’s how these “Risk-Free” arrangements play out:
Scenario 1: You sign up, place your bet, and it wins. This is desirable.
Scenario 2: You sign up, place your bet, and it loses. Now you have equivalent credits in the form of bets in your account. You have to gamble these and hope you win.
Scenario 3: You sign up, place your bet, and it loses. You wager your free credits and they win. Congratulations, you almost broke even. Factor in the juice the bookmakers take, and you’re lucky to walk away with only a small loss.
Scenario 4: You sign up, place your bet, and lose. You wager your free credits and lose. Sorry.
Scenario 5: You learn to hedge to tilt asymmetry in your favor and to do so, you keep reading this blog post.
How to Hedge Bonuses
Maximizing sign-up bonuses and “Risk-Free” bets is all about positive asymmetric risk. As Dear Retail explains, asymmetric risk is “an investment scenario where the potential for profit or loss is imbalanced: the risk is not equal to the potential reward.” So if you hedge against your “Risk-Free” sign-up bonuses, you tilt asymmetry in your favor.
An example:
Sportsbook A offers new users a $500 Risk-Free bet, meaning that if your first bet loses, they will refund you $500 in site credit. You then have to win this bonus wager to get close to even. Assuming a win with your $500 credits at -110 odds, you’ll be down to $454.55, for a total loss of $45.45.
This is why we hedge.
When placing our first bet at Sportsbook A, we go sign in on Sportsbook B and place the opposite bet. In this scenario, if the bet at Sportsbook A wins, we see a total loss of $45.45, with no free bet in our account. If, however, the bet at Sportsbook B wins we are down to $454.55 BUT we now have a free $500 bet in our account at Sportsbook A.
From here, we can gamble the free $500 bet and hope it hits. Or we continue and hedge again to secure guaranteed profit.
Degenerate Gambling and Fantasy
Does your willing engagement with risk make you a degenerate? Does confronting your psychological floors squander your life’s purpose? Or are you one who stands out as brave in a world of cowardice?
Degeneracy in gambling is like alcoholism in bartenders. Not every bartender is an alcoholic, but if you’re an alcoholic being a bartender is a good gig. I’ve learned that the greatest danger in living off of gambling is not the risk inherent in your wagers. It’s not the risk inherent in setting limits or breaking them. It’s the imbalanced fantasies of great riches or severe poverty that drive ultimate degeneracy in the gambler’s brain.
Find me a life path devoid of daydreaming and I’ll retire in silence. The fantasy to live without fantasy. Like any addict, real degenerates seek a permanent escape. The modern gambler is aware of such pitfalls. They are gamblers who acknowledge risk from the outset and adjust expectations with every wager.
Gambling will expose your worn mental patterns. How do you respond under pressure? What are you like when things are going well? Can you ever walk away?
Blackjack Will Break You
I’ve experienced it many times: blackjack can break a human soul. It is a vile game secreting evil from the anus of the capitalist machine in the form of face cards.
Listen to this salty loser: if you’re going to play Blackjack, remember to get out. Profit from a lucky run is often as much as you’ll wring from the sour pits of this race to 21. And always double down on 11.