How can you lose so much money in slot machines? He must have spent so many hours playing slots to get to such a loss. The return-to-player ratio of slot machines is between 95-98%. That means he must gambled over the time worth 180,000 USD to achieve 5% losses worth 9,000 USD. That is some insane numbers. Every time I gamble I play it's only for a few bucks, so when I win or lose its a few dollars. I have never heard of the android games Higgis Domino, is it a casino? To be honest with such kind of large numbers it sounds more like he got scammed than played legit slot games. He should check where he lost all that money and verify it were legit games in a real casino. Otherwise he can go to the police and might be able to get some of his money back. Of course the biggest mistake is to take out loans and gamble with it.

For long term crypto investors the bitcoin price doesn't really matter so much, they know there is a long term trend and that the bitcoin price is eventually going to recover. It is mostly the day traders who are worrying about the price and are afraid to lose their money. The purpose of bitcoins is to have a decentralised currency that can be used all around the world. The price is still important if we actually want to buy something with our coins. Sure I can send BTC around the world at low fees and shouldn't worry about the price quoted in Fiat, but if I want to buy some goods like a new cell phone or laptop I need to consider the prices in the country I want to buy in. If bitcoin was worth only $1 like a stable coin that many people would complain because they bought bitcoins at much higher levels. What we need is more stability in the price levels, not a cheap bitcoin price.

Welcome to the forum, always nice to see a new poker player here. From your posts here it sounds like you are just looking to resell poker material that wasn't actually created by you. It would be nice if you give more information here about what kind of material you are selling. Adding the information to your initial thread will save you also a lot of time answering emails. The internet is already full with poker material, are you selling videos course material from big schools? There are quite a few poker schools out there who offer coaching sessions with the world's top poker players. For such kind of courses you have to pay thousands of dollars, would be nice to get it cheaper. But I am not sure if it's legal to resell it. Personally I learn better with a teacher than just to read books, that is why coaching sessions would be much more attractive, if they are cheap.

Investing is important for a country to advance and not stand still. It's very similar to a company that needs to invest in itself to not become obsolete. There are different forms of investing that will bring different outcomes. A country can invest in it's infrastructure to make it more competitive international. For example, having good Internet access is a must today. Without it there is almost no chance of running a business, same goes for security. Another form of investing is into knowledge, having better schools and universities makes sure that the population will be more intelligent in the long run. If a country doesn't invest into education than it will be hard to replace the workforce when older employees go in retirement. Also innovation requires investing.

That's a difficult question, if bitcoin would stop to exist today than probably ETH will take its place as the new leading crypto currency. The crypto boom has already happened and there is no way people would go back to a world before cryptos. The demand is still strong for an independent currency that is not influenced by central banks.
Things would be a little different if there was a time machine to go back in the past and prevent bitcoins from ever being created. Without bitcoins we would not have the crypto boom and it would need someone else to invent crypto currencies. Who knows when this would happen, it could be in 20 years after the next big financial crisis. It took so many years and a lot of work for bitcoins to become mainstream that the success  would not be guaranteed if we had to start from scratch.

First time I am hearing about that trend. Sounds a bit crazy for my own personal taste. Isn't the display too small on a smart watch to really gamble? I have some friends who really like to gamble on their cell phone, for me it doesn't work. Even with the big displays today I am not comfortable to play for money on it. The optimal setup for me is on the couch with my tablet or on my desktop PC. It's probably because I like to do things on the side while gambling.



The biggest new trend I noticed this year is virtual reality setups. Many casinos are adding now the VR technology as new experience for customers. The article already mentions it. Another trend which I did see in the article is that leader boards become more common. Casinos seem to enjoy showing the top gamblers each week and month. It's a nice feature to see how much other gamblers are winning, even if it makes me a little jealous.

Yes trading can be profitable as long as you are good at it or being lucky many times. If you are unexperienced and think it's an easy way to get rich, the chances are very high you are going to lose money. Since you have no background in reading I will try to simplify things a bit. Think of traders in the market as a zero sum game, for one person to make money someone has to lose money. So on average you would have 50% of the traders making money, and 50% losing money. It's a bit more complex than that because there are fees and transactions cost to consider. As a very good trader you can make a lot of money. How much experience has your brother in trading? If he did it a few years successfully he might be able to do it for a living, but without any experience I think it will be hard to cover all his living cost. Also does your brother has a decent bankroll to start with? Starting from zero can take some time to build up an portfolio.

