This probably depends on the severity of the gambling addiction. For a serious case where someone has struggled quite a while to lower his gambling acitivties I would say that cold turkey is the best approach. Having failed several times before to stop gambling is a sign of a serious issue and that a new approach should be tried. In my opinion there is a difference between addictions from substances like alcohol or drugs and a gambling addiction. One type is something that our body got used to and there will be severe reactions when we don't take the substances anymore. That is why there are so many different type of drugs to try and reduce the effects of stop taking the serious addictive drugs. With gambling and other addictions that come from our brain, it's better to break the cycle we have going cold turkey. We need to find a way back to a daily life without gambling, maybe then after some time we could slowly start to gamble again without falling into our old patterns.

I am definitely better at the latter, managing my bankroll is more easy for me than picking the right bet to place my money on. When I compare myself to my friends, I know that I am not the best person to place profitable bets. A few of my friends are quite successful in football betting because they follow the league into the smalles detail. I am more of a big picture kind of guy and only really follow my home team, which makes it a bid hard to give accurate predictions and place my bets accordingly. However, remaining in full control of my money is for me the key to remain profitable. Learning how to control your bankroll is what saved me from not going broke over the years of my gambling history. I think it came from the strong focus on poker in my early days on gambling, because you need to have a close eye on your bankroll all the time and adapt quickly. You can only move up the stakes when making money, and as soon as you lose money you need also lower the stakes again. There will be losing streaks and we need to have the capital to survive it.

Thinking back on how it was to find my last job, it would have been nice to just invent something that suits me better and pays more money instead of running to so many different interviews. The question for me would be how well is a new job that I invent myself going to be. Is it going to be secured for many years to come and will it provide a high enough salary to provide for me and my family? I would probably prefer to stay employed or try to find a decent paying job where I don’t have to worry so much. A high degree of job security with good benefits is important in the current time, where we face many crisis. So, when choosing between unemployment and inventing a new job it’s an easy choice. But when it comes to already having a secure job and trying something new with limited upside potential, I would probably stick my current job and value the security more.

I fully agree with you, losing access to our crypto wallets is on us and we can't blame other people for it, except for the case that people steal our keys. But even then, it could be the case the we are not paying too much attention where we store our keys and share information too openly. It's been so many years now that cryptos have been around and we all have heard the stories about people owning hundreds of BTC from the early days and lost access to their wallets over time. By now we all should have learned from these early mistakes and protect our keys more secure and also have a backup plan in case our access is lost. A single piece of paper can easily become lost over time, which is why having steel plates is a great alternative to store our keys. It's much bigger and we need to find a more permanent place to hide and store it. It’s like with cash, we need to keep an eye on our wallet and lose it by mistake. On crowded places there can be pocket pickers that try to steal our wallet, which makes looking after our cash and wallet very important. The more money we have with us the more we should be alert. The same goes for our crypto wallets as they grow over time.

I don't think it's likely that world is going to be crippled again by another pandemic any time soon. First of all, the countries are ready as all the governments still have their covid pandemic plans ready to be reactivated. Secondly, the people are ready as well, everybody still has makes and sanitizers at home from the last pandemic. We all know the drills about social distancing, not shaking hands and washing our hands regularly. And thirdly, the pharma industry is ready for the next pandemic. There was a huge race to find the first vaccination and people saw how profitable it's going to be. I am sure any new pandemic would be focused on even harder in the future by the big pharma companies. The world has changed a lot since 2019 and I don't think the impact from another pandemic would have the same strong impact like covid. There isn't much to do for us to prepare, maybe stock up on food and toilet paper, save some more money and maybe buy into the big pharma companies before they announce the next vaccination round.

I agree, not everybody is gambling and the funds to provide services as free health are limited. There are already plenty of benefits from the lottery and gambling in general. For example the taxes, the government gets a lot of money from the gambling industry, it also employs quite a few people that rely on the casinos for their monthly salary. What if all that gambling money would just be put into a savings account and not used at all? That would be terrible for the government as it misses out on a lot of income. On top of that are all the big gambling winners that manage to get life changing money. As long as we don't become addicted and lose all our money I don't see any issues with gambling and mostly benefits. In the end everybody decides for himself if he wants to gamble or not.

From a gamblers point of view I can understand that, we spend a lot of money and feel entitled for a big win after a losing streak. Unfortunately, this is not how gambling works, the casino games are based on mathematics and statistics. One of the most important things in gambling we need to remember is that each round is independent from the previous ones. It doesn't matter if there was 10 or 20 times in a row red at the roulette table, the chance for black to come next round is exactly the same. Humans like to see patterns, which is why our brain tells us that there will be black next round, or that we deserve to win now after a losing streak. This also makes chasing losses very risky and I try to avoid it as much as possible.

