So far I have never closed out / hedged a bet to save some money. I understand the strategy behind it, but I don't like it. Usually I only place bets when I am really convinced that one team is going to win and I want to stick with my bet to get the most out of the winnings. During some matches I realise that my prediction was wrong and I will likely lose money, it could be a could strategy to try and close out those bets to try and minimise the money I lose. But in sport games everything can happen, even a losing team can get lucky and score a goal in  the last 30 seconds of a match.  I read in some articles that bookmakers try to convince gambler to close out their very high risk / high reward bets. They are happy about all the unrealistic bets as long as they are losing and it's free money, but once there is a chance for such bets to succeed they become afraid to lose a lot of money. That is why I would not hedge my bets if the bookmakers would approach me. Gambling and betting is fun, I am trying to maximise my winnings not reduce my risk.

It is hard to predict the future during such uncertain times we have right now. Everything seems possible, the Bitcoin price could remain on the 20,000 USD level and only fluctuate around it for the next several month, it could also be that the price finally recovers and we see much higher price during autumn, or the worst case scenario where price would fall even lower. For me all of these possible outcomes are fine and won't change much of my actions. I am not going to sell any coins this year, it doesn't matter how low price would fall I am investing long term. So if prices rise again, I am happy and hold, if prices stay the same I will hold and keep buying more and if prices drop more I will buy more. In the end all of the possible outcomes this year have some positive effects.  We need to stay calm and focus on our goals during uncertain times.

I agree with you, we need to be honest with ourselves and take a good look at our own gambling habits. Gambling with the motivation to make big rewards and hit a jackpot one day is a valid dream, but we need to stay realistic about the chances hitting those big wins. I have been gambling for more than years and I am still waiting to break the jackpot one day. It's very rare occurrence and will only happen when I am really lucky. There is no point in lying to ourselves about the real reason we are gambling. In the past I played with playmoney at casinos to try out new strategies, also during my first year of playing online poker I played mostly with playmoney. It's a good way to learn and get used to casino layouts, the problem is that the winnings are not real. It felt like a missed opportunity every time I made a big win and players seemed to play a differently when it was not real money. In poker there were some players who only went all in or fold their cards, a bit boring to play against. I think long term there is no real alternative to gamble with real money, it's just not the same form of excitement.

Interesting thread, just yesterday I read an article about the updated disaster recommendation how every person can prepare for themselves. It basically sad to have 20 litres of water and 14 kilo of food per person to last 10 days without leaving the house. In crisis times these supplies could also be stretched to 20 days, but it still doesn't seem a lot to me. I am trying now to store provision for a longer period of time. Your 45 days approach seems like a good start. I like your variety of canned goods to not be forced to eat the same thing every day. Canned goods are good if you have space to store, if you are limited on space I would recommend different food. Take a look at the army or mountaineer rations, they very lightly packed because they don't contain any water. Like that they last forever and you can pack a lot of them on each other. The only problem is you need a lot of more water to prepare the meals. One solution can be a water purification system at home that cleans public water. Another thing I would add is vitamin supplements and medicine to make sure we don't get sick.

Selling 1,900 BTC at 24.736 USD is a better price than if they sold the coins right now, but a very bad price if you compare it to earlier this year or last year. Giving the money to Ukraine is a good way to help a country in need, and other countries should do similar things. What I am not sure about is why they didn't send the BTC instead of USD to Ukraine. Is Ukraine in need of short term cash? I thought that all the weapon shipments from the West are either free or part of a lend lease program that only needs to be repaid in many years to come. Because if Ukraine doesn't need the money right now it would have been much better to keep the BTC for now and convert it when they need the money. Long term Bitcoins is going to rise again and if they want to use the money for rebuilding Ukraine they would get a lot more from it.

Why do you want to start your own bitcoin casino? To be honest with you, you are a bit late to the online casino boom. We saw in 2020/2021 a big increase in new casinos that tried to take over market share from the old casinos who have been around for many years. Due to the covid pandemic online gambling was the only alternative since most physical casinos were closed during the lockdown. It seems that you are starting from the beginning and have no prior experience in the gambling industry. It requires a lot of knowledge, time and money to run a casino and I am not sure if you have that. Having a background in coding is a good starting position, I am just not sure about the business side. A cheap gambling licence already cost 10,000 USD, on top of that you need money for the website, infrastructure, support team and legal team. Plus you need to have a decent bankroll to start with in case a gambler gets lucky and hits a jackpot very early on. It's not guaranteed that you will make money in the first year of running a new casino. How about you work first in the industry? You could look for a job at an existing casino and get some knowledge and save up some money.

