Gambling is the worst addiction you can have. I’ve not gambled a dollar in almost 3 years. I went from losing all my paycheck in an hour to gambling $0. I’m always very proud of myself for making that decision to stop and sticking to it.
no addiction is better or worse than another. Addiction itself is the name that all of the different types have in common. Ive been in recovery since 2008 and its been a steadily better 15 year road. Always be proud of yourself!
@@herculesbrofister265 oh and the likelyhood that that person you overheard talking about someone else who won...that person might not have even won and was just saying it to feel better.
My cousin worked like security guard in casino. One day olderly couple approach to him and ask him to throw young Man out. Why ? asked my cousin.He did nothing wrong. They said to him: We are his parents He gambled away 2 flats, money,car. Some people are beyond help
That's sad. In the US it is actually possible for some gambling addicts to ultimately be banned from a specific casino company or every casino in a state.
Yeah, if he kept up the pattern he learned from the one app he could've slowly made a profit from their pattern based system. However...I assume even then the people that created that app wouldn't be happy to know that one man keeps winning over and over and it's hurting their own profits, thus they would probably do something in return, be it shutting his device down from getting onto said app, or even just the simpler option of actually making a random system, rather then a pattern.
His flaw was using “reversion to the mean” theory with a random number generator. And there is no reason on heaven or earth to believe that there is reversion to the mean unless your time horizon is unbelievably long. You can only play that game if you have massive liquidity to get you through the inevitable. But then why would you ever engage in that kind of risk reward setup when there are less risky alternatives?
The funny thing is I actually have a friend like this. Plays the slots on her phone and gets exited when she wins £5. She spent £10 to win the £5 but she counts it as winnings as she technically won £5 playing the slots
He wasn't focused on making profit he was focused on figuring out the system. Profit was secondary. He was obsessed with trying to crack the code. It was worth it to him to lose money if it meant he was closer to figuring it out. He probably though of it as an investment and when he figured it out then he would win it all back. Kinda like billionaires spending ridiculous amounts of money on anti aging research and other ways to prolong life or prevent death. The potential payoff is worth blowing all that money trying to beat the inevitable.
@@shadesmarerik4112 if you play it responsibly it's just $2 for a chance to dream a few times a year. Sadly very few people do it that way. To me the saddest are the scratch ticket addicts.
That US lottery spending statistic is embarrassing. I've hated the lottery ever since my college days of working at two different gas stations. The way people can behave when their lottery tickets are at stake is insane. I had one well-respected school employee who had to be thrown out of our store one day after he lost his mind that he couldn't cut the line during the lunch rush because he "forgot to get a few of the numbers he wanted." There was one woman who came in almost daily and would spend at least $100 on scratch off tickets, usually closer to $200 on most days. She would hold up the line because she insisted on standing at the register to scratch them off, have them scanned to see if she'd "won" anything, then buy more if she happened to get $2 back. The mess she made with that nasty silver scratch off dust was ridiculous and of course she left it for us to clean up. The most disgusting part of her story though is that, after spending a few hundred dollars on worthless scratch off tickets, she'd waddle around the store picking up another $100 or so worth of chips, candy bars, pop, snack cakes, etc., then pay for them with food stamps. So she wasted her entire paycheck on scratch tickets and paid for her "food" with government assistance. Finally, I stopped at a gas station one day to fill up my car and the cashier asked if I'd "bought my Powerball ticket yet." I told her no, that I didn't play the lottery and that I disliked the entire concept. She had the audacity to act offended and say "Don't you know that the lottery funds our schools?!" Huh, you don't say? So do the taxes taken out of my paycheck every week. And it seems that if people actually cared about school funding, they could give money directly rather than feeding into a system that sells itself as some benevolent school charity and maker-of-dreams. I still get angry remembering that encounter.
I bet that if the food stamp lady had hit the jackpot, she would have spent her fortune poorly, gotten ruined and would have very quickly gone back to square 1 anyway.
I had similar experiences working at a liquor store. The hardcore lottery addicts were far more annoying than the alcoholics for the reason that as a cashier you were expected to participate in all their little rituals they thought would bring them a win. Some of their orders were insane and very difficult to ring up correctly. They'd rattle off something like "Give me five quick picks for today and run the numbers12 22 54 76 82 three times a day for five days and then give me one quick pick run five days" and if you screwed up they would berate you for throwing off their "system." Some of them were so difficult we had to call over an employee who had worked there long enough that she was the only person who understood how to handle their orders properly. The alcoholics who came to our store were generally ashamed of their addictions and would come up with excuses for buying so much if they talked to us at all, but the gambling addicts were braggarts who acted like they had figured out life by gambling every cent they had. The way they could turn from bravado to rage at a moment's notice made me feel on eggshells whenever anyone asked me to "ring up a few numbers." And you could never tell how bad an addict was just by looking at them, as you could usually guess with an alcoholic. Even little old ladies might fly off the handle at you if they felt you messed up their "luck." Such an insidious addiction.