Oh wow that's crazy, I had no idea gambling was so old. Can't believe that people already 5000 years ago enjoyed gambling. When I saw the Egyptian dice my first thought was, it looks like a dice from the Dark Eye game, it's a fantasy role play game which you play at a table and there is one story teller. He uses a dice to see if you succeed or fail in your action. Pretty funny when you think that humans didn't change much in the last several thousand years. The article should be a must read for any politician who is trying to ban  gambling in his country. How can something be wrong for society that has been enjoyed by so many generations? I wish gambling hadn't the bad reputation it has today.

Yes I think about payout ratios from casinos from time to time and try to so some research on it. The problem for me is that casinos offer a wide range of games that have different payouts. For example, I see one casino that has really high RTP numbers for slot games, but then another casino offers better payouts at their black jack and roulette tables. If there was one casino who has the best rates for all games it would be optimal, but I couldn't find it. Also payout ratios are not everything to consider how profitable a casino is for us. If a casino runs special promotions for its regular customers we should also consider that.  A 100 or 200% deposit bonus is huge for example. Especially when it comes to poker these promotions can be quite big. Comparing rake across different casinos is important, but a casino like GGpoker offers a free sitngo voucher every day worth 0.25 to $1. That adds up to a lot of you okay regularly eventhough there are other casinos which are cheaper.

There is no way that bitcoins were created by governments. What would be the benefits for a government to create a competitor against their own fiat currency? First of all, in many countries there is political pressure to ban crypto currencies. They would never do this if the government would control it. Then secondly all the big central banks are developing their digital currencies. Why would they need them if they could control bitcoins? The independence of political influence is what makes crypto currencies so attractive. Especially now in the times of high inflation it's important to have access to an asset that can't just be printed freely.

I know this feeling very well, after a few losses you start winning again and your brain tells you that you are on a winning streak now. To me it doesn't really seem like there are streaks in gambling, every new day will bring us back to the exact same games with the exact same chances of winning. Our brain likes to see patterns, that is also why we want to bet on black if we see a long red streak in roulette. Somehow our brain tries to predict the future based on past results. It is on us to make sure that we don't fall into this thinking, we know better that the gambling rounds are not connected and every coin toss or dice throw has the same probability of outcome. In my opinion it is better to limit our gambling time before hand, if we give ourselves 1 or 2 hours in the evening to play on a casino we should make sure that it doesn't turn into 3 or 4 hours. Having clear boundaries when it comes to gambling also makes sure that we are not at risk to become addicted to gambling easily.

IEM matches this week are very exciting, both BIG and Vitality managed to win their first match. The big surprise we saw with the underdog 00Nation winning against Astralis in the first match. That was a bad loss for me that I want to recover now before the weekend. Astralis only managed to win 6 rounds against the Brazilians. In a best of one game it can go either way, but that match was really one sided. Astralis will be playing against BIG today and even though I am a big fan for BIG, I think Astralis will take that game. The second match today will be TYLOO against Mouz, should be an easy win for Mouz, so far TYLOO hasn't really convinced me. And tonight is also 00Nation vs Imperial a Brazilian only match, I think 00Nation is hyped now after their win against Astralis and will take that match. For tomorrow there will be Heroic vs NiP which is going to be a very close match, not going to bet here. A save win for me looks like Cloud9 vs OutSiders, Cloud9 should win this game.

Really surprising how Goldman Sachs made a 360 degree turn towards crypto currencies in such little time. In 2018 the bank opened their first crypto trading desk, only to close it shortly after. In 2020 they still are heavily against it and saying it's not a real asset class, but in 2021 they are reopening own trading desk. As such a big investment bank it's all about making money, so as soon as a trading team is not generating enough revenues they will drop it. Also there might be some branches of the bank who are pro cryptos all along. I think the bank mainly tries to make money based on commission  and will go into everything that their clients want to invest in. Similar to the 2008 mortgage crisis where in the years before the bank was heavily selling credit default swaps to their clients. They were pitching two sides of the trade to their investors so they would buy either the long or the short contract and the bank is left without any exposure and only makes money from selling their products.

