I do like to keep my private life as much as possible private, which doesn't mean that will lie about my gambling habits. When it comes to strangers I will not tell on my own that I like to gamble a lot, but if the topic ever comes up in a conversation I try to be honest as much as possible. With my friends and family it's a different story, they know about my passion ever since it started. Actually it was one of my best friends who brought me into Poker more than 10 years ago and since then we have played a lot together. Switching into other casino games over the years was the natural evolution and I tell my friends about any bigger winnings or losses. With my family I am not going into too much detail, they know I like to gamble and they are fine with it. For me there is a big difference between actively hiding my gambling habit and not oversharing it. Only at work I feel uncomfortable talking about gambling, I will only talk to my colleagues about it during a beer after work, but never at my job and not to my boss directly. I feel like this could lead to negative consequences.  

I fully agree with you that Europe is doomed, the Euro is going to lose a lot of more value in 2023 and whoever has the chance to diversify out of Euro denominated assets should be doing so. Crisis management has always been a bad thing in Europe, politicians over here talk too much and need way too long to react and get anything done. Together with the double digit inflation rates which will likely stay high next year, there is not much we can expect from the Euro. Gold doesn't seem like a good alternative right now which leaves crypto currencies as the main inflation hedge together with real estate investments. The problem is that people are afraid of inflation, but don't react to it. So far most people sold any risky assets in 2022 and didn't reinvest. The cash levels are very high in Europe right now, among my friends most of them have 50-70% cash levels in their portfolio. Which is insane to be honest, because you lose so much value with cash during high inflation times.  

What a major this has been so far, after many of the favourites got knocked out early, now NaVi is out against Furia. Luckily I had only a small bet on NaVi, but what happened there. It looked like a sure win for NaVi before and then they lost 2 maps in a row without even overtime. Simple had a really bad day, he couldn't make his plays work with the lowest ADR of the team. Even during the first map which NaVi won Simple only had a 68 ADR, which is way too low for the top player of the team. Nothing I can do now, only move on and prepare for two more good games today. After knocking out NaVi, I think that Furia is hyped for the tournament win and is going to beat Heroic today. Heroic played very well this Major so far and only lost against Cloud9, but to beating a hyped Brazilian team is very hard. This always reminds of the Coldzera/Fallen era. The second match today with Mouz vs Outsiders is going to be closer, I am a fan of Mouz and would love for them to reach the finals. They are also hyped after knocking out Cloud9, but they played Outsiders before on Monday and lost 2-0. Outsiders so far lost only one match against Heroic during the tournaments. The payout for Mouz to win is good, so I am going to place a very small bet on them, it's definitely going to be a hard match for them. Realistically the final tomorrow is going to be Furia vs Outsiders.

While cash transaction are great for making purchases or sales with a lot of anonymity the security aspect of cash if not great in my opinion. Most people will be reluctant to engage in larger size cash transaction, because they afraid to carry around it. The risk of getting rob is too high in my opinion. That is why I only have small bills and not a lot of cash with me when I go to the city. Also we should be aware that cash transaction don't offer 100% anonymity anymore, whenever we use cash we need to physically meet other people and this can be seen by others too. CCTV and facial recognition became very popular over the last 10 years and it's hard to avoid it in many countries today. Just take London for example, all of the major places are fully covered by CCTV. So whenever you meet someone to make a transaction with large sums of money, this could be recorded. Not that this is a bad thing, it provides a lot of security, but also takes away the anonymity in public places. Bitcoin and other crypto currencies seem like the best way to make transactions that are secure and outside of the banking industry.

I rarely copy bets from other people, if it's strangers or not I still want to make up my own mind. What I do like to do is getting inspirations and see what other people bet on, but after that I will try and figure out why they bet like this and if it makes sense. During university we had a football betting group, where 6 guys were pooling their money and one friend of mine placed the bets. He was spending a lot of time reading about the different leagues and had a good edge on making profitable bets. This only worked for me because I knew him well and I could trust him. Otherwise I would not put my money down on someone elses bet. A few weeks ago we had another thread here about celebrities like Drake sharing their betting slips publicly and of we should follow his bets. I think it only makes sense to place small bets on someone else's idea.

I agree with you, trading based on a hunch or your gut feeling is not a idea. You might make a few short term profits because you are lucky, longterm however this is not going to work. When it comes to trading and investing we need consistency to make a profit, without we are just going to lose most of our money eventually. Technical analysis is a great tool to help us make the right trading decisions. When I first started out with stock trading I attended some courses for trend analysis and which momentum indicators to use during which market phases. Even though the stuff is quite old by now it's still helpful and can be used for crypto currencies as well. Experience and skill are going to build up over time and we can only get better at it, if we are actually trading and taking risks.

That's a really difficult question to answer because the world is so divided when it comes to cash and using credit cards. When I look at my grandmother who is above 90 I don't see any chance to remove cash for her. She only uses cash which my uncle withdraws from the bank for her, she never even made a bank transfer, everything is done for her by either the bank clerk or in our family. For her there is only cash, very similar to my parents. They do have bank cards, but rarely use them. It's hard to keep track of their finances they say and want to stick to cash. We even had online banking setup for them in the past, but they kept forgetting their login details and never use. So based on my own family I can tell there is no way that cash could disappear in the next 30 years. Any political party that would start removing cash from the economy will be gone by the next ejections. After 30 years things could be different, once our generations are in retirement age I am use we could live without cash.