@@flashypork OMFG you know! There was this one couple that drove me absolute insane. They each played their own numbers and categorically refused to use the Scantron tickets that would make my job easier and would allow them to get exactly what they wanted quickly and take their time making sure they didn't "forget" anything. So the man would come up, hold up the line for 5+ minutes with "Give me a Pick 3, Straight Box, 5 times with numbers 345. Pick 4, Box, 5 times with numbers 123." He'd usually end up with about 50 tickets, insisted on standing there slowly thumbing through each one, and then start rattling off even MORE. And the whole time, the line is growing and people are getting impatient. And then his wife would take her turn doing the exact same BS. AHHHHH. Still to this day, 15+ years later, every time I see someone with a lottery ticket at a gas station I become irrationally furious LOL. I can't help myself. I did, and still do, call them "Lottery Losers" in my head. It just never fails, it'll be 10 degrees and pouring freezing rain outside and I will get stuck behind someone picking out stupid scratch tickets or cashing in their whopping $1 winning tickets. I don't know if this is just local or a national thing, but they started allowing CARDS to be used to pay for lottery tickets! At least before, once you ran out of cash you were done. Now people can just charge up their credit cards, drain their debit cards, use cash advances on credit cards, etc., to fuel their never-ending losing streaks. It makes me sick.
do you mean the 53-month sentence? it kind of makes sense, i suppose. the guy already turned himself in and was clearly remorseful, plus the root of it all was an gambling addition, not just general greed. him taking money because he was convinced he would pay it all back when he won, isn't the same situation as someone taking money with no intention to pay it back and running away. i'm pretty sure previous cases of ponzi schemes where the intent was to take the money and run, the organisers went to jail for serious time. but this dude is unlikely to re-offend with proper treatment
@@zilesis1 He stole a shitload of money. People have gone to jail for way longer for way less. Hoping that this guy is remorseful and won't repeat sounds like wishful thinking, tbh. He didn't turn himself in because he regretted his actions. He turned himself in because he thought his life was in danger.
yup, turned himself in because he was at the end of the line and then regret hit him since he was left fucked and with nothing left. His brain tricked itself into justifying all the bad in any way possible (because of the benefits (specifically to my understanding constant the dopamine high)) until that just wasnt an option. -Sucks but i believe the brain "loves drugs" not in a literal sense tho drugs do the same to ur brain chemically. Atleast mine sure as hell does. Working on following the drug of personal happiness. It's not easy but wishing whoever reads this the best on your journey :), whatever it was don't hesitate and do it!
This guy is clearly mentally ill, that's why he isn't in jail for a long time. I work in the financial sector, financial crimes are no joke, but fact still is that financial crimes normally don't involve violence unlike regular crimes. There is a big moral difference between the willingness to fudge some numbers & to point a gun at someone for a couple bucks. Street thugs are much worse people which is why they go away for longer.
When I worked at a gas station I had a guy come in once to buy 160 individual daily 3 tickets and it took a solid 5 minutes to print all of them. So it had to have taken a good 30-45 minutes to print all of this guys tickets.
I work at a gas station and trust me I despise lottery players. It's usually older people, usually women, you can usually tell that they could not really afford to spend so much money on nonsense, and then I've got to spend like 15 to 30 minutes scanning dozens of cards to tell them that they won $3, and then of course they almost always disagree with me and say that the other cards were winners too. So I simply turn around slap the stack down in front of them and tell them to go scan them or redeem them somewhere else and I hand them their 3 measly dollars
The fact that he wasn't just trying to make predictions based on previous numbers (which could possibly make sense for numbers produced electronically) but even just random signs in his own local environment suggests that he did not merely have a severe gambling addiction, but likely also undiagnosed schizophrenia or some other form of cognitive disease.
I don't think so. The addiction IS the cognitive disease---massive emotional motivation can create intense biases that cause people to make irrational leaps in logic. Regular gamblers fallacies (e.g., the last five spins have landed on black, so we're "due" for a spin to land on red) also rely entirely on magical thinking, even if they seem superficially more reasonable.
@@arglebargle5531 Just look at the rest of the information outside of the lottery gambling. - Obsessed with patterns - Paranoia, fearing the feds were after him even though they weren't, yet - Manic ego, thinking his mere presence was putting his family in danger and trying to surrender himself to the police even though, again, nobody was after him at this point - Psychotic breakdown when he started acting erratically and going around in his boxers It is pretty clear that this guy has some underlying condition that was getting progressively worse. That doesn't mean he wasn't addicted to gambling, but it is pretty clear that he had issues outside of it too.
@@arglebargle5531 The gamblers fallacy is a case of people misunderstanding a statistical concept, it's an issue of lack of comprehension, not intrinsic irrationality. Attempting to gamble based on dates which were personally important to him or based on numbers seen on license plates he happened to come across is a level of total disregard for basic logic that it can only be concluded that he was either also addicted to a mind altering substance, or that he had a physiological cognitive problem on top of the psychological pathology of addiction.
True story from about 20 years ago. Before driving to work I would usually stop off at a gas station near my house and pick up some snacks and gatorade etc. I was standing in line behind a elderly woman who was buying lottery tickets and talking about how she had never won anything in all the years shes played. She then said, "I wait by the phone every Wednesday, but no one has ever called me." Something clicked in my brain and I turned to her and asked, "You wait by the phone? Have you ever brought your tickets in to be checked?" She said, "Why would I do that? They call you if you win." Both the clerk and I stared at each other, horrified as she wished us a good day and walked away. Neither one of us could find the will to tell her that she had been throwing her money away for years. Still makes me sad thinking about it.... I wish I had said something, but even if she believed me I would have just broke her heart.
Man, that's sad... I honestly don't know if I could tell her either. I mean it's the right thing to do but it could lead her down a crazy path of checking years upon years worth of lottery results...