Roulette seems like a great game for beginners, you have a wide range of possible bets to place and you can learn a lot about the game while playing it. All the big casinos have roulette tables and if you manage to go to Macau or Las Vegas it's the one table you won't get around. Without any previous gambling experience I would you recommend you start placing bets on red or black. The winning chances to double your money is almost 50% and you are not at risk to lose to much. My favorite game is black jack, but here you need to learn a bit more about the game first and it's hard to make your decisions quickly when gambling for money.

There will always be a luxury market for the 1% super rich people of the world. It doesn't matter who holds the cash, because if one person losses it someone else will gain it and take his place spending it. Supply and demand don’t really work for the billionaires of the world, because they want to be different from everybody else. There are limited amounts of Lamborghinis or Ferrari in the world, some models are even only produced in very small numbers. This gives a lot of prestige to the owner of the cars, because everybody knows how expensive they are and you can't afford them from a normal salary. Same goes for the clothes the rich people like to wear. The quality of a T-Shirt or Short will never justify a price of 2,000 USD, but showing a logo to everybody else from such a special brand makes it worth it. Luxury items are never going to be for the masses and we should be fine with it. If you had millions in your bank account and don't care about money anymore, wouldn't also buy the fanciest items in the world? You got to somehow spend your money after setting up your family for life.

I wish I had such kind of Bitcoins in my wallet, unfortunately I am still among the smaller traders here. Either you joined the crypto world really early when prices where much lower, or you just have a lot of money through work/gambling or trading that you can buy so many coins. In any case I think there are plenty of people today who still hold large amounts of BTC and are not selling. The first reason why is that prices have been much high in the past and many of the long-term investors didn't sell their coins at the ATH above 60k USD. So, why should they be fine now to sell at 40k USD? Another point is that prices are not dropping sharply. I would expect prices to dip again if there are many investors selling their coins at once. And the last point that speaks against most investors selling their coins at the moment is the halving is only coming up next year. If you don't really need the money at the moment, wouldn't you rather wait for the next halving to push prices even further? Thinking about retirement might be a good idea as well.

If a lot of luck is involved then I wouldn't call it a great trading strategy. Luck will always play a part in life, but I wouldn't recommend to start trading with the only hope of being lucky to become profitable. In the past I tried myself with arbitrage trading and only achieved mixed results. The price differences I noticed on a few exchanges was quite small and when trying to take advantage of them they were also short lived. It's good to keep an eye open for arbitrage opportunities, but I found that only relying on it is not going to work. It requires a lot of time to observe the markets and compare prices on various exchanges constantly. Also, there is a big competition for arbitrage trades, which is why most opportunities are going to be very quickly. Arbitrage trading is the closest we can come to a risk-free profit, because we buy and sell the same security at the same time.

Chris Ferguson is a great poker player, I loved to watch him in the 2000s on TV. The Poker After Dark Series with him, Doyle Brunson, Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, etc. was awesome. So many great personalities that taught me a lot about poker. However, you can't really use poker as the standard gambling game we are going to play, because it's completely different from all the other games we can play at the casino. Biggest difference is that we are not playing against casino, only against other players. In the traditional casino games, it's us against the casino, which always has an advantage over us with their house edge. Mathematics is not going to change the fact that the more we play, the closer we will get to the expected values of the games and likely lose money. With poker we don't have to worry about the casino, because they take a fixed rake per hour from each round for providing the infrastructure to play online poker. We only need to a have a decent strategy to play better than our fellow gamblers. So, it's good to learn math and statistics for gambling, just don't expect to find a strategy that is making you consistently money in all type of casino games.

   

This sounds like the plan some business owners have, who are expecting AI to take over the workforce eventually. There won't be enough jobs for all people, so the government has to provide a basic income to cover all needs of the people without a job. This would have to be financed through taxes, which doesn't seem realistic at the current state of the world economy. Only a few rich countries would actually be able to pull it off, and the majority of countries would need to rely on debt to take care of all their citizens. With debt levels already being so high for many countries, I don't see much room to make the universal income feasible at the moment.  Crypto currencies are a good way to try and generate some income at the side, protected from government interference. But for that we would actually need money to start trading and investing. Without any savings it's really hard to build a decent crypto portfolio that will grow large over time. The only thing we can do is to vote for the party that is the most likely to help the little man and push for universal income.

For me sports betting is a great way to make watching sports more interesting. I am much more excited when I placed a bet on the game and as I watch many sports anyways, I like to put more pressure on my convictions as well. Sports betting is winnable long term, because we can choose freely what type of bet, we want to go for. For example, only placing a few games per months on the strongest team of the league is going to let us win almost all of our bets, unfortunately the payout will be very small. It’s true that in every bet there is of bit of luck involved, but there are professional players behind the teams and we know about their past performance. A very strong player is likely to keep performing for the rest of the season if he doesn’t get injured and vice versa. Also, money invested in the teams is correlated with the success of the teams. It’s no surprise that always the same type of teams is going to be at the top of the league and reach deep in tournaments like UEFA. The competition is high in well paid sports and it might be hard to predict the champion at the start of the season, but predicting the winner for each match as we get all the available information each week is much more doable.

