Investing our money is no guarantee to make us rich, I agree with that, but in my opinion it's the best option we have to try and get rich. There isn't many alternatives we can do with our money. The first approach would be to spend it all and not carry about our financial futures. This is the worst possible attitude and will never get us out of poverty. We could buy new clothes every month, buy the newest smart phone every year, go out to eat in restaurants multiple times a week, and so on. It's easy to spend all our money and don't save for the future. The second approach would be to save money regularly, but don't care about in what form we are saving. Leaving all our money in a savings account at the bank is the worst form of saving. We will never become rich this way, as the inflation will take away all the value of our money over time. The interest rate the bank bank offers us is below the inflation rate, we need to invest our money to make higher returns. Our last and only option is really to use our money and invest it in more promising opportunities. Better to invest and lose some money along the way, than to never invest our money at all and make no real returns.

The Blast Spring Semi Finals are being played today and the Grand Finale is coming up tomorrow. The first match today is going to be Heroic vs Imperial. Its nice to see that a Brazilian team managed to go so deep in the tournament by beating Vitality and Complexity. FalleN is one of my all time favourite players and it's awesome to see him still play competitively at such a high level. I really would like to see the Brazilians reach the finals, but Heroic is the number 2 team in the world and they beat FaZe 2-0, my money is on Heroic to win. The second match is G2 vs Vitality, which is going to be a much closer match as the two EU teams are quite similar in strength. Vitality is currently the #1 team in the world after winning IEM Rio and the Paris Major. That is why I am going to stick with Vitality for this one, the final is likely going to be Heroic vs Vitality, where I think Vitality should go all the way.

I also stopped calculating my losses, because it didn't give me any real benefits and only made me fell depressed. In the past I used to have an excel spread sheet where I put down all the money that I won and lost in gambling, but over the months it got to a lot of money and when I looked at the sums I felt really bad about it. For some people it might be interesting to see how much money they spend in gambling, for me not so much anymore. One point of summarising all our gambling endeavours is that it can be misleading. There are a lot of swings when it comes to randomness based games and this will inflate our loss numbers. Let's say you first won 1,000 USD in gambling only to lose it again 2 weeks later. Then your loss will show that 1,000 USD even though you never heard it in the first place without gambling. Only in poker I still keep recording how much money I play with each week to see how my swings are and if I am still profitable.

That is very like   with the high inflation rates we have right now, there is not really an end in sight for the price increases. Even if the inflation slows down to only 6-7%, its still going to be devastating effects for the average person a few years down the road.  It's important for us to invest our money and not leave it in savings an account at the bank. The bank is never going to pay enough money to fully compensate us for the inflation. One way to try and beat inflation is crypto currencies. With bitcoins the main idea is that the supply is limited, we have halvings every 4 years that reduces the new amount of bitcoins being mined in the next 4 years. That means that the long term price trend of bitcoin is upwards, as the miners will require higher prices in the future for their hardware and electricity costs. 

Running a bank has been a lucrative business in the past for its owners, but this doesn’t mean that all banks are a money printing business. Over the years there has been quite a lot of banks that went bankrupt. Even this year we saw big American banks struggle with the continues interest rate rises by the FED. The main business of the bank is to match customers demand and supply for money. Usually, you have one side depositors who leave their money long term with the bank and are looking for some interest on their savings account. Against that you have the borrowers, that require money short term for consumption, investments or mortgages. The bank charges higher interest on their loans than what they are paying on the savings to make a profit. But there is a maturity mismatch between deposits and loans which creates risks for the banks. Especially when there is a huge deposit outflow the bank will struggle to meet the capital requirements. Now with the new high interest rate environment it becomes very expensive if the bank needs to raise money itself to meet the outflows. I think that the banking business model only really works for the largest banks that have millions of customers, because the government would always step in to protect the customers and can’t let it go bankrupt, for smaller banks it’s much riskier to operate in high interest periods.

Short selling means to sell something today that you don't own, you need someone else to lend you the particular coin you are looking for. Then after some time you need to buy back the coin at the market to repay it to your lender. While it's theoretical possible to 10 or 100x  returns it's not very likely. For such kind of returns you need a coin to lose large sums of money, what is not going to happen. One issue is also to find someone to lend you his coins when the outlook is so pessimistic. Why would someone not outright sell his positions when there is a big risk for the price to drop? And instead lend it out to another investor for a small fee. Another issue is the big risk of short positions because there is no limit on the downside. In case of a coin to make a huge price jump the loss on the short position would be devastating. I prefer to focus on long positions and own the coins that I buy.