I don't think the gambling board would be as busy as it is right now if there were no more signature campaigns with requirements to post in the gambling section. There are some threads here that attract a lot of viewers and replies. For example the big football tournaments, or the basketball and cricket threads would all still be active without the signature campaign posters. The sub forum here is a good way to talk about upcoming matches and see how other gamblers are betting on them. I got good tips from the forum that made me decent profit over the years. Overall I still expect the number of post to go down and we would also see less new threads being posted. Most people would probably post in their local boards more instead as it's easier to write in your own language than in English.

Bin ich voll auf deiner Seite, es macht wirklich keinen Sinn ein Luxus Auto in der Garage stehen zu haben bei den aktuellen Benzin Preisen, ganz zu schweigen von den Auswirkungen für die Umwelt. Mich ärgert es schon die große Anzahl an Range Rovers oder Porsche Cayennes die man auf der Straße sieht und dann sitzt nur eine Mutti drin um ihr Kind in die Kita zu fahren. Wäre schön wenn die Menschen etwas nachhaltiger wären. Nur weil wir uns es leisten können heißt doch nicht gleich dass wir es wirklich benötigen. Jedes Jahr eine weitere Hitzewelle mit immer weniger Schnee im Winter, so langsam wird es doch allen bewußt dass wir Menschen zu viele Rohstoffe verbrauchen. Auch wenn Cryptos viel Energie benötigen zum minen denke ich es ist die Währung der Zukunft. Die Unabhängigkeit von Notenbanken wird den Preis von Bitcoins wieder in die Höhe treiben wenn es mit der Inflation so weiter geht.

I am also using Excel to keep track of all my monthly expenses vs my income, it helps a lot of to project how much money you can save in a year and where best to invest it. Also Excel is great to show how my investment portfolio changed over the time. I use one tab for expenses, one for income, one for stocks and investment funds and one for crypto currencies and all is added to the summary tab. This way I can go back 1 or 2 years and see how far I have come. Having an emergency fund is very important, there will always be unexpected issues that we need to address and selling our long term positions is not good. That is why I like to put 10% of my investment money into a money market fund to be available quickly while still earning a little bit of interest.

Blackjack is one of my most favourite card games after poker, I have been playing it for years and tried out a lot different strategies. Most strategies in blackjack fail to increase our chances of winning. The only real strategy that is consistent in bringing our chance of winning above 50% is card counting. Card counting is very hard to master without getting noticed by casinos, and if you don't want to get banned by a casino better don't do it regularly. As for martingale betting it's very popular in roulette and dice game. I like the strategy and think it's working most of the time. There are two issues with martingale betting strategies, first out bankroll is not infinite and secondly the casinos limit the maximum amount we can bet on at a table. Because of that we can't make too many bets in a row, it's best to start small so we have the most chances of making a profit.

I am really wondering why so many people worry about the bitcoin price dropping down to 1$, it's a very unrealistic scenario. It seems like panic is taking over and controlling investors, acting out of emotions is usually not a good idea. And even if the worst case scenario would happen, wouldn't it be the best time for us to buy more coins? How many of us came late to the crypto party and dream sometimes about having bought bitcoin back in the day when the price was below 100$? I would love to get another opportunity like that. Asset prices have been falling for weeks now, with crypto markets being down 40-50% since the start of the year I think it's a bad time to sell now. The goal is to buy low, not sell at low prices. And the lower the bitcoin price is falling the coins we can buy for our fiat money.

I can only speak for myself, even though I gamble almost every week I wouldn't call myself an addict. For many years now I enjoy gambling and can still take a break without thinking about. When I go on vacation I don't gamble, or when there is an important project at work and I need to do overtime I am also not gambling. The best check for gambling addiction is to see how often during a day we think about gambling. There are different ways how a gambling addiction can show itself, there psychological and physical symptoms. Feeling bad and depressed about losing money is one thing, but having physical issues due to excessive gambling is not okay and needs to be addressed quickly, before it gets worse. It's important to control our emotions when it comes to gambling and investing, decision making based on our gut feelings is usually not a good approach. And still a big loss will always hurt our feelings. If the problem is only in our head we can think about more positive things, like how much money we won in the past already. Taking losses into consideration as part of our whole gambling career makes it seem less severe. The big problem is if the issues are not only in our head but also affect our body directly. That can be very dangerous because it can become a chronically illness that might require treatment for the rest of our lives. It's similar to little tics that humans develop under too much stress.

Happu Birthday Hhampu, enjoy your day, hope you had a great trip.