I have been using my username many times by now. It comes from gaming, ever since I started playing Battlefield 1 when it came out, it became my absolute favourite shooter. It's so much better than the last two Battlefield games. By now I have more than 2000 hours in the game, and my most used weapon is still Gewehr 98. It's such a reliable and great rifle in the game that you don't need anything else. As I also like history I read a lot about the rifle, it's a Prussian made rifle 1898  that basically became the standard infantry rifle by many nations back in the day. And the manufacturer was called Mauser, which became my username. Today the company doesn't exist anymore on it's own, they are now part of Rheinmetall and hopefully don't mind I took their name  .

Really hard to imagine such a thing happening in reality. Betting 10k USD on a single number is a bit insane, if one of my friends would try to do such a thing I would try to stop him. The risk is way too big and who knows if he is thinking clearly. When a friend would tell me about his plan, or I see him with large sums of money walking towards the roulette table I would say anything to convince him to be cautious with his money. But once the money is in the table I don't think I would Touch it and move it to a different bet. Is that even allowed? Like if I was in that position and placed my bet, can't I just say I didn't change the bet and I want my winnings? How does the dealer know if my friend is allowed to place a different bet for me or not? In the end the casino could ask the 10k from my friend, but would have to pay me 350,000 USD. With these kinds of sums of money friendship stops. If the money was lost I would feel bad every time I see my friend, how do you come back from it?

Buying a house with debt is normal in my country, I haven't heard of anybody who was able to buy a house without having a loan. House prices have risen drastically in the last 10 years, whereas wages are not keeping up. The percentage of rent or loan repayments from the monthly salary is rising every year and it becomes harder to maintain the sane living standards. Still owning your home one day is the number one goal of young adults, they would rather give up on a nice car and vacations to afford their own house one day. Here it's normal to have 20% equity and get the rest from the bank. The problem for me is that many people view their own home as an asset, even though it doesn't generate income as they are living it themselves. In my opinion your own house should be rather a liability if its not modern or füllt renovated. Friends of mine bought their own house 5 years ago, only to find out now that the government regulations are changing and they are required to fully renovate it by 2030 to meet new energy efficiency standards. Their dream project almost ruined them.

Why not, this is a good idea to build some portfolio for your kids at a very young age. If you are buying bitcoins for yourself, why not do so for you kids as well? At the moment banks are offering a lot of new savings schemes that are designed for young parents and grand parents. My parents where offered multiple savings accounts that lock you in for 18 years and then will be paid out to the child when it becomes of age. These schemes are designed to be able to pay for a new car, or university later. The big problem I have with them is that they cost a lot of commission today and offer almost no good interest rate in the long run. So why do you need the bank in the first place? To me it seems much better that you take care of the saving yourself and don't pay the bank for it. This gives us a lot of flexibility and we are not limited to save in only one account. When it comes to long periods of time I would recommend to invest in more risky assets. Putting some of the money in crypto currencies is a great idea, same goes for investment and real estate funds. Over 18 years all these products are going to offer better returns than a savings account. 

What a crazy major this has been so far, both FaZe (rank #2 in the world) and Vitality (rank #1 in the world after winning ESL Pro League 16) are out already.  The world ranking is going to complete change after the major is over, we can already see being the best 3 month ago is no more guarantee for future success. My bet sizes have small so far as I am trying to build a second bankroll for the Worldcup starting in 2 weeks. Today are the last 3 matches in the playoff stage, with ENCE vs Mouz, BiG playing against NaVi, and Team Liquid facing Team Spirit. I am a huge fan of BiG and they played well this tournament, but I don't see any chance of them winning against NaVi. This is going to be a sure win for NaVi in my opinion. I will also bet on MOUZ for today, it's going to be the closest match today as they very equally skilled teams. Still after defeating Vitality they must be really hyped to reach the champion stage. As for the last match I would expect Team Liquid to pull through. On Thursday the champion stage is going to start with some nice CSGO matches this weekend.

This is a good philosophy many traders should follow it, keep your losses as small as possible while trying to maximise our profits. When it comes to trading, losses are not always lost money. As long as we are confident in a coin we can keep holding it and wait for the market to turn around. The general market risk in the crypto markets is very large, when bitcoin is falling in price than it will pull down most of the alt coins with it. As long as we make a higher profit when the prices are recovering than we are in a good position. It also can have benefits to sell coins at a loss, we won't have to pay taxes and reduce our tax liabilities in another trade. Losing is always part of trading and investment, but who is not trying and doesnt join the market has a 0% chance of making a profit.