This weekend the semi and grand final is happening of the BetBoom Dacha 2023. It was kind of sad to see Furia being eliminated after there strong win against Astralis, but both Spirit and Virtus.pro played much better and deserve to be in the semi finals. The first match today is going to be BetBoom vs Virtus.pro and should be won comfortable by Virtus.pro. They are the much stronger team and didn't lose a match yet in the tournament, for me they are the clear favourite. The second match today is going to be MIBR vs Spirit, where I am going with Spirit to win the match. It's nice to still see a Brazilian team in the tournament, but I think Spirit is much stronger and should win easily. Also, the two teams played against each other during the qualifiers and Spirit won 2-0. The most likely grand final tomorrow is going to be Virtus.pro vs Spirit, where I am going with Virtus.pro to win the tournament. They reached the first place in the group stafge and beat Spirit 2-0 earlier this week already. Should be a good final, which might be going into overtime on one match, but Virtus.pro will win in the end. 

Yes I think the same, we should be investing time to do research on the teams and matches we want to bet on. The odds from the bookmaker and the spread can give a good indication how popular a certain bet is. And in the end it always comes down to the quote we get from the bookmaker to determine if we should make a bet or not. Because just because there is a decent payout for a bet, doesn't mean it's likely we are going to win the bet. I would always try to gather as much as possible information before a match to make up my own mind and come up with a winning probability for my team. Then comparing my chance of winning to the odds the bookmaker offer. This of course means that we follow the sport we bet on regularly and have an advantage over other gamblers. Let's say I have no clue at all about the sport and still want to bet on it, then looking at the spread might be my only way to get some information. The problem is that without any additional information it doesn't really make sense to bet on a match, because it's just like rolling the dice.

I am also excited for Bitcoin to have a small rally before Christmas. To me it was just a matter of time before the crypto boom would come back. Any price levels above 40k USD are huge and I hope that we are going to stay on those levels for next year and not fall back down again. FOMO can be a risk when we are only running behind the trend and never actually participate. As long as you already own Bitcoins and participate in the current rally, I would try to not start buying large amounts now for the fear of FOMO. In my opinion the best approach to acquire crypto currencies is still the DCA method and it worked really well in 2023. Buying a fixed number of coins every month or every two weeks, is going to lead to a great average purchase price, as the long-term trend of Bitcoins is positive. We need to be realistic when it comes to FOMO, buying now large amounts would mean that we think the rally is just starting and there is a big upside potential. In case you don't own any Bitcoins at all I would consider buying some, in any other case I would just keep my current ones and wait for a new ATH before taking profits.

Investments are the best way to make use of our savings and to not leave the money in a bank account where we get only limited interest. In my opinion money is the most important thing in investing, because you give money to people that already have business ideas. Running a business consumes a lot of time and we need to have ideas, with investing we can just bring our capital to good use instead. The only type of business that I can  think of where you are instantly profitable is selling products that you don't own yourself. Basically, you bring together buyer and seller for a commission. This is the business model that most influences and steamers follow. They don't have to spend any of their own money on products and still make a nice profit. The only thing they need to invest is their own time to attract new buyers and if course they need a big follower base. In case you are active on social media and know many people you could try to run your own small online business, otherwise I would stick to investing.

For me 1,000 USD is not enough money to start trading futures with a margin account. I have done so in the past with a few friends and we started out with 5,000 USD using x5 leverage, which still lead to large swings that would go up or down 10-20% in a day. Two days is not such a long time, so you probably have to worry less about larger swings. But why not keep trading more in the spot market with your 1,000? Prices are going up and down a lot lately and we can profit of the volatility in the spot market as well. Is this your only investment money or do you have other investments? Without any additional cash to cover margin calls you could be forced to sell your position at a loss. Assuming this is your first future trade I would recommend you stick to a small leverage and don't take too much risk.

The next tournament in CS2 is starting this week with BetBoom Dache 2023 in Dubai with some strong CS teams again. I am really hyped to see Furia again after their big win at the Elisa Masters Espoo 2023. It's great to have FalleN back on the international stage with all his experience. The first match today will be GamerLegion vs Cloud9, where Cloud9 should have no issues of winning the game, they are clearly the stronger team. The second match will be MIBR vs BetBoom. The second Brazilian team is not as strong as Furia, but should have good chances of winning against BetBoom. The two teams played against each other last month and MIBR won 2-0.  Tomorrow Astralis is playing against Virtus.pro, which could be going either way. The two teams are equal in strength and it feels a bit like a coin flip to me, I will skip betting on that match. The last match tomorrow is going to be Furia vs Spirit, where I am rooting for Furia to win. Spirit is a strong team that won a lot of there last matches and they are the favourite, but I hope the Brazilian magic is going to win.