Of course money is king, if you ask random people on the streets to choose between money and education they would all choose the money. Once you have the money you can always educate yourself again, or just hire a smart person that does everything for you. Money is what drives the world, not education. There are many things you could study and will not find a well paying job afterwards. That's why sating educate yourself first and then the money will follow is not always true. The main question is of course how do we get our hands on money. The usual way is to find a good paying job, but for that we need an education first. So we can't really choose between the one or the other, we need both. Just make sure that you study something important that companies actually are looking for.

I agree with you, it makes so sense for the casino to rig their games. All the casino games are profitable as they already have a house edge that is going to make them money long-term. The more people that will play their games, the more money they are going to make. And if there would ever be a case where games are rigged the casino name would be ruined and all the customers would leave the casino. Live casino games are more engaging that the traditional online casino games, but it's not a proof that the game isn't rigged. When it comes to roulette it's usually the ball or the wheel itself that is rigged and just by watching it live we wouldn't notice it. Personally I like live Casino games as there are usually beautiful woman as dealers. The only issue I have with it is that the cost for the casino is much higher to run live games than online only games. They have to hire all the dealers and make less profit that they could give back to the community via promotions.

That would be a very terrible situation and I would start to question the sanity of the government. What real reason is there to ban ccrypto currencies and VPNs? I don't think the government needs more ways to try and control it's citizen and I would try actively try and fight these bans. Hopefully in such a case there will be alternatives that we can use and don't have to give into the government's demands. It's one thing to ban the use of bitcoins, but can they really force us to sell all our coins? I don't think so, I would hold my coins as long as I can and not give into any demands to sell them. It's up to the people to stand up to the government when they try and exploit their power. Hopefully the ban will only stand until the next elections, when voters wake up and will change the government again.   

I am quite surprised that you mention poker as the one game where this should be the case. Poker is such a competitive game that I would have expected it to be the other way round, professional poker players who only focus on winning should be taking advantage of gamblers who only play a little for fun. I know this from the home casino in my city, and also in Las Vegas there are a lot of regular poker players that want to take advantage of the tourists who only come in town for a few days. In my opinion being not very competitive and focusing on winning is a problem in poker, because you need to stay focused for a long period of time. In poker there is no house edge, we only play against other gamblers, and the one that stays mentally strong the longest is likely going to win. Luck plays a big role at the beginning in poker, but the longer we play the smaller becomes the impact of luck and the more important is our strategy. 

I agree with you, we all need fiat money for our everyday life, without it it's very hard to function normally in most countries. But there is a difference between using fiat money to pay our bills and expenses every month and saving large amounts of money in currencies that are losing it's value over time. In my country we have at the moment inflation rates of 8-10%, while the bank pays 0.5-1.5% interest on savings account. It makes no sense at all to save money at the moment in a bank account. I would recommend anybody to invest their money instead, stocks and cryptos are two good alternatives. As long as we don't pick the most risky assets the risk of losing a lot of money is not that high. And in case we need some short term money we could always sell some of the assets again.

Well done mate, that is some life changing profits you made there and I hope you invested the money wisely since then. Taking a break from sports betting after such huge winnings is a good idea. Hopefully you find something else that gives the same excitement in life. Looking at your bet I am really surprised to see 19 legs, that insane. On one side you need to combine a lot of bets together to get to a 1,300+x multiplier, on the other side this decreases your winning chances so low. Over 19 matches there could go so many things wrong, I definitely don't have the stomach to take out such bets. Kudos to you for making it work and showing all of us here on the forum what a successful sports betting career can look like. Good luck for your future plans.

Crazy week so far in the ESL Pro League Season 17, who would have thought that G2 would lose 2-0 against Cloud9. I lost some money on the match and need to recover it in today's matches. G2 is still one of my favourites this season and they managed to pull through the lower bracket of Group A to beat fnatic 2-1 in the lower bracket final. Now fnatic has to play against IHC in the last chance match before being out of the tournament. I will go with fnatic for the match as they will do everything to advance. The winner of the match will then have to play in the evening against Eternal Fire. Which is likely going to be fnatic, and even though Eternal Fire is a good team, fnatic should beat them. The 2 teams already played each other 2 days ago and fnatic won 2-1, so they should be winning again. The most interesting match of the day is going to be Outsiders vs Cloud9. I am going to go with Cloud9 for the match, after their 2-0 win against G2 they should be hyped to go deep in the tournament.