You should've told her that they just changed the rules this week and you have to go online. I bet she couldn't use the internet though. I probably wouldn't have thought of that in the moment anyways
When you are dealing with electronics and certain machines that cannot generate random numbers, there is always a pattern but companies building these generally make the patterns so ridiculously long that it is nearly impossible to decipher. But ball-rolling machines??? Those are totally random.
The slot machines are actually not real randoms but pseudo randoms, because computing "real" randoms requires a lot of computational power and environmental variables, so every slot would require hardware worth simillar to a low mid range gaming PC (there is a reason why people are paid 30$ an hour to just throw dices and protocol dice results). They just use seeded randoms and here you have some crazy info: those slots also use bluetooth to transmit winnings, losses and an API for the owner to change the chance of winning (which in itself says everything about casino luck). But there was once a Nokia phone which was able to intercept that bluetooth traffic and you could reverse engineer the seed, meaning once you found out the current position in the seed, you always would know the next position. Those phones are by now super rare, but that attack vector is still open. I remember a guy in 2018 gaming the system by playing the same slot machine for thousands of times, noting every result, and reversing the pseudo random seed, making it possible to predict every future result (but I would not advise that in a big casino, albeit not illegal, you would have accidents with your kneecap in their back alley)
@@fatalityin1 interesting, i reckon you could try looking the bluetooth version as opposed to the whole nokia phone Nowadays you won't get capped cheatin in casino, they could simply kick you out and banned you. On repeat offense they can call the cops on you.
Me and my mom went to a casino in Southern Oklahoma years ago. We went to a nearby gas station first and when we got back to our car we noticed a car next to us that had a back seat full of losing scratch off tickets. The pile covered the entire back seat and reached up to about halfway up the seats. And there was a guy in the driving seat scratching tickets. Whenever he got a losing ticket he would just throw it behind him in the back seat and keep on scratching.
I've read that with gambling addiction, the addiction isn't even to winning- its to anticipating winning. The dopamine peaks while the roulette ball is still rolling, the horses are still racing, etc.. So whether the addict wins or loses, their brain still got what it was after: dopamine from anticipating pleasure. That's why it's so hard to quit.
Even if someone had recognized what he was doing right away, there's no way they'd have been able to convince him to stop. It's always the same with people gambling on random numbers. They always think they have a real system, but they're always just fooling themselves. The guy I knew who was the worst in that way, known as Chef Ra, would play Joker Poker in the bar I hung out at, once in a while winning a little, but always ending up with nothing. I felt sorry for him--his life just kept getting worse, until he finally died in 2006, in his sleep.
I applied to work at a casino, and while I didn't stay because of the constant smoke in the air, it was still sad to see the same people coming up to the money cage with their "winnings" just to show up an hour later asking if there's an ATM since they ran out of cash on hand. They'll do this all day, every day, and even though there's pamphlets and signs warning them of addiction and how to recognize it, clerks never bring it up and none of the customers believe they have a problem in the first place. I thought working retail and watching people spend their government handouts on candy and soda was bad, but seeing these people in that endless loop was just depressing.
If a casino worker said something directly to a customer about gambling addiction just after a big loss, he might start screaming and telling the supervisor that he is being harassed. I saw a lot of people say nasty things to the people at the money cage. Even after I'd lose, I never blamed the people at the cage. Whenever I turned in my chips they'd almost always say "good luck."
I have a deep fascination with scams and scammers so this channel has been a great find. It almost always seems inevitable, the scammer ultimately scams themselves as much as anyone. I like that much and with such conviction and eventually you start to believe your own bs.
@@themug406 such a narcissistic way of thinking (Not you) but yeah your 100%% right. Been addicted to this channel btw. Anything reading these comments Subscribe. This is good youtube content.
I have both the addiction gene and the gambling gene. I started on loot boxes, and realized my problem only years later, after I had quit overwatch due to associating it with near fatal illness. I was 10, legally gambling
its the fault of your crappy parents to first allow you to play a game that is not for 10 years and secondly allowing you to spend money there for lootboxes. why should others suffer because your family sucks
Candy crush is also gambling, the basic game just does not have cash involved, but the `win`, probability and addiction is right there, for everyone to get addicted.
Lmao "gambling gene" pure pseudoscience BS my friend, same with "alcoholism gene". It's an excuse and a boogeyman the medical community uses to push drugs and a "its not your fault" narrative. You were a young kid who found a way to soak your brain in dopamine, there wasn't some sinister gene taking control away from you.
I used to be friends with a silver spooned fella, only through business....he constantly badgered me about doing cash deals through his father's company, I continued to decline & eventually found another company to deal with my stock control, though the relationship was compromised after taking my business elsewhere we slowly became friends again...long story short, his father handed the business over to him & within 3yrs the company was sold for £6.5mil, he then spent every day apart from the days he was hungover at the Casino's, it left him totally broke, nothing.
"He was on Adderall for his ADHD", I think that may explain a few things considering the possibility that he was probably abusing it if others described him as "looking like he was on a cocaine fueled frenzy"
@P C Being very anxious would probably make him look like he was on a “Cocaine fueled frenzy” - From a person who is anxious a lot. Also, people with ADHD aren’t necessarily hyper. ADHD - I is where there is less an emphasis on hyperactivity than inattentiveness [ADHD - I literally stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, primarily Inattentive], and quite a few people with this type may experience no hyperactivity at all, which is also why it is much harder to diagnose than ADHD - H [Primarily Hyperactive] and ADHD - C [Combined type. AKA: Hyperactive and inattentive].