There are definitely some bad losers out there that are really hurt about their big loss and want go give something back to the casino. It doesn't necessarily have to be a gambling addict, it can just be someone who believes in revenge and wants to hurt the casino. Making claims that casino games are rigged come up on forums from time to time, but it's hard to really proof it. Only for someone to lose a few times in a row is no proof of rigged games. What could help would be that former casino employees step up and reveal how they were involved in rigging the systems, but so far I haven't heard about it. The big arguments against fake roulette systems is that the game by itself is already making money for the casino. With the 0 in the wheel the casino has a house edge as there is no more winning strategy.

I don't really see the variety of games as an indicator that a casino is honest or not. Just because the casino has a lot of games doesn't mean that all the games are fair. A large number of different games would it even make it easier to hide a few games among them where the winning chances are skewed in favour of the casino. All the traditional casinos I have been to had Roulette, Black Jack, Slots and Poker games as their main features. This is already a good variety of games in my opinion and I never really felt that the games where manipulated. Fewer games means that the casino needs less people working the games and also oversight becomes easier. In the end it comes down to what customers want to see, a bigger range or games or are most of us spending their time at the favourites like Black Jack and Roulette anyways. It's better to keep a close eye on the casino no matter their number of games and don't just trust them blindly, because they have such a large number of different games.  

Welcome to the forum, nice to see another poker casino opening it's doors. Looking through your website it seems that you work together with GGPoker, are you an official part of the company or just a partner that uses their platform. GGPoker is one of the leading online poker companies that offer a lot of different type of poker games. In case we are already GGPoker users, do we need to link our accounts to take advantage of any additional promotions from you? I just don't understand why you call it PokerWorld365 and not GGPoker. It's quite a popular name and you already have access to a huge player base.

That's really a sad story, but I can't understand why someone would end his life over gambling. The shame and financial insecurity that comes with losing large amounts of money is devastating, but suicide is not fixing any problems. It's the easy way out for the person itself, and everybody else is stuck with the problems. Like you said, suicide is only creating more problems not fixing them. I wish anybody who has thoughts about suicide would think more deeply about the situation. All the debt you accumulated and the money you lost for your friends and family is not coming back overnight, it's not solving any problems for the living. That's exactly why I would not consider suicide a real option, my family and their well being is more important to me than my own situation. I couldn't leave them alone with all the problems. There is always a chance to find a new job and repay the money we lost, life is more important than money.

Sorry to say this to you, but this was a hoax by a Swedish swinger club that wants to promote his business. A very well placed advertising where all the news picked it up quickly. The world is not ready to have sex as a sport. If this were true would we then have 18+ adult only Olympics? There would never be a mainstream TV channel showing the sport live on TV. It's funny as a meme, but I don't really see any way for this to work. How would you decide who is the championship? Would it objectively fair to mix couples randomly and determine a winner by jury?  I just can't imagine it. That's also why I would probably not bet any money on it.

I don't think the USA is considering to start a war to make sure that the Dollar remains the number one currency in the world. First of all USA is supporting Ukraine heavily with advanced weapons and doesn't have the stockpile for any major war. They would need to  build up their missile and javelin stockpile first. Secondly who should the USA attack to secure their power? There isn't one country that they can attack alone to increase the strength of the dollar. Let's say USA attacks China, then the international community would work together to impose sanctions on USA and that would hurt the dollar even more. The strength of currencies is not going to be determined by real wars, but rather by trade wars. For years China and USA have already tried to manipulate each other's currency, that trend will likely intensify.

I agree with you, forcing someone to do be interesting in a subject is rarely going to work. The only thing that is going to happen is that people will resent it and might even hate for the rest of their life. Trying to force kids to enjoy something always reminds me of my parents trying to make me eat spinach, which I hate to this day. There are other ways to make something interesting instead of using force. The best way to get someone interested in a subject is to make it funny and entertaining. The second best way is to use monetary rewards to spur interest. Let's say we play games with our kids and if they win we would give them money, but instead of using fiat money we could use crypto currencies. Once a certain amount of money is accumulated it should make our kids interest by itself. They would need to learn about wallets and how to transfer and use crypto coins to access the money.

It's true, we can't rely on gambling as a steady form of income. When it comes to casino games most of them are based on luck, not on skill. The randomness in these games doesn't make them suitable fora reliable and steady income. On top of that have the casino games a house edge, which makes sure that the gambler is going to lose in the long run. Owning a business on the other hand is also not going to be a reliable source of income. There can always be a crisis which ruins income and as the owner we would have to bear that losses. It also costs a lot of capital to buy or open your business. If you really only want steady income without much risk I would recommend you buy an apartment in the city center and rent it out. From the monthly rent income you can still gamble at the casinos and try to make an additional profit.