I don't think it's a good idea to always value bitcoins based on the current market price. At least for me bitcoin is a longterm investment and I don't feel like my personal net worth is changing daily with the bitcoin price. For some investors it might be different, they are looking for the short term profit and would sell their coins during a crash. Only after selling your coins you will realise a gain or loss from the trade and your bankroll will change. In my opinion it's better to sit out a crash and wait for prices to recover instead of panic selling. Crypto currencies move in cycles and we should worry less about price changes.

It's been a long time since I did some day trading, I used to do day trading with stocks, futures and cryptos. With stocks I was the most successful, with futures I only lost money and with cryptos I made some small gains. In the end the time and stress I put into trading didn't justify the mediocre returns. When comparing trading returns I always looked at the basic Hodl strategy to see if I outperform the market. It wasn't really worth it paying so much in transaction cost for only small gain. That is why I switched to a more long-term trading approach. Overall I would say that day traders are more risk averse, because they close out all their positions overnight, they don't want to take the risk of the asset for a long time.

I wouldn't say that this is something only limited to the forum here. If you ask the average gambler on the street he would give a similar answer. A lot of people who gamble, do it only for fun and will be using fairly small amounts compared to their savings and net worth. This is what I would call a responsible gambler and at least among my friends we are all having a similar mindset. Nothing wrong with placing smaller bets in my opinion, I would always prefer to play longer at a casino than placing only a few large bets. A casino would prefer to have more high rollers play their games and will run promotions to attract them, just would be nice to have some promotions for the little guy as well. There is also nothing wrong with taking advantage of the deposit bonus. There are a lot of casino out there that try to compete for new customers, why should we look for the best deal for us? People always compare prices online before shopping, so we should be doing t he same when choosing a new casino.

I think we had a few similar threads like this before, but it can never help to share the same information a few times with the community. I am not an expert when it comes to gambling or controlling my emotions, and still over the years there a few points that I keep in mind when gambling. First of all, never drink and gamble. Having one beer in the evening is fine as it's not going affect our brain that much, but drinking heavily is a bad idea to do when we are gambling. I have seen plenty of gamblers in a casino losing a lot of money while being drunk. The second recommendation I give anybody is to set fixed boundaries when it comes to gambling. Make sure you only play with a certain amount of your bankroll in the evening and don't go over the limit.

I was a bit surprised to read that ChatGPT should be involved with trading, because they try to be children friendly and political correct. A friend of mine has tried a lot of things with bot and says there are a lot of limitations. With OpenAi it's something else, it can be used in all aspects of life and can bring value for the users. However when it comes to trading I am sceptical, so far I haven't seen a profitable AI based trading strategy. Financial markets are very complex, and while many traders use computer system to support their trading strategies, they still need human input and supervision to making sure the bot doesn't break down. Self learning AI is definitely the future, but when it comes to trading do we think there is this one perfect pattern the AI will identify? I don't think so, human action always involves emotions and the more people are involved the bigger the emotions. I do think there are strong patterns in the market, but they are changing with the market conditions. A strategy that works well during a bull market is not guaranteed to do well in a bear market and vice versa. The Ai might have problems switching between such strategies.

Most of the older users here must have seen this before. It's funny if you compare the 25 bitcoin to today's prices, but the question is did the winner actually kept all his coins? Or maybe he has sold them straight after. Comparing such an old prize to today's prices is a bit misleading, because the 1st place winner could have bought a lot more bitcoins with his 500 USD. It's one thing to get bitcoins as a price money, and something completely different to make the decision to keep them for so long. Now with hindsight it's always easy to make the right decision. You are right that in esports we rarely see crypto currencies being used to pay the winners. I am not really sure why, it's a bit sad because it would further boost the popularity of crypto currencies. But any winner could easily use his price money and buy bitcoins the day after the tournament. There is really no excuse to say now that I wish I had won bitcoins 10 years ago. Everybody can buy them and doesn't need to win a tournament first.

That's very cheap, where actually is that restaurant? From the type of food it sounds a bit like Brazil. I remember from my few trips in South America that food is fairly cheap down there and very fresh. In Brazil almost every meal included rise and black beans, so delicious and much more healthy than all the fast food in my country. Here are no restaurants where you can get a meal below 5 USD, there a children portions for 3 USD but that doesn't count. Even the lunch menus are above 5 USD. The only real cheap food we have here is for students, because it's subsidised by the state. For less than 2 USD you get a main dish, salad or soup and a small desert. The quality was quite good back in the day, unfortunately you need to be a student to get the discount.