@@user-pl9pu8ys8s adderal has 0 “calming” effects that’s literally 100% you just telling yourself that. Addedal is literally a few chemicals away from meth. It’s an upper. That’s why college kids take addys so they can stay UP. also adhd dossnt exist
I grew up working behind the lottery machine in the Detroit area. The state-sponsored gambling and the cruelty it inflicts on poor people is endless. But I watched a lot of people with resources piss away their money. We had a sign on our machine that said "lottery, a tax on people who are bad at math." When we removed the lottery machine from our store, which was a rare thing to do and surprised a lot of people, it made our lives so much better.
What's unsettling with this and so many cases is that the gambling addict, when caught simply declares themselves bankrupt and the people who are out of pocket as a direct result of the lies and deceit normally suffers the same fate if not worse than the actual gambler.
This is why gambling addicts don’t get much sympathy. I’m a small time sports bettor who earns a little extra income from it and i can honestly say most degenerate gamblers were scumbags before their addiction. Everyone always says “oh they’re not addicted to money they’re addicted to winning” but yet every time they go broke they always go looking for other peoples money. First the banks. Then later they just start scamming normal people. Then when they finally hit rock bottom their first and only concern is to figure out how they can protect THEMSELVES and avoid any financial accountability. Meanwhile, the people they scammed get left out to dry. They’re really no better than the Casino. They’re just not as clever. I’ll always say that the only silver lining is that gambling truly does have a way of separating an undeserving rich man from his money.
If you ever managed to find a secret system to win over and over again I think they would stop paying on the third claim and open a massive investigation 😂
@@boat6float No, because they were making more off him than they were paying out, no reason to interrupt him. Kira didn't make that very clear until later in the video.
Funny how people believe that they can win the lottery. I thought about buying one ticket, just because how improbable it is, but thinking you can win is unreasonable
Yeah, with the lottery essentially you're paying a dollar to have a little shot of dopamine right as the winning numbers are being read and you're looking at your ticket
Yeah it's crazy to think though, it's unreasonable to think that you'll win the lottery because the chances are so low. But the chances of somebody winning the lottery have to be above 0, given enough time and redraws. Therefore, while it's unreasonable to think you'll win the lottery by buying a ticket, it's also unreasonable to think that it's impossible to win by buying a ticket.
We have MANY PEOPLE from the Balkans here in Australia. Not unusual AT ALL for them to get addicted to gambling. They very often seem to have a big ego which doesn't help.
I’ve met a big ego gambler before. They’re convinced that they can beat the system because they think they are so much smarter than the average Joe that gets duped by the system. They had that same holier-than-thou attitude in other aspects in life, so I’ll admit I found it greatly satisfying to see them get squashed and have to get humbled.
"You are a wealthy man now. And one must learn to be rich. To be poor, anyone can manage." A quote from Gus Fring from Breaking Bad which perfectly explains why I would never buy a lottery ticket. Unfortunately what most people fail to realize is that money is not the key to happiness, and is often the key to depression and arrogance. Statistically, most who play the lottery are not financial rockstars, and such a person suddenly gaining hundereds of millions is almost guarenteed to run out in a short matter of a few years at most. After that in many cases the winner is in worse physical and mental state than before he or she had won because money has replaced their desires that were once simple in life. In this sense winning the lottery is actually losing to gambling addiction.
This is why I'm against all sorts of luck-based "games" for real money, such as the lottery and roulette. It only preys on the addictive personalities. I'm not against poker or any other skill-based "gambling". Although there are risks of addiction with those games as well, they aren't purely chance so there is a chance of getting ahead of the curve.
Gambling preys on people's vulnerabilities and causes massive harm. Most of the money extracted comes from poor people who can ill afford to lose it. It's manipulation and addiction.
@@clownworld4655 where in the comment did it say anything about not holding people accountable. do you honestly think gambling isn't purposefully addictive and predatory. yeah we all have agency and free will but we can be manipulated and our weaknesses strategically preyed upon and any person or business who does that is evil. not only gambling businesses but any business that benefits from making their customers addicted to their product (like social media) does a lot of research on how to make their product as addictive as possible. social media apps are structured to keep you scrolling and checking your notifications and casino buildings are structured to keep people there longer, disorient them and their sense of time, and the games are designed to keep you playing. and it obviously works very well
I can relate, I spent years trying to develop a "winning system" running "what if" analysis but my tests never delivered consistent results; my average win ratio for a small prize against draws that would have been played was around 2 percent. Fortunately I spent only $50 to find out it wasn't profitable and stopped wasting my time on a delusional pastime. In this guy's case, he actually won big on more than one occasion, so it's not hard to imagine falling into the same trap of thinking you can keep consistently beating the odds.
I never win ANYTHING realated to chance except when I was 24 I won a few bucks on the slots. I just played and turned off my "worry system" that normally controls my every thought and I won. Now I cant even consider trying it again
I pity this man because he recongized the issue and even turned himself in to get help, but was turned away. I'm glad he lived from in that hotel room because his loss would of been a much bigger impact
Fascinating, and very sad. A couple of hundred years earlier Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who was a straight-up genius if not appreciated in her own time (she was the first computer programmer, about a century before there was a machine that could run her code), ruined herself bcause she was convinced she had a "system" for betting on the horses. Cleverness doesn't seem to immunise against gambling addiction.
I actually felt really sorry for him listening to this story. Addiction is so misunderstood especially when it’s one that doesn’t destroy you physically… at first.
I've tried to explain to my Dad that people who win either end up broke in a short time, or commit su***de because being responsible with the money usually causes friends and family to shun you as, they feel entitled to the money.