To me it seems only as matter of time for the bitcoin price to recover and reach a new ATH. With higher Bitcoin prices that could make El Salvador very rich, but it is mostly the government that holds these Bitcoins and not the citizen. I am not sure if El Salvador would transfer it new wealth to the population or just keep it for themselves. Comparing it to USA or China seems a bit off right now, because El Salvador is lagging so far behind. They need a lot of investment in their own country and while the money from Bitcoins would help them, they need to transfer that wealth into some form of production. A whole country can't only run on bitcoins. As for the monopoly I don't think it will be a big deal, as long as Bitcoins are free everybody can choose his own ledger and wallet.

I had no idea casinos would use Fengshui to help in designing the layouts. It kind of makes sense now because Fengshui is trying to achieve harmony through only using round shapes. A friend had his apartment setup with a ying and yang approach, so not using any edges or squares, everything has to be round and a fixed place to get the most positive energy out of it. I am not really believing all of this, but it makes a little sense now. I noticed myself that casinos are build up like a long maze with no real start and finish, it's like a flow of water that keeps on moving, you can spend hours and hours in a casino walking around. The design seems similar to adventure parks where you want to let the guest feel excitement all along the way and the whole design is buildup to make everything feel bigger that it is in reality.

Very good prediction last year, I hope you made a lot of money from it. It seems you have a good feeling for the crypto market, why not trust your own intuition this year again? Listening to other people can be helpful sometimes but it is still only a prediction, and if it goes wrong than we hate ourselves for listening to other people. I prefer to take other people opinion into consideration, just not to trust blindly other people. To me it seems that the bitcoin is already in a recovery state, the price recovered a lot since his lows this year. Right now BTC is up 15% within the last 4 weeks. I would still advice to hold bitcoin because the price will likely keep rising after the summer break, and it's still cheap to buy bitcoins compared to last year.

I play in casinos for entertainment, it's exciting to gamble with money and having a chance to win large jackpots. Even though the chance for winning big is small it's still fun, and if we don't play our chance of winning is 0. Going into a casino with the only motivation of winning and making money is not a good idea. We all know that the casino has a house edge, the games are designed to offer better winning chances to the house and not the player. Without it the casino would lose money and go bankrupt. I look at gambling like any other hobby I would do instead in the evening, if I go watch a movie in the cinema I have to spend money on the tickets, snacks and drinks, gas and parking. If I go out with friends to a bar I have to buy expensive drinks. So staying home in the evening and using the money instead at a casino is fun too. There I have  atleast the chance to win back some money.

Relying on money from other people is always dangerous, they will charge us fees and interest and might cut us off without a notification. I try to rely on myself as much as possible, when I was younger I only borrowed money from my family or close friends. From them I knew that they wouldn't rip me off. When I went go university it was the first time i had to borrow larger amounts of money from a bank. I made sure that that it is a longer running loan that will be fully repaid at the end. Like this there is no risk that the bank demands full repayment at one point. Loan apps now sound even less trust worthy than the big banks and even if we blame them for our misfortune, it won't change the situation. We need to be on top of our finances.

It would be awesome if the US decides to do that, but I don't think it's very realistic right now. The volatility in the bitcoin market is still too high for it to be a good store of value for everybody. Historically the Gold price has kept it's value for a long period of time, we haven't seen a price drop of 50% in a few months before with it. That is why it's so attractive for the older generation as an investment to store value. With the high volatility in bitcoins I would also not recommend my grandmother to invest in it. She is above 90 and at her age I advice against investing in stocks or cryptos, she still holds a bit of gold but the most she invest in is short term bonds. For the younger generation this completely different, the longer the investing horizon I would recommend to invest in cryptos rather than gold. The thing with gold is that it's good to store value, but you have no more upside potential. There is no chance that gold will rise 50% in the next 6 months, whereas with crypto currencies you can store your value long term as well and still have a chance to make a nice profit.

I am in favour of gambling and it should not get banned anywhere on the world. Since I am 18 I enjoy gambling regularly, there are so many different casino games out there that make me excited that I don't want the government to tell me one day you are not allowed to gamble anymore. In my eyes it's wrong for the government to constrain the way we live. During university I had a lot of time and played poker almost every single day, now with work I have less time and I play usually 1-2 days per week max. Also I play less poker now and enjoy more games BlackJack or Roulette. The thing with the con arguments against gambling, is that it's the same arguments against so many other things like alcohol, tobacco, or even unhealthy food. They are all bad for us, reduce our life expectancy and make create a lot of problems. But the government can't just ban everything bad in our life, humans need to have a choice what to do with our lives. As long as gambling is for adults I have no problem with it. I prefer to use my money in a casino instead of buying cigarettes or beers every single day.