Very interesting article to read, unfortunately most of the stories are illegal and will probably end with us being in jail if we would attempt it. Was a funny read, just not really realistic in today's world. For a Hollywood movie it's a great story, but to do it now in real life I would advice against it. Even if we manage to get our hands on a lot of money like that, we won't be able to enjoy the money. What brings us all the money in the world if we are sitting in jail? I like story number 4 a lot, she won the jackpot but didn't get the money straight away. It always seems so weird that the first reply from the casino is it's was an error an the win is not legit. But why would they then offer her a lower payout? They are trying to cheat her out of the winnings and she fought for her right and got all the money in end. I also like the ending that she donated all the money to charity. At this point it's all about principals, she didn't need the money herself but wanted to make sure her rights are respected.

That is a great idea and congratulations for owning your first bitcoins. Don't worry so much about the short term price fluctuations, you did the first step of buying coins and now you need to wait for the next big bull run. Once the bitcoin market recovers you can take some profit and buy a new bicycles. In my opinion it's clever to sell physical things we don't need at the moment and invest the money in bitcoins. Back in 2016 I did the exact opposite, which was my biggest trading mistake. After making a lot of profits in CSGO skin trading, I cashed out all my money into bitcoins, but didn't keep them. I sold the bitcoins and bought a new bicycle for it. It's a great bicycle and still works fine today, but every time I use it I think about how much the bitcoins would be worth today. Not going to make the same mistake again and will always keep at least some bitcoins in my wallet.

Unfortunately yes, the wealth we humans amassed over the years is distributed very unequal across countries, and even more unequal within all the countries. To be honest I find it the number of 20% owning 80% of the wealth quite high, I expected it to much lower. Just look at the super rich for example - worldwide the 26 richest people held as much wealth as half of the global population (3.8 bn people). It's kind of insane that there are not more civil wars around the world and people are demanding change. The wealth of the 1%ers keeps increasing even during crisis times, whereas the wealth of the largest part of the population remains constant. I don't think that the government is going to change anything, because they are being funded by the rich families. There is a huge lobby industry behind the politicians that finance all their campaigns. Without the money of the rich, the politicians would never get into power. 

That's a really good comparison, when it comes to gambling there is no segregation between the average Joe and the high rollers, we all gamble at the same casinos. It makes no sense for the casino to only focus on one type of customer, it's best to appeal to the whole community. Personally I am a small average gambler, I try to stick to smaller sizes bets and prefer to gamble longer with my  bankroll than to place a few large bets and hope to get lucky. That's why I am biased for casinos to offer more smaller size games and promotions. Sure the casino should reward the high rollers differently and give them higher rake back, but it would be nice to have some promotions that are linked to the number of games played and don't focus only on the amount of money placed in the bets. Because any average gambler can become a high roller when he hits a winning streak, and any high roller can drop down to a smaller bankroll again after a losing streak.

I disagree with you, just because the casino has an edge over the player doesn't mean that there isn't a strategy. Even a losing strategy is a strategy. Everybody that plays at a casino should know that that the chances of the house to win at higher than the chance of the player to win and make a profit. This is of course only true on average, there will always be winners and lowers at a casino. If everybody would only be losing than nobody would be playing. With this in mind there is no strategy that is going to make a guaranteed profit for the player. Or said differently if we would play any gambling strategy infinite times we would go bankrupt. But life is not infinite, that's why there will be lucky gamblers who are winning big and on the other side unlucky gamblers who will lose big.

For me there are different concepts to saving money that I try to keep seperate as much as possible. First of all I have a long term savings account, which is also my emergency account. All the money I put in there is only to be used in emergencies and never for any things that is not really necessary. And then I have a savings account for ordinary things, like when I need a new mobile phone, laptop or clothes. And the last account is my daily checking account, where I also try to save at least the living expenses and utility bills for the next two months. Each of these accounts are at seperate banks and for my long term savings I don't even use online banking, this all helps me to not use money from one account for the purpose of another. In my opinion we shouldn't use all our money during our lifetime, most of the money in my long term savings account actually came from my grandparents who worked really hard for it. It's fine to take out the interest payments from time to time, but the principarl I will never touch for unnecessary purchases. Like I received money from my family, I also want to leave behind something for my children and grand children.