3:46 I remember from the 80s some guys actually partly 'beat the system'. Back in the day they had painted the numbers to lottery balls so that changed the weight of the ball for ever so slightly. They used computer to calculate the results for drawings what to bet next week. I don't remember how much they won. Not much, but more than just what you would consider just 'noise'. Of course when the balls wore and were changed they had to start over. And no, this was long time ago (80s is surprise surprise) so some details might be wrong.
Something similar happened with a roulette wheel. I believe it was MIT, but they realized that the wheel isn't truly random. If you had access to specific data and tests you could determine the outcome but the casino would be unlikely to let you get that level of access. However they later devised a method that was less accurate but didn't require access to the wheel.
@@killaken2000 The most famous roulette breaks were by Richard Jarecki in the 1960s and 1970s. He and his accomplices tracked large numbers of spins on roulette wheels in European casinos. He then analyzed the data looking for roulette wheels with statistical bias that he could use to win more than he lost. Jarecki claimed to be using computer calculations to predict the numbers. This story was a complete lie, but it was necessary to protect his opportunities. Eventually the casinos realized their roulette wheels were biased, so they began replacing roulette wheels on a frequent schedule and worked to develop improved versions less susceptible to bias.
@@CoastalSphinx interesting. I don't remember exactly who it was but maybe it was Thorp and Shannon (Shannon was at MIT then) or it could have been the Eudaemons from UC Santa Cruz. Supposed there was another group that published a paper in Chaos claiming that their method used chaos theory. It was a long time ago so I only remember the basic premise.
Never could I have imagined that someone would dig a hole so deep over a simple mathematical misunderstanding. Random is random. Well, nothing is really random, but merely unpredictable with the available tools and time at hand.
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. Meanwhile, the guy fell for this old trap: The "gambler's fallacy" is the belief that the probability of an event is lowered when that event has recently occurred, even though the probability of the event is objectively known to be independent from one trial to the next. This paper provides evidence on the time pattern of lottery participation to see whether actual behavior is consistent with this fallacy. Using data from the Maryland daily numbers game, we find a clear and consistent tendency for the amount of money bet on a particular number to fall sharply immediately after it is drawn, and then gradually to recover to its former level over the course of several months. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that lottery players are in fact subject to the gambler's fallacy.
@@petelee2477 I'm sure there are places in √2 where some four digit sequence is repeated immediately. There would be no periodicity either. Longer repeating sequences would be further apart on average. Obviously this is not a random number. If you start at some arbitrary location and spit out digits from there, it will look random.
I was wading through the comments to see if anyone would mention gambler's fallacy. Casinos and lotteries are built to exploit human psychology. In addition to gambler's fallacy, many also fall victim to confirmation bias (cherry picking data that supports an outcome they hope for instead weighing all data objectively as a whole) and sunk cost fallacy (where person refuses to abandon a course of action they've invested heavily in). All those factors dogpile on each other to make gambling addiction hard to break even when a person is aware of the mathematically low odds.
@@philw3039 I think the biggest trick casinos uses is the bright flashing lights and noise when a slot machine pays out. There are often enough slot machines in a group so that there are payouts happening within seconds of each other, at least at large casinos. Of course the payout rate is fine tuned and the house still wins.
The saddest part about this entire story is that he could have retired, put $20M into the S&P 500 and made around $2M per year for the rest of his life.
@@rickyrickman5458 okay put 2 million in then. That’s more than enough to retire big hoss. I thought he won another 28 million on top of his other wins I didn’t realize that was the total.
This goes to show really how unlikely it is to win the lottery. If a person can spend thousands and still barely win, it's not something to get entangled with.
You know, back in school I had a teacher that played 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 on the lottery back in the Dale Winton days. I mean - it’s got as equal chance. Can you imagine 😂
It's one of the stupidest things you can do. Sequential picks, famous number combinations etc means you will be sharing the jackpot with 100s of people. Imagine actually winning and then only receiving like $50K. Literally just use an RNG tool.
@@xaIlGG No, you don't just use a random number generator, you only pick numbers greater than 31 - nobody's birthday means you share less if you win with unpopular numbers.
This is why I only play the lotto with 1 lot when I have plenty of spare money. NEVER gamble more money that you're willing to lose. AND if you win the big one, shut up about it, so you don't suddenly get a lot of "new friends".
Having spent many years working in casinos, they are houses of misery. The same people come in for their 'shift' at their 'lucky' machine every day, some from open to closing. They fight each other over pennies, ask valets to bring their cars up so they can dig through the ash tray for change, take out lines of credit the casinos are more than happy to give. Many of them are elderly, often lonely and abandoned by family. They throw down their rent, mortgage payment, or social security income onto the table and lose it all. They come in miserable, and leave miserable. It is an awful, awful place.
It's very important to have a set standard of life. If you always dreamt of a specific life, don't try to imagine something bigger. If you already guaranteed your life expenses till death, why continue? The biggest mistake of all such people is to never know when to exit stage
I was a gambler. I was convinced I saw patterns. I had apps on my phone running analysis on horses, and lottery. I had a break down. It lost it all and then some. Lucky for me, I never fell into it as far as victor did. The state doesn't care. Gambling is the hidden tax that keeps the corrupt system going.
I used to work with an investor who was scammed twice for huge amounts. Despite me catching it early and showing him where the funds were, how it wasn't going into the business etc, greed took over and I was "wrong". It's no surprise this kind of scam happens over and over because everyone wants that great deal to be true.
As an old-man rambling aside; I play FF14, and I've noticed people calling in-game gambling "Gamba" now. Cutesifying something that really can lead to very damaging real addiction. I'm probably over-reacting, but it still sounds wrong to my old gnarled ears.
nah man you're reacting appropriately. that's probably embraced by a lot of the publishers of games that feature gambling, to make it more appealing (maybe even to kids?)
And this is why ALL forms of gambling should be illegal. It ruins lives and the world knows it but doesn't care. Hell, gambling's a MASSIVE problem in video games and is only getting worse as time goes, but people just keep letting companies get away with it.
It makes sense why so many lottery winners lose their winnings. People that play the lottery are usually financially irresponsible to begin with. You can be great at making money and great at business, but if you suck at managing your personal finance it doesn’t matter.
If I had a nickel for every time someone used the lottery to cover a financial crime, I would have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
My father won $10k playing slots at a casino and the machine he won on became his lucky machine. Over the next few years he dropped over $100k on that same lucky machine and probably won a total of another $10k.
I worked security at a casino a while back and we had little cards we were meant to give to people we seen too often or suspected of being addicted. One time while sitting at my podium a guy Ive seen often came through and stopped to chat with me. He talked about how deep in the hole he is in and he said "Right now im just trying to recover some of my loses" I tried to get him one of the cards and told him to cut his losses and go but he was just too deep. Was super sad to watch.
I heard that most big lottery winners after a few years end up in a worse financial state than they started with. They just burn all their winnings on unsustainable luxury and eventually the money run out.
How one handles a small sum of money, is how they'll handle a large sum of money/windfall. In the case of 98% of lottery winners, they have the added pressure of family/friends/random people with their hands out, or offering bad financial advice.
Found an error at 10:20 The property that was already owned appears to be the mansion purchased on the same date, not the medical plaza. The medical plaza was a "roughly 75,000-square-foot building" (as visible at 10:17 at the top of the screen) and was purchased for $3m if I read that right. The mansion in question was 16,500 square feet and was purchased the previous year for $215,000 (Visible at 10:25) Small thing in the scheme of the story, but have a comment. Interesting video as always
No, I think you're misunderstanding what's being stated. The original 3m purchase was of a bigbox store property. The $215,000 was for a 16,500sqft plaza building(strip mall style). This property was one that he already owned. So he was just using it as a way to deceptively get a loan, or out from under it. I'm guessing he then closed the deal to start construction on the mansion. You could possibly buy a 16,500sqft strip mall for 200k(probably not nowadays), but there's definitely no way you'd ever touch a similar sized mansion for that price. He was behind in payment to the construction contactor for that amount alone.
@@FlipLoLz Think you might be right. The mansion is being mentioned as a side note, and what follows isn't quite obviously returning back to the original topic. As you mentioned though, I think only that sentence related to that mansion. It's poor structure, but the fault there would be with the article itself and not KiraTV. Cheers for the reply.
yep. imagine if I said "let's play a game. on average for every dollar you give me, I'll reward you with 97 cents back..!" most people would be saying how ridiculous that game is... but yet that's basically what gambling is.. over the long run even if you do win, you will lose. and averages always win in the long run
There’s a good story of a mathematician who won money from Hong Kong racing. You can find the story here on TH-cam. He won so much that he left a ticket unclaimed to prove a point
@@SpiritualDeclutter Indeed! I have seen that video. Great story! Makes me wonder how these scenes (horse-racing, poker) will deal with machine learning.
When I was really young, I studied Kabbalah and they have a number mysticism thing where each letter equals a number and certain numbers have certain meanings, etc. Basically, number mysticism. I would spend hours adding up numbers and looking at numbers. For instance, I still get a big thrill when I see the number 418, Even though I know that it's just a damn number. I think there's a part of the human brain that can get overpowered by this. Beautiful mind was a really good example of how it works. I've noticed that people with schizophrenia, people who study cabala, and compulsive gamblers all basically do the same thing when they try to interpret numbers. And I'm glad I stopped studying Kabbalah. It really wasn't anything.
Playing Fallout: New Vegas was my first experience with gambling I played 3 rounds of blackjack before deciding the entire thing was dumb. Wasted 500 caps on that bullshit, too
The state should have the morality to ban those with addictions from playing the lottery. Singapore has casinos but you must show an ID to get in not because they are checking your age but because those with known gambling addictions are not allowed to enter. The is based on a law in that city-state.
> playing the lottery now and then or once a week for fun or just because it's nbd - totally reasonable and if you're in the UK for example you're helping charities and good causes > thinking you can 'game' it - legitimately a sign of a mental illness / addiction
A person can be intelligent, clearly understand probability and statistics, and still become a gambling addict. It hits people who are highly competitive, and people who are filling a void in their life. Like alcohol and drug addiction, it's very arbitrary, and just as devastating.
greed, like anything in excess it will lead to ruin, greed just happens to be one of the most common ones and is also literally whats driving us into the ground rn
Gambling is the worst addiction you can have. I’ve not gambled a dollar in almost 3 years. I went from losing all my paycheck in an hour to gambling $0. I’m always very proud of myself for making that decision to stop and sticking to it.
@@user-lg6zm5bz7l uh i really dont think so, just go to the gym if you eat too much what
You should be proud! It's incredible how deep it's hooks can be in you. From one internet stranger to another, I'm proud of you. :)
@@user-lg6zm5bz7ldude shut up, this isn’t a pissing contest. Get over yourself
no addiction is better or worse than another. Addiction itself is the name that all of the different types have in common. Ive been in recovery since 2008 and its been a steadily better 15 year road. Always be proud of yourself!
