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Nobody, of course, is hypnotized into gambling, and illegal gambling flourishes today because the customers are there. Once considered either the elegant pastime of the rich or the grubby escape of the poor, it is now virtually classless. Who plays which game? Dealers and other psychologists offer only rough generalizations: competitive types favor man-against-man games such as blackjack; intellectual types and women more passive pursuits such as roulette; craps, with its rattles, pitches and shouts of "Baby needs shoes!" attracts the assertive male. As for horseplayers, according to one sociologist, about 60% are lower- and middle-class men who bet long shots "to assert their ability to make individual decisions in a depersonalized society."
Most people who gamble do so only sporadically. But perhaps as many as 6,000,000 are compulsive. To help them, Gamblers Anonymous was founded ten years ago, modeled after A.A. In chapters in 80 cities, regular group-therapy sessions pile up endless case histories of gambling victims. One compulsive gambler tells of robbing his children's piggy bank and selling pints of his blood so he could have one more fling at the dice; another recalls how he absconded with the money for his father's funeral and blew it on the ponies. "You act just like a kid," explains Sidney L. of Washington. "You go along thinking when you hit it big you'll get the wife a mink coat, then a trip to Bermuda. Then when you do, how much of it does she see? Five dollars. You never get the car fixed or buy new tires. No odds in that. It's dead. It has no life."
A Meaning Machine
Addicted to their habit, the compulsives are caught in a wheel of misfortune whose payoffs are broken families, lost jobs and bankruptcy—or, often, embezzlement. G.A. is making only limited headway. The "cure," which requires total abstinence and regular attendance at G.A. meetings, works in about only one case out of 30.
The compulsive gambler is by definition an extreme case, but many of his motivations are shared in milder form by all gamblers. Anthropologist Charlotte Olmsted, who made a study of the subject in Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, believes that "many male gamblers use gambling as a substitute for sex. This is why you see so much of it in lumber camps or among soldiers. It helps avoid a certain amount of fighting as well as homosexuality." A lot of people clearly play for fun or excitement, and only secondarily for the just-maybe chance of winning some money. As that great prophet of potluck, Nick the Greek, once said: "The next-best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing. The main thing is the play." But the incentives are hard to separate. Behaviorist psychologists believe that what keeps people gambling is "intermittent reinforcement"—a regular expectation of winning. Says Harvard's B. F. Skinner: "I could arrange for a rat, pigeon or monkey to get hooked on gambling simply by providing a certain schedule of rewards or payoffs."