You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.
All serious poker players try to minimize their tells, obviously. There are a couple ways to go about this. One is the robotic approch: where your face becomes a mask and your voice a monotone, at least while the hand is being played. . . . The other is the manic method, where you affect a whole bunch of tics, twitches, and expressions, and mix them up with a river of insane babble. The idea is to overwhelm your opponents with clues, so they can't sort out what's going on. This approach can be effective, but for normal people it's hard to pull off. (If you've spent part of your life in an institution, this method may come naturally.)
Some people will each start investing more of their salary on ‘their’ house and spending less of it on ‘their’ car or cars only when they start being able to take ‘their’ house to work, funerals, weddings, etc.
Performing magic in the live show thrills me. Just get me a deck of cards and some attentive audience, and I have made my day and theirs too
A magician may step out without a purse, but he should never step out without a pack of playing cards.
Conventional wisdom nor scientific, mathematical prove of randomness in life could do nothing to deter human's curiosity for the unknown, however small the chance of a positive outcome maybe.
The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.
You cannot afford to gamble your youth only for fun.
One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.
So much of the theatrical can leave you with a yearning for the real. The real is suddenly and starkly there right at the city’s edge and extends for thousands of square miles of desert and mountain and canyon with which human beings can do almost nothing profitable other than to leave it be and just look at it.
He was in conflict with himself. There was no enjoyment in the thought that he had escaped a great danger, and in the midst of his uneasy reflections he had a sudden breathless conviction that she made him feel old because he loved her. Then he felt a hatred of himself, gathering into one mighty heap all the fierce and bitter hatred he had cherished for others and pouring it out on himself.
He had a hint of a Southern drawl, as if he’d worked hard to hide it, but couldn’t quite rid himself of the last of it. It was rough and gravelly, and had the seductive warmth of sinking into strong arms in front of a cozy fire. To my surprise, a spark of that long-dead heat stirred in my belly. This wasn’t the sort of response a woman should have to finding a strange man in her barn.
Once an opportunist like Mickey, who took the argument when she jumped on some devastated wretch's machine and jackpotted that it was the "cash-ino's money" she was winning, Moon returned after her six month break with the view that the separation had somehow sweetened the honeypot. The sad reality, she quickly learned, was that she was not irreplaceable; as such, the Casino felt no compunction to welcome her back with multi-jackpots. Instead, it took her money everyday and did not once give her a jackpot so that she could say, "Ah. They missed me." Instead, all she could keep saying was, "Verr-y bed. Verr-y bed. Suck-ah all my money!
Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the tails in order to catch up! That's what is at the root of such ideas as "her luck has run out" and "He is due." That does not happen. For what it's worth, a good streak doesn't jinx you, and a bad one, unfortunately , does not mean better luck is in store.
The human mind has a tendency to observe unsystematic events and assign a pattern to the results. A habitual risk-taker reorganizes the stream of random events and retrospectively attributes the outcome of indiscriminate trials to their own gambling “strategies.” We often hear people say that they are lucky or unlucky, when in actuality they can claim no ownership in the occurrence of chaotic outcomes. A false sense of the existence of luck can cause people to discount the value of their actual effort, skill, and training.
Never bring a lot of money to where a poor man lives. He can only lose what little he has. On the other hand it is mathematically possible that he might win whatever you bring with you. What you must do, with money and the poor, is never let them get too close to one another.
When you are gambling, though you probably do not know it, your mind is on the tide, the ebb and flow of the Universe, and there is no way to fight it. Going with the flow is the only option, so there is no point in struggling against it, but, it will tell you how you sit with God, or the Universe, at that particular time in your life.