Quotes

“Luck:  Success or failure brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions.” “Randomness:  The quality or state of lacking a pattern.  Unpredictability.” “Chance:  The possibility or likelihood of something happening. The occurrence and development of events in the absence of any obvious design.” “Probability:  The likelihood of something happening.” Oxford Languages Dictionary

“In the long run, the coin will land heads about half the time.” Anonymous gambler. 

“In the long run, we are all dead,”  Economist John Maynard Keynes. 

“I hope I break even this week.  I need the money.”  – Veteran Las Vegas gambler

“To make money, buy some good stock, hold it until it goes up, and then sell it. If it doesn’t go up, don’t buy it.” – Will Rogers.

“Ever since that big craps game, I been livin’ on chicken and wine.  I’m a leader of society since I got mine.” – Ry Cooder. “Chicken Skin Music”

“Feeling as though I were delirious with fever, I moved the whole pile of money to the red – and suddenly came to my senses!  For the only time in the course of the whole evening, fear laid its icy finger on me and my arms and legs began to shake. With horror I saw and for an instant fully realized what it would mean to me to lose now!  My whole life depended on that stake!” … I elbowed my way into the thick of them and stood close to the croupier;…It appeared to me that pure calculation means fairly little and has none of the importance many gamblers attach to it.  They sit over bits of paper ruled into columns, note down the coups, count up, compute probabilities, do sums, finally put down their stakes and – lose exactly the same as we poor mortals playing without calculation.”  – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – “The Gambler.”

“Making a combination of bets with negative expected value is like the retailer who sells every item at a loss, hoping to make up for it in volume.” – Anonymous gambler.

“When degenerates lose a bet, they don’t double-up to get even. Who wants to be even? Degens triple-up.” – Michael “Roxy” Roxborough, former head Las Vegas oddsmaker.

“As one judge said to another, ‘Be just, and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary’” – William Burroughs, “Naked Lunch”

“You’ve Got to Ask Yourself One Question: ‘Do I Feel Lucky?’ Well, Do Ya, Punk?”  – Clint Eastwood as “Dirty Harry”

The Humpty Dumpty Principle:  “It’s much easier to break something than to put it back together again.” –  A version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

“A sports expert is the guy who writes the best alibis for being wrong.”  – Jimmy Cannon, legendary sports writer

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future” – Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize winning physicist.  Or maybe it was Yogi Berra. 

“Suckers have no business with money anyway.” – Canada Bill Jones, legendary three-card monte dealer.

“If you bet on a horse, that’s gambling. If you bet you can make three spades, that’s entertainment. If you bet cotton will go up three points, that’s business. See the difference?” – Blackie Sherrod, Dallas sportswriter.

A gambler was hopelessly hooked on football betting. Nothing else interested him. Unfortunately, he lost almost every bet he made. Finally, even his bookie felt sorry for him. “You lose all your bets,” said the bookie. “Why don’t you bet on hockey instead of football?” “Hockey?” said the gambler in dismay. “But I don’t know anything about hockey!”

“Well, you understand Unser Fritz is betting one hundred thousand dollars against a thousand dollars that Cara Mia will run in the money, and personally, I consider this wager a very sound business proposition. Indeed, and so does everybody else, for all it amounts to is finding a thousand dollars in the street. There is really nothing that can make Cara Mia run out of the money, the way I look at it, except what happens to her, and what happens is she steps in a hole fifty yards from the finish when she is on top by ten, and breezing, and down she goes all spread out, and of course the other three horses run on past her to the wire, and all this is quite a disaster to many members of the public, including Unser Fritz.” – Damon Runyon. “All Horse Players Die Broke.”