I don't think that knowledge of technical analysis is mandatory for every trader. It can help a lot if we know about it, as it helps with identifying trends and decision making. But if we have no experience with, there are still other ways to analyse the market. One way is to trade on gut feelings, which is not a good idea. I would advice against making investment decisions based on emotions. There are basically 3 ways for traders to make their decisions, based on technical analysis, guessing or fundamentals. Especially for more long term focused traders it can be helpful to use mostly fundamentals for their decisions. As a more short term orientated trader I would definitely recommend you start looking into technical analysis. There are plenty of good books out there for beginners that can teach you a few easy to use indicators.

It would be nice to see more countries start to adopt bitcoin as a legal tender in their countries. Only when international acceptance of bitcoin grows can we push towards a crypto currency as the number one reserve currency in the world. The main problem is that every country would like to see their currency as the leading currency in the world. Which is exactly why it will take forever to replace the US Dollar, there is no consensus to unite behind one single currency. Which might also be why bitcoin could be the only real alternative. If no country is willing to support other fiat currencies to replace the dollar, we would need to find a currency that is not controlled by one country. In a perfect world bitcoin would be the perfect to be the world's reserve currency.

I fully agree with you, there are so many different casinos out there that we shouldn't focus only one, especially if that one casino is not allowed in our country or doesn't want to operate here. Why take the big risk of losing our account if using a VPN becomes public? As long as there are alternatives available, I would try to stay within the ToS of the casino and be legal in my own country. Even if you only gamble with small amounts and don't really worry about the consequences, there is always the chance that we manage to get a big win. Imagine you finally beat a jackpot and are unable to withdraw your money because the casino found out you are using a VPN. We shouldn’t take on such big risk already at the start of our gambling careers. Using different wallets is a good idea to add another layer of security to our coins. I like to have one mobile wallet for my online purchases and one online wallet to move money around between casinos. And any larger winnings are stored on a more secure wallet. So far I didn’t have any issues while gambling online and didn’t see the need for a VPN. The casino can also change their ToS over the time creating more uncertainity, that is why in my opinion it's better to only use a VPN if it's really necessary.

The thing with online poker is that you don't really have time to think in depth about a given hand, because you are not only sitting at one table. Online poker can't be compared with the casual poker play we have friday nights with friends. When playing at a physical poker table we observe how the others play and there only limited hands per hour being played. As for online poker, there a lot of more hands played per hour and there is always a clock on us. When we play 2-6 tables at the same time we need to make our decision very quickly, that is also why there are fixed charts for almost any type of poker game, where you know exactly when to raise and when to fold. It helps a lot to follow a standardised strategy to increase our earnings per hour. Which is going to be the main advantage that ChatGPT is going to bring to the equation, the bot has no problems to run 10 or even 20 tables at the same time. Whereas humans can't keep such numbers up. Also humans are going to get tired eventually and ChatGPT can run 24/7. This could lead to a big problem if there are too many bots out there compared to human players.

It's sweet of you that you want to managed all the money for your dad. Not building a house right now seems like a good idea, in my country as well the building materials are so expensive that it's better to wait. We had 1.5 years of high inflation where every construction company increases prices by at least 30%, it could be the peak right now as prices are expected to slowly fall again. On top of that are we seeing a big increase in financing cost which is going to make any real estate deal more expensive down the road. Your fathers retirement allowance is a monthly payout or a big one time lump sum? If it's monthly payouts and he doesn't need all the money now, then it definitely makes sense to invest that money. Going into bitcoin is a good investment and if you manage everything for him that it shouldn't be any security concern. In case his retirement money is big one time payment that I would advice to split his money into smaller parts. Investing 50% into bitcoins also involves some risks and in case your dad needs the money short term it could be a problem. Being forced into selling at unfavourable prices can lead to big losses.

It is sad that there always some people profiting a lot when millions are suffering. Before the Russia Ukraine war last year, I thought that another big war in Europe would never happen again. The main issue we have is that the world is more divided than ever and every country tries to put themselves before everybody else. As long as we think in national identities instead of the world as a whole we will always have wars. When looking at the last 12 months I see that China, India and UAE seem like the big winner of the sanctions against Russia. Western countries stopping to buy from Russia forced the price down of many commodities considerably, and other countries are happily picking up the bargain now. Again as long as there are ways to get around sanctions and for the world not to speak as one voice, there will be people trying to take advantage of others.  With that being said, poor countries shouldn't be feeling be bad when they are doing the same thing that rich countries are doing. If everybody puts their own country first then the poorer countries need to do the same, there is no point in taking the moral high ground if your people are suffering for it.