The clock strikes 5:00 AM, Eastern Standard Time, and I am sharply awoken by the default alarm tone on my iPhone cutting across the deafening silence. Normally I am not a morning person, but on this particular day, I have risen from my previous night’s slumber with a keen sense of purpose and direction in my life. The 2021 installment of the Wimbledon Championships are set for first serve in just about an hour’s time. And like a bull shark smelling fresh blood in the warm coastal waters of a pleasant beach, I too smell opportunity, ready to attack an unsuspecting victim with the blink of an eye.
To be completely honest with you all, I don’t really understand tennis as a sport. Sure, I understand the basics of the game to the point where I could hold a conversation over a few drinks at the local sports bar. But if someone asked me my “strategy” for handicapping tennis games, I would simply shrug my shoulders and tell them that my strategy has nothing to do with the actual knowledge of the sport. The same goes for any obscure competition I have wagered on in the past, from Finnish Basketball to Kazakhstani Hockey to Algerian soccer (football) and everything else in between. That is the beauty of sports betting (and risk in general) – there is enough ambiguity to allow for creativity. You can choose to be scientific, parsing through an infinite sea of statistics to create a model that beats even the sharpest of global betting markets. Or you can choose to be more artistic, using your savviness and instincts to identify opportunities that others overlook. But perhaps all of that is a discussion for a rainy day.
Because none of that matters in the present moment, and over the course of the next hour or so, there is no time to ask the big questions of life. There is only time to point, click, and type. A quick glance at the betting lines, then some elementary calculations on a spreadsheet, and back to the betting lines to place a wager. Perpetual computation, both mathematically and instinctually. No questioning, no second-guessing, no pondering if it is even worth it. I have a one-track mind like a starving apex predator on a solo mission to find food. It is move forward or die, and today I am trekking through the barren wintry landscape of the Antarctic Desert, desperately trying to return to the warmth of my camp before the looming blizzard wreaks havoc.
When running through the slate of games that day, my mind does wander, and occasionally I will reminisce on how it all started. In grade school, I was trading Yu-Gi-Oh cards and sports memorabilia. In my high school days, I was dabbling in various business ventures with my best friends, which included pay-per-click campaigns, monetized meme accounts, and a door-to-door snow shoveling racket. At some point after my 18th birthday, I made it a point to sign up for all the offshore betting websites that I could possibly find on the interweb. It didn’t take me long to find like-minded degenerates in college, and soon we were discussing our favorite college football plays that week and turning everything into a friendly wager, from FIFA to beer pong. I even stumbled into a dream class called Sports Analytics, where I finally put my seemingly useless math skills to good use. The game continued well into my postgrad life, and soon I found myself chasing the adrenaline in my cubicle as I rotted away at my first 9 to 5. I even became a bit of a microcelebrity on the sports betting section of Reddit, becoming known as the internet’s sharpest European Basketball tipster – a story for another day.
But it runs even deeper than that. My lifelong mission to seek fortune or failure have extended into all areas of my life. I have experimented with every workout routine, every supplement, and every sleep hack, unwilling to accept a random fitness guru’s recommendation until I have tried it myself. I have relentlessly pursued most women that have caught my eye, with the hope of parlaying a first date into a loving wife and worthy mating partner. There has never been a corporate job I have applied for that I felt was out of my reach, even if I lacked the necessary “qualifications” to perform the essential functions of the job for which you are applying with or without reasonable accommodation. In the same light, there has also never been a corporate job I was unwilling to walk away from to pursue a more fruitful venture, something I have done multiple times in my short career as an adult. And whenever a friend or colleague makes an audacious statement about some sporting event or otherwise, my first reaction is to pose the question: “would you be willing to bet on it?”.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that life was nothing but one giant gamble, with the opportunity for salvation or damnation lurking around every corner. Perhaps I was born this way. And perhaps you were too. There is no doubt in my mind that all of you reading this incoherent stream of thoughts have felt the same feelings I have felt in certain life scenarios. Maybe you have put your dignity on the line to cold approach a crush. Or you left a stable post to chase after a riskier, more lucrative venture. Maybe the enticing odor of your local casino has lured you in like a grizzled angler reeling in buckets of fish at his favorite spot. The specifics of what game of life you were partaking in are trivial.
Participating in something as rudimentary as sports betting has provided me with more personal education than any cheap self-help book or motivational speaker could do. Beyond the technical aspects, such as building a predictive model or calculating the vig, I have learned about myself as a human. My tendencies, emotions, cognitive biases, and intuition have all been put to the test when looking at that day’s slate of games, and deciding on which bets to take, and which ones to pass on. I have begun to think deeply about the complex systems that surround me. I’ve questioned past decisions, conversations, and reactions. And my outlook on life has never been more positive than now, after realizing what is possible when you embrace the choppy waters of risk and ride out the storm of existence.
The modern-day gambler sees every opportunity as one that will either result in riches or a lesson hard-learned, so long as he doesn’t send himself to an early grave in doing so. A gambler has come to terms with his own personal Hell; perhaps he has even experienced it. He knows exactly what his worst-case scenario is, and he is not afraid to walk through the inferno. Instead of shying from it, he invites it into the comfort of his own home with every wager, every prop bet, and every roll of the dice. He has been in dark places, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. A gambler understands his deepest and darkest impulses. He has been stripped naked in the streets, forced to undertake the walk of atonement, and the people have seen him disrobed, disheveled, and completely beaten into submission by his own shortcomings. And for this reason, a gambler does not fear loss, but rather the thought of not playing the game in the first place, when there is so much to play for, no matter what the circumstance. A gambler knows that almost all of life’s great challenges are a gamble, and even the lowest of risk games still involve an element of uncertainty. Instead of quivering in fear, the gambler charges ahead into the enemy lines with a full head of steam, like a war-hungry general leading his men into an ill-fated battle.
And while the money is important, as it serves as a useful measuring stick, the gambler does not become attached to the material possessions associated with success. He is more interested in the intangible benefits of risking it all – self-actualization, intentional suffering as a means to an end, and a deep love for the game that others simply cannot relate to. The gambler knows that the results will come, so long as he keeps putting up shots on target. Shots with positive expectation. He knows if he does that enough times, that in the long run he will achieve whatever stupid prize he is chasing. So long as the gambler continues the to play the game, his head will hit the pillow with a feeling of inner peace, knowing he did what he could, regardless of that day’s outcome.
We live in a Gambler’s Paradise. The opportunity to profit from the great mystery we call life has never been greater in the history of mankind. Everywhere you look, there is a chance to profit from exploiting an unfair advantage you (and only you) possess. It could be something as simple as jumping on a bad betting line in a lower-tier German football game. Or it could be as something grand as a political office. I don’t know what that unfair advantage is, and you might not know it either. But it is up to you to find out, and the only way to do that is by playing the game. You probably have heard the saying “fortune favors the bold”. That’s cute, but I would take it one step further. Fortune favors the one with nothing to lose.
Onward,
Tony
Great piece. I'll go one step further from what I've understood (or is it one step back - not sure). Fortune favours the one willing to bet on it.