Headline June 27th, 2012 / "The Gaming Gene"

"The Gaming Gene"

But then my father was a gambler, too. He would sit at home with a small roulette wheel, with a pile of hand-rolled cigs, spinning and noting the numbers for hours, seeking the darker mysteries hidden behind their occurrence, behind the gauze of intuition and probability. He also played real estate and the stock market. 

He was a gambling man, and though many men fell victim to games of chance, he saw an opportunity for anyone who had the nerve to play and the cold blood to bet his own hunches. My father is a part of our dinosaur past, when gambling was a test of nerve and intelligence and luck and contempt for the workaday world. 

A gambler takes a look at the odds and then makes moves to change them, an echo of our animal nature, the way a predator sizes up a deer in the forest. In nature the odds are always with the prey, or there would be no deer!! As simple as that! And soon after that triumph there would be no mountain lions. 

But a predator that studies the situation can change the odds, and such a creature becomes a successful predator. My father gambled out of greed and ego booze and, no doubt secret drives they kept to themselves. 

But they also gambled out of optimism, out of the belief that they lived in a rising nation of winners, and they figured that they should be bigger winners than other folks.I'll give you a symbol of that outlook: My mother's wedding ring was won in a poker game. 

This magnificent passage is from the work of a super American writer. And he continues,.. All that belief and work is behind us now; we are a different nation, and we play a different game.

Today gambling is played on machines or on a lottery scale, forms of crapshoots that offer little mystery, little chance for sizing up odds and adjusting behaviour. Gambling has left the back rooms, the tumblers of hard drinks, the ready pistol in the coat pocket, left all this history and culture and edge for a clean, large, well-lit room. 

Hunter S Thompson's earlier treatise on this milieu, 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' has a quaint air to it now. Gamblers gamble away every year close to a trillion dollars in America, the action-street legal. But there is no longer a fabled edge to the desert, and gambling is no longer a racy past-time of low-lifes, old money and eager sinners! Haha! 

It is all as main stream as the great and formidable Wal Mart, Morgan Stanley, and General Motors!! In fact it is no longer called 'gambling' but universally referred to as ''gaming.'' And one brilliant writer sums up as such: We have lost the ability to sin, and this is a grievous loss!! Haha! 

So as this delightful post continues, remember, A day without SAM Daily Times? Not and never an option!! And let me just add, that in view of your many many insights and requests, SAM Daily Times has added 'The Google Legacy Stats'' on the Home Page for the day. 

Top Ten countries of the World and their readership displayed. The field is level now. Lets hit the million mark. Torch stays lit for Global Traverse. 

Good Luck and Best Wishes! 

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless