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Gambling: Casinos
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Gambling chips themselves are a subtle manipulation to make gamblers feel like they are not losing actual money, and to make them feel more like it's just a game. One casino manager points out that the average person thinks of cash in terms of what it will buy, but the equivalent number of chips are just "betting units." And they have carefully studied the effect of the denomination of chips on how much a gambler bets, and now all dealers are instructed to give change in smallest denomination possible, as those have been shown to be most likely to encourage more betting.[31]
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Gambling can be defined as playing a game of chance for stakes. Gambling occurs in many forms, most commonly pari-mutuels (horse and dog tracks, off-track-betting parlors, Jai Alai), lotteries, casinos (slot machines, table games), bookmaking (sports books and horse books), card rooms, bingo and the stock market.
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By 1900, three loosely organized syndicates controlled most commercial gambling. For the first time, big gamblers used violence in a struggle to control the specialized business of supplying racing news by telegraph, the strategic key to controlling lucrative off-track betting. Mont Tennes emerged as Chicago's most important gambler. While big gambling houses concentrated downtown, bookies and policy writers spread out into neighborhood newsstands, cigar and barber shops, and saloons. Promoters built racetracks beyond the city limits. In the 1890s, illegal casinos moved to the suburbs, a process accelerated by John Torrio in the 1910s.
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Unfortunately, government lotteries are doing some of the same things; not only do they promote gambling, they even sink to the same sorts of tricks that casinos use to manipulate the ignorance and misunderstandings of the gamblers. One especially reprehensible trick used by casinos in Nevada to exploit gamblers' misunderstanding was the "near miss" slot machine, which made the losing combinations appear to be close to a large jackpot, giving the illusion that the gambler had almost won. This trick was eventually banned by Nevada gambling authorities[33] , yet almost every lottery employs a similar trick. Namely, you would rarely think you were close to winning if you were supposed to pick a number between one and eighteen million, so instead lotteries have players choose many small numbers. They then give small prizes for partial matches, thereby strengthening the illusion that players are close to winning, and encouraging them to try again. In reality, their being close last time has absolutely nothing to do with how they will do in the future, but the lottery encourages them to think it does.
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"As Hawaii ponders the merits of legalized gambling, a group of American Indians is positioning itself to provide $100 million in financial backing to native Hawaiians for development of a casino. Ideally...the casino would be on land owned by native Hawaiians. The American Indian group is offering to manage the casino and train native Hawaiians for up to five years, or until its initial investment and interest are recouped" (Chuck Davis, 1995, "American Indians Offer Casino Funding." Pacific Business News, January 30, page 1).
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Twenty-eight percent of sixth-graders, 38 percent of eighth-grades, 44 percent of 10th-graders and 46 percent of 12th-graders reported gambling in the past year. Most common age to begin gambling is 10 or younger. Relatives . . . introduce teens to gambling by giving them scratch-off lottery tickets as gifts. One University of Nebraska-Lincoln student raked up more than $40,000 worth of casino debt before his parents sent him to a rehab clinic.
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