This is true for the majority of gamblers, they can control their own actions and know when to stop. The problem is however when you become addicted to gambling and lose control of your own actions. It's very hard to imagine such a thing for people who have never experienced or watched an addict. For an alcoholic the rational thing would be to stop drinking, or for a drug addict to buy drugs in the first place. But the brain creates such a strong desire that they can't do anything against it. I am not saying that there is no blame for people with an addiction, it's not the result of a bad gene, they should have been more responsible in the beginning. Once the addiction becomes too strong it's almost impossible to fight it alone, professional help is needed to get the life back in order.

It's very hard to predict the next few weeks of the crypto markets. The markets have been so volatile lately that it could in either direction. I really hope that we already hit the bottom, because every time the bitcoin price drops below 20,000 USD it's bouncing back. So there are definitely investors heavily buying below the 20k level. And somehow I hope that all the investors who want to get out of the market must have sold by now. I keep asking myself why would anybody sell his coins 18,000 USD when he didn't sell at 25 or 30,000 USD before? It must be all about panic selling. Even if I hope for the best case scenario I think the most likely scenario is that prices will stay at a similar level for the next several. Maybe in autumn we see the recovery setting in.

Relocation and a change in environment can have positive effects on addictions. I don't know much about gambling addictions, but we have other addictions in our family that are very severe. My little cousin is gaming addicted, he already played games daily since a very you age. When he went to university my uncle rented him his own apartment where he started gaming all day. It took the family 1.5 years to realise that he never went to university and played every day at home, while lying to the family that he was getting good grades. Since his addiction is so severe there is no more chance for him to live alone. He is now at farm with other addicts and gets supervised while working with animals. I assume with gambling addiction is similar, you lie to your friends and family while everything spirals out of control. Relocation can help to break old habits, but only as part of a therapy. As for people gambling around you I think it's not so common now since most people gamble online. Most interaction with other gamblers is online.

You only made a loss if you actually sold your crypto currencies. As long as you are holding your coins your positions might be red, but you didn't realise any of these losses. As a long term crypto investor there is no real point in marking your positions to the current market price everyday. This is only helpful for traders who quickly buy and sell their positions. Right now we are in a bear market that affects all the major asset classes, even the top stock are down more than 40% YTD. The best we can do is hold out and not give into the panic selling.


I agree with you that money management is very important in trading and investing, it gives us discipline and more control over our income and plans our spare money in advance to create an investment plan. A good money management strategy not only focuses on the income but also on the expenses each month. For me it helped a lot to budget my monthly bills and expenses and categorise them into necessary and unnecessary. Only with full control over our finances we a have the chance to quickly react when the market is entering the next bull market.

I am not sure if this is really a good success story for gambling. There are a few issues with the story that are not really good in my opinion. First of all, going to visit a casino with a "depressed mind" is the wrong state of mind before gambling. Personally I only try to gamble when I feel good, because when losing in a casino everything feels worse. So if I am already in a bad mood before by gambling session I would be afraid to downward spiral into a depression after losing money. Gambling with $5,000 as a CEO seems alright, his salary must have been quite high even during the startup phase. But making it to $27,000 within a week doesn't seem so live changing for such a huge company like FedEx. With that money you could have maybe bought one new delivery truck, or hire a few more employees. Not sure if it was worse it to spend one week for that money. Couldn't he just get a loan that is much larger and spend the week working to advance his business? We shouldn't forget the opportunity cost of gambling for a whole week and not being in the office working.

Looks nice the museum and would be a cool visit, unfortunately it's a bit far away for me. At the moment I don't have any plans of travelling to South America. Venezuela sounds like a nice place to make vacation with good weather and cheap food. The problem for me is that I don't speak any Spanish and it could be hard to get around only with English. A friend of mine was in Colombia two years ago and he said that almost nobody spoke English, so without at least a basic level of Spanish it seems impossible to travel there. Maybe the museum could maybe a virtual tour through the history of bitcoin mining? That would could be interesting for the many people who live to far away from Caracas.

I agree with you, gambling is a form of entertainment where the focus should not be on success and making money. If we only go into gambling with the idea of becoming rich and making money, we will be frustrated very fast. Sure there are a few lucky gamblers who manage to get rich, but the majority of players will not achieve that. Measuring success as avoiding big losses and njg becoming addicted is a good idea. It's like going out a night drinking with friends, we could only buy champagne and spend thousands of dollars. Like that we will likely feel horrible on the next day, it's about having a good time while not spending all your money. The excitement in gambling for me is that there is a small chance to win big. I am aware it's a small chance and I will not count on it to happen.