Topic: Gambling is not only about winning and losing, but about psychological control - page 14. (Read 2025 times)

Personally I used to play slots every day until some brutal lost consecutive sessions hit me,it looked like I had the worse luck on the world and I decided to quit.Of course I could not quit immediately but little by little I was doing advances in the number of days without playing which were on the increase so I was doing well.It took a while for me now to say that I have full power and it is months that I did not gamble.My point is that psychological control is only achieved through huge patience and self determination,once you have achieved these things you can say that you control your gambling desire and not the gambling desire controls you.

You mentioned the psychological effects of winning and losing in one's mind but the effects of  these on your mind will cease to exist if you're playing to enjoy the game, the negative effects of winning and losing are present because you are forcing your way to win and looking at gambling platforms as a way to make money.

Casinos promote themselves as an entertainment portals with an opportunity to win, so treat it as such, enjoy the game and if you win cash it out enjoy your winning.
When you know the facts about gambling, that the house has an edge, and you stop trying to beat the casino, you can enjoy the game. When you're enjoying the game, you have a better chance to win.

The two moments you explained are two opposite thing but has thesame results. Because a situation when win will require a person to continue gambling untill he is left with nothing, and when lost a situation where you lose and decide to chase your loses will result to losing all. In al the situation it only ended in total lost. The solution to this problem is to learn emotional and self control to handle such situation when the habit arises. This has always been the problem of most gamblers which has been said repeatedly in this gambling board. Though it's easy to always say it, but I know that most people here are still addicted despite the advise which has been said on daily basis. But I believe for sure that those that would change will change and those that will not change will also stick to gambling addiction. But we should improve ourselves by reducing the rate of day to day gambling habit or reduce our stake per week.

These are the two main conditions of gamblers but I think there is also a time when you are a level of equilibrium. This is when you are in a state of not losing or winning that's is a moment you have recovered all your losses. At that state you are faced with the choice of continuing or leaving the casino. I accept the OP's position that these conditions can be easily handled when one have a gambling plan or budget. This gambling budget will help you know when to continue to walk away and it is the best way to avoid loss chasing.

Bettors should know that it is impossible to beat the house based on their calculations. You cannot decide how your game will play out so there is a need not to chase losses. If you are disappointed about the outcome of your games, take a break or focus on other things that entertain you. One way I forget about my losses easily is to watch comedies and some movies I cherish.

 There's always this adrenaline rush whenever you gamble, especially if you used a big amount to stake and it has a high chance of winning. And it is easy to exercise control when things are going well with your stake but you'd have to admit that it takes a lot of patience and control to not blow up or feel sad when a game which had much promise get spoilt along the way and you find that it was just a game left to collect your winnings.
 Gambling houses will tell you to do so responsibly but just like the warning given in cigarette packs about smokers being liable to die young, it is a hard to thing to maintain control and a balanced psyche when gambling.

We can do that, but sometimes we can just relax and enjoy the game without too much calculations... There are good moments for everything, we are not programmed robots to do the same thing over and over again.

And I wouldn't say that we are "limited to winning and losing", I can't say I understand this part. Winning and losing are part of our lives and in everything we do, in every game including gambling games. Nobody wins/loses all the time, there are ups and downs in everything we do. Being humble when we win, and staying proud when we lose is something we learn... it's how we become sportsmen & fair players. We play because we love the game.

Well written. It shows your level of experience with casinos. However, it is not always black or white in my estimation. Sometimes when I win, I withdrawal all of my winnings including the initial bet amount. And at other times I can decide to leave the winnings and still go on ahead to gamble with it while I spread the rest across the times I gamble. It is not greed but my own personal strategy. Which is if you like to call it my own personal psychological control. And it is easier to have this control when you have planned ahead already. on the spur gambling is what leads to lack of psychological control and greed, and disappointment.

What gamblers should first think of is what can cause this emotion thing to occur in a way that a gamblers will always be losing than winning and the net profit is negative which means loss. It all started from thinking of winning money from gambling but it goes beyond that. It get to the point of thinking gambling can be used as a source of earning income which is the main reason. Any gambler that think of gambling like this should be careful and not think like that again. A gambler also should have a weekly budget for gambler.

Gambling drains so much from us psychologically than we  might know, we're unconsciously putting so much mental efforts to gambling. It's like going into a mental challenge to defy all odds and win, you know that you're up against limited chances to win, yet you build the gut to go ahead. If you win, your ego that you have conquered will dare you to continue and you'll probably lose everything, making you to feel worse off. If you lose, you might feel challenged to recover your lose and in the process, you can lose even more or win. There is need for every gambler to be in control of their emotions while gambling so that it doesn't affect their psychological well-being.

Winning or losing is one of the triggers for someone to lose control of themselves and everything they do without realizing it.
It is difficult to control ourselves or control our emotions when we experience these two things because there are several other triggers that make it difficult for us to control our emotions when we lose or win.

For example, a gambler who bets because he has family problems and forces himself to bet but after that he loses and continues to make deposits to spend the money he has.

In this case there are other triggers as I said, so it will be difficult for a gambler to control his emotions because for me losing and winning are only the main triggers and usually there are always other triggers that push a gambler to lose control even more.

Is it really greed though? I think it's just human nature to want more. I agree sometimes greeted will make you want so much more to an extent you don't care how much you risk, but other times it just the insatiable feature of humans to want more so they keep gambling. That is why you'll find people who are not greedy losing money they won from gambling to gambling.
Something that happens to me something is when I win a bet, I'll start regretting why I didn't use a higher stake so I could have won more, but I quickly check myself and realise that I can stake high and lose it all. That feeling of wanting to stake higher is not greed per say, it's just human nature of wanting more.