Well done man smashed it! That's why is not allowed in Islam, pure evil.
The worst thing about gambling is that sometimes you win.
Or even someone else. I'll be prepaying my gas and be behind someone buying scratch offs, "i know this guy that won $500"
Intermittent reinforcement is a hell of a drug.
@@herculesbrofister265 oh and the likelyhood that that person you overheard talking about someone else who won...that person might not have even won and was just saying it to feel better.
I cant even cross a dark street at 3 AM without a car showing up a EXACTLY the wrong time and almost hitting me. This is why I never gamble
I found out that the part that actually hooks a gambling addict isn’t the Win. It’s the loss. When they lose that is what makes them enjoy it.
My cousin worked like security guard in casino. One day olderly couple approach to him and ask him to throw young Man out. Why ? asked my cousin.He did nothing wrong. They said to him: We are his parents He gambled away 2 flats, money,car. Some people are beyond help
Madness🤯😱 thank you for sharing
That's cool
That's sad. In the US it is actually possible for some gambling addicts to ultimately be banned from a specific casino company or every casino in a state.
@@bobbyrayofthefamilysmith24 too bad you aren't
Viktor: "Where did I go wrong"
Me: "The moment you decided you somehow had the power to spend $1000 to win $500 and still call that a profit"
Yeah, if he kept up the pattern he learned from the one app he could've slowly made a profit from their pattern based system. However...I assume even then the people that created that app wouldn't be happy to know that one man keeps winning over and over and it's hurting their own profits, thus they would probably do something in return, be it shutting his device down from getting onto said app, or even just the simpler option of actually making a random system, rather then a pattern.
@@astralguardian5930 Yeah, assuming that he was actually on to something, they could have easily screwed him over by switching to a different RNG.
His flaw was using “reversion to the mean” theory with a random number generator. And there is no reason on heaven or earth to believe that there is reversion to the mean unless your time horizon is unbelievably long. You can only play that game if you have massive liquidity to get you through the inevitable. But then why would you ever engage in that kind of risk reward setup when there are less risky alternatives?
The funny thing is I actually have a friend like this. Plays the slots on her phone and gets exited when she wins £5. She spent £10 to win the £5 but she counts it as winnings as she technically won £5 playing the slots
He wasn't focused on making profit he was focused on figuring out the system. Profit was secondary. He was obsessed with trying to crack the code. It was worth it to him to lose money if it meant he was closer to figuring it out. He probably though of it as an investment and when he figured it out then he would win it all back. Kinda like billionaires spending ridiculous amounts of money on anti aging research and other ways to prolong life or prevent death. The potential payoff is worth blowing all that money trying to beat the inevitable.
The equivalent of playing every horse in a race and jumping around in victory when you have a winner.
lottery is an extra tax for people too dumb for math
@@shadesmarerik4112 if you play it responsibly it's just $2 for a chance to dream a few times a year. Sadly very few people do it that way. To me the saddest are the scratch ticket addicts.
@@dougray30 u dont need 2$ to dream. But whatever floats ur boat...
@@shadesmarerik4112 you do for that dream. Not for most.
@@dougray30 Get a donut at the gas station. The high will last longer.
That US lottery spending statistic is embarrassing.
I've hated the lottery ever since my college days of working at two different gas stations. The way people can behave when their lottery tickets are at stake is insane. I had one well-respected school employee who had to be thrown out of our store one day after he lost his mind that he couldn't cut the line during the lunch rush because he "forgot to get a few of the numbers he wanted."
There was one woman who came in almost daily and would spend at least $100 on scratch off tickets, usually closer to $200 on most days. She would hold up the line because she insisted on standing at the register to scratch them off, have them scanned to see if she'd "won" anything, then buy more if she happened to get $2 back. The mess she made with that nasty silver scratch off dust was ridiculous and of course she left it for us to clean up. The most disgusting part of her story though is that, after spending a few hundred dollars on worthless scratch off tickets, she'd waddle around the store picking up another $100 or so worth of chips, candy bars, pop, snack cakes, etc., then pay for them with food stamps. So she wasted her entire paycheck on scratch tickets and paid for her "food" with government assistance.
Finally, I stopped at a gas station one day to fill up my car and the cashier asked if I'd "bought my Powerball ticket yet." I told her no, that I didn't play the lottery and that I disliked the entire concept. She had the audacity to act offended and say "Don't you know that the lottery funds our schools?!" Huh, you don't say? So do the taxes taken out of my paycheck every week. And it seems that if people actually cared about school funding, they could give money directly rather than feeding into a system that sells itself as some benevolent school charity and maker-of-dreams. I still get angry remembering that encounter.
I bet that if the food stamp lady had hit the jackpot, she would have spent her fortune poorly, gotten ruined and would have very quickly gone back to square 1 anyway.