I think it also depends on the deposit method we choose, if there are fees involved for the casino which don't make it profitable to deposit only $1 or $5, then the casino shouldn't offer it. I understand that money is always relative, and some people can't afford more money to gamble with. If we have more money at the casino we might be encouraged to gamble more than we should. But this is on us, we need to have our emotions under control and set a certain limit with which we only gamble. The same goes allowing withdrawals only after a certain threshold, this is for the casino to save fees and have gamblers leave some more money at the casino. We need to have ourselves under control and remain disciplined. There is also a positive thing about depositing larger amounts, we can take more advantage of promotions. Especially first time deposit bonuses are very nice to have and we should deposit as much as possible to get the full benefit.

In my opinion both bitcoin and Real Estate are two excellent investments that every investor should hold in his portfolio. Investing in properties is a good way to store value and get a monthly rent payment, the problem is that it requires a lot of capital and it locks it down for a long period of time. With bitcoins we also have a good way to store value and it's very liquid, we can easily sell holdings if we need cash. In case I had two choose between one of the two I would go with bitcoins. There is much more upside potential with bitcoins, the price is much closer to its 52 week low, whereas property prices are still very expensive at the moment. The problem I have with real estate is that interest rates are rising sharply at the moment, which is going to make financing more difficult. I would wait for property prices to come down before making an investment.

It's the first time I am hearing about the casinos offering us betting strategies. It sounds very cool and now I am wondering how many casinos offer this option and how many people have a made a profit with it. Is this maybe part of the automated betting section? I tried this myself only a few times with Dice and always lost my money. There were so many bets happening that never made any profit for me. In case you can combine different strategies now it seems much more sophisticated. But we need to remember that in every strategy the casino still has a house edge over us. In my opinion the one perfect strategy doesn't exist, even the best strategy is no guarantee to make a profit, we need luck to remain profitable over a longer period of time. And the luck will run out eventually, losing streaks are pretty common in gambling, at least for me. That's why I try to stay away from gambling bots or automated betting that can lead to very big losses.

It's a good idea to invest your money instead of keeping it in a savings account, but the investing needs to be done in the right way to avoid losses. It sounds a bit like you promote any form of investment over saving at the bank. The main feature of parking your money in cash or moving it into bonds is that you can't lose money there. If you look at gold for example, it was the best asset in the past to protect us from inflation and hold it's value during a crisis. But this year gold lost 8% of it's value while we face inflation rates of 10% and are in an energy crisis. With stocks it's even more problematic, most of the stocks this year lost money, so holding cash would have been the better trade. For 2023 things could turn worth, there is no end in sight for the high inflation rates and in Europe we are going into recession. With this in mind we are probably not yet an the turning point for stocks and I would be very cautious which to buy. Real estate is another issue with the rising interest rates, it's a good idea to invest some money into it, but financing cost are going to rise even more next year which should lower the price of real estate eventually. Buying right now could still be expensive compared to next year. In my opinion the best would be to add in crypto currencies to avoid holding larger amounts of fiat cash.

Not that I am aware of, so far all my friends I talk about gambling with, are also gamblers and we sometimes share each other success stories. But I never had a really big win yet, I do get lucky from time to time with some decent wins, in absolute terms though these are not living changing wins and will probably not attract anybody to join gambling. Whenever I go to a physical casino to gamble with my friends we have an easy rule, whoever wins the most money has to pay for gas and the food or drinks after. So the motivation is not the strongest to make the most money during a night, and even if you lose everything you still have decent night out. The most money I won in gambling comes from poker, but the game I play for more than 10 years and you have to build up a bankroll over time. That is why I always tell a bit more about poker when I share some success stories, it's not that you should jump into the higher blind games when you are a complete beginner. Also I don't want to "lure" my friends or family into anything, they should understand the risk they take and decide for themselves. The problem with luring someone in, is that if things go sideways and he loses his money, it will be blamed on you. Better not to risk a good relationship for gambling in my opinion.

To me it seems so that companies are struggling to keep employee for a longer period of time in today's world. Maybe it's a new generations thing and part of the mindset of employees now to always look for a better deal, for a new promotions or higher salary. Like what we are doing with shopping these days, we are not sticking to one stores we like and we have been there in the past, rather we compare prices all across countries to find the one store that offers a little bit better deal. When I think of my grand father or even father, the both worked only for two different companies in their whole life. What was a big difference for them compared to me now is that the companies they worked for had a special retirement plan, you need to work a minimum of 30 years for them and then you became eligible for a private retirement payout. The money you get on top of your government retirement money is large part of the salary and it would make no sense to switch companies after working their 20 years. Today it is very different, special retirement packages are independent from the company and an employee can take it with him when he switches the company. There is no real incentive anymore to only stick to one or two companies your whole life.

Nice to see another crypto casino coming next month. It's always great to check out a new websites and see their games. I hope you are successful and can make it work in the gambling industry. Especially your second part sounds very promising, we don't have many casinos with live gambling yet and it would be a good alternative to see actual games and not only virtual ones for a change. One more thing you should be adding if you have the time would be a chat function, so you can interact with other gamblers during the live casino games. Going into sports betting and casino gambling all at once it a lot of work. But your timing is not bad, launching during the christmas period should attract a lot of new customers.  Let's hope you will run some special promotions for the friends here on the forum.