Aside from wanting to take revenge, another thing that makes us want to keep gambling even when we're losing is the tiny voice in our head saying "this next one may be it". The voice is constantly in our head telling us to keep trying, you may get lucky on your next bet. If not checked, this goes on till you have nothing to gamble with. Then the regrets hits you. Two things can happen in that instant, either you walk away with regret for not listening to the other voice that told you to stop betting, or you take money elsewhere to game, it could also be a loan because they voice keeps telling you "you were so close last time, your luck might be in the next game". That's one way an addiction sets in.

As you said, we always have to keep our emotions in check. Be disciplined and know when to work away despite the voice telling you how much you could have won or how you should not give up.

so in essence, what you do after you've won or lost in your gambling makes the big difference. The psychological thing that plays out these different scenarios shows how matured you are in handling issues and for most people, it's always a direct and unconscious response that happens to them when they are in most of these situations. Most addict don't know how to manage thier emotions when they've lost or won and this is the reason why it's as though  it's the same thing that happens to them over and over again at Everytime time they loose in Thier gambling. Ones they've lost, unconsciously, it appears as though they have to fight back and try any means possible to ensure that they've won back thier lost money and when they win, the urge comes in again that tend to propel them to play even further with the assurance that if they continue playing, it's most likely that they are going to win in the gambling in the long run.

Inability to knowing these psychological events that happens during our win and loses will leave us not to know how to deal with it and it's certainly going to lead you to easily getting addicted to gambling or gamble in an irresponsible manner. If you don't set out a target you can't gamble above regardless of the urge to gamble more because the potential of winning seems much or make it compulsory that after winning to a certain hight you're always going to opt out, you're most likely going to become a victim of poor decision making due to your inability of managing your psychological pedigree the right way.

In my opinion the points from this thread is there is no big difference for psychological control between when you win from gamble and everytime you lost because people should have good self control to facing those situations and i think almost everybody know the method which OP mentioned and if we can used these method in gambling then it can avoid us to gets huge lost and addicted in gambling but i think we have already to discuss about these things before but just like people said that sometimes it's hard to being consistent to do this because sometimes we always being so curious when lost and want to recovered our loses and everytime we win sometimes too we forget this method and continue to gamble however i think did some the mistakes in our gambling activities would be fine because as a human cannot control our emotion when gambling is normal but for me as long as we can learn from those mistakes then it could became an valuable experience

 In my view psychological control at gambling depends on cultural regulatory  inherent in concrete person which in turn is harvested  from many factors such as parenting, education, mental training, you name it. Thus  gambler's psychological character   can not be changed before you can say knife. Who is fated to lose will lose...and vice versa.

Easy to say, difficult to do.

Controlling emotions when you know your money is on the line seems impossible. A gambler will try to calm himself but when all is gone, there's always the stress, frustration, and regret of what he had done.
This is why the "gambling what you can afford to lose" motto is very critical. That way we won't feel too devastated about what we are going to lose and we must also not expect too much from gambling. We are supposed to enjoy it but there's always anger that will come whenever a losing streak is happening.
For me, I always tell myself that I am ready to lose the money and sometimes that's when a miracle will happen and suddenly a multiwin comes out.

It’s normal to feel extreme emotions when gambling. Be it extreme stress or despair or extreme happiness, both can be equally dangerous. When you experience these extreme emotions you can make decisions that you might not normally would consider when you are not under such extreme circumstances.

It might be difficult but if you don’t want to end up with too much losses, you need to control your emotions

Winning and losing is a mental battle. When we win, our emotions are going cloud 9 and we can think of unimaginable things that seems to be positive for us. And if we're losing, that's the time when we're becoming pessimistic about things. So, OP is right that this is about psychological control and we tend to promise matters when we're happy and that's during the time when we're winning our bets. But when the time of losing has come, that's when we get bad mood, we think that the world is against us. As if we're going to lose our lives because of the bad outcome. That's how we make things for ourselves and we need to be perfectly set when those times comes. Well, they do come often because when we gamble we only have those two either of it as a result.

That is normal if someone becomes greedy when they wins because they see they have more chance to wins more money. But they must realizes that winning more money from gambling is not easy and they will have a big chance to lose that wins money. When you can manage the pressure to continue playing gambling, you will not gets tempt by chasing more winning because you knows that can leads you gets lose your money.

When you lose, you will not wants to spends more money to keeps playing gambling because you still have big chance to lose more money. That is why we must be wise treating gambling so we don't lose much money but we can still enjoy the gambling games. Maybe it is difficult and needs more practices to control yourself but that is worth to do.

Winning and losing will comes many times but in gambling, we will see the lose will comes too often than the winning. We must holds ourselves so we don't have to gets deeper in gambling. By controlling ourselves, we will not have to lose much money and we can have fun in gambling.

I think gambling always puts a person under stress. When I first started gambling I won a few bets, I was very happy with those bets and put some more money in there to bet. I got a bit greedy with gambling winnings and then became interested in gambling more. I plan to continue my game more because of the profit and lost just when I gambled with more money. Gradually lost all my deposits, and then I quit gambling and never played there again. That's why I think gambling is a tempting activity where winning attracts more gambling, and gradually it becomes stressful. If you can't quit gambling, you'll lose all your money at some point, so you'll be a loser until you can't stop.

Very well said. I do think that someone with unstable mental health would not be fit to be playing gamble. They might depend their mental state to the results of their gambling. Often times I see that those who gamble also have another addiction that they do alongside gambling.

For example if one loses in gambling they tend to go out and drink due to them being stressed. But if they win they will also drink for a celebration. Someone who doesn’t have any sense of control over their emotional and mental well being should not be gambling.