I had similar experiences working at a liquor store. The hardcore lottery addicts were far more annoying than the alcoholics for the reason that as a cashier you were expected to participate in all their little rituals they thought would bring them a win. Some of their orders were insane and very difficult to ring up correctly. They'd rattle off something like "Give me five quick picks for today and run the numbers12 22 54 76 82 three times a day for five days and then give me one quick pick run five days" and if you screwed up they would berate you for throwing off their "system." Some of them were so difficult we had to call over an employee who had worked there long enough that she was the only person who understood how to handle their orders properly. The alcoholics who came to our store were generally ashamed of their addictions and would come up with excuses for buying so much if they talked to us at all, but the gambling addicts were braggarts who acted like they had figured out life by gambling every cent they had. The way they could turn from bravado to rage at a moment's notice made me feel on eggshells whenever anyone asked me to "ring up a few numbers." And you could never tell how bad an addict was just by looking at them, as you could usually guess with an alcoholic. Even little old ladies might fly off the handle at you if they felt you messed up their "luck." Such an insidious addiction.
@@flashypork OMFG you know! There was this one couple that drove me absolute insane. They each played their own numbers and categorically refused to use the Scantron tickets that would make my job easier and would allow them to get exactly what they wanted quickly and take their time making sure they didn't "forget" anything.
So the man would come up, hold up the line for 5+ minutes with "Give me a Pick 3, Straight Box, 5 times with numbers 345. Pick 4, Box, 5 times with numbers 123." He'd usually end up with about 50 tickets, insisted on standing there slowly thumbing through each one, and then start rattling off even MORE. And the whole time, the line is growing and people are getting impatient. And then his wife would take her turn doing the exact same BS. AHHHHH.
Still to this day, 15+ years later, every time I see someone with a lottery ticket at a gas station I become irrationally furious LOL. I can't help myself. I did, and still do, call them "Lottery Losers" in my head. It just never fails, it'll be 10 degrees and pouring freezing rain outside and I will get stuck behind someone picking out stupid scratch tickets or cashing in their whopping $1 winning tickets. I don't know if this is just local or a national thing, but they started allowing CARDS to be used to pay for lottery tickets! At least before, once you ran out of cash you were done. Now people can just charge up their credit cards, drain their debit cards, use cash advances on credit cards, etc., to fuel their never-ending losing streaks. It makes me sick.
I wish there was a blood test for addiction. Addiction is so sad. Robs people off everything.
School funding is a joke. The worst schools in the country are also the most well-funded.
The house always wins. This is tragic, but it's also kind of surprising to see how mild the consequences of financial crime are.
do you mean the 53-month sentence? it kind of makes sense, i suppose. the guy already turned himself in and was clearly remorseful, plus the root of it all was an gambling addition, not just general greed. him taking money because he was convinced he would pay it all back when he won, isn't the same situation as someone taking money with no intention to pay it back and running away.
i'm pretty sure previous cases of ponzi schemes where the intent was to take the money and run, the organisers went to jail for serious time. but this dude is unlikely to re-offend with proper treatment
@@zilesis1 He stole a shitload of money. People have gone to jail for way longer for way less. Hoping that this guy is remorseful and won't repeat sounds like wishful thinking, tbh.
He didn't turn himself in because he regretted his actions. He turned himself in because he thought his life was in danger.
yup, turned himself in because he was at the end of the line and then regret hit him since he was left fucked and with nothing left. His brain tricked itself into justifying all the bad in any way possible (because of the benefits (specifically to my understanding constant the dopamine high)) until that just wasnt an option.
-Sucks but i believe the brain "loves drugs" not in a literal sense tho drugs do the same to ur brain chemically.
Atleast mine sure as hell does. Working on following the drug of personal happiness.
It's not easy but wishing whoever reads this the best on your journey :), whatever it was don't hesitate and do it!
This guy is clearly mentally ill, that's why he isn't in jail for a long time.
I work in the financial sector, financial crimes are no joke, but fact still is that financial crimes normally don't involve violence unlike regular crimes. There is a big moral difference between the willingness to fudge some numbers & to point a gun at someone for a couple bucks. Street thugs are much worse people which is why they go away for longer.
It's only a crime if you get caught.
Imagine being behind this dude in line when he is buying lottery tickets lol.
Yup and all you want is 20 on pump 5
Yeah; You run into a store to buy a coke or a pack of cigarettes and there's a guy buying 1000 lottery tickets in front of you in line. Brutal.
When I worked at a gas station I had a guy come in once to buy 160 individual daily 3 tickets and it took a solid 5 minutes to print all of them.
So it had to have taken a good 30-45 minutes to print all of this guys tickets.
Id tell the cashier "20$ on pump 5", leave it on the counter then leave
I work at a gas station and trust me I despise lottery players. It's usually older people, usually women, you can usually tell that they could not really afford to spend so much money on nonsense, and then I've got to spend like 15 to 30 minutes scanning dozens of cards to tell them that they won $3, and then of course they almost always disagree with me and say that the other cards were winners too. So I simply turn around slap the stack down in front of them and tell them to go scan them or redeem them somewhere else and I hand them their 3 measly dollars
He won more than one major jackpot that would have set most people up for life…he snatched defeat from the hands of victory.
Would set you, me or most other people up for life. But a 10mil win doesn't mean the same of you spent 15mil on entry tickets lol
The fact that he wasn't just trying to make predictions based on previous numbers (which could possibly make sense for numbers produced electronically) but even just random signs in his own local environment suggests that he did not merely have a severe gambling addiction, but likely also undiagnosed schizophrenia or some other form of cognitive disease.
Based
Yea I can nearly guarantee he has schizophrenia. That’s a huge symptom
I don't think so. The addiction IS the cognitive disease---massive emotional motivation can create intense biases that cause people to make irrational leaps in logic. Regular gamblers fallacies (e.g., the last five spins have landed on black, so we're "due" for a spin to land on red) also rely entirely on magical thinking, even if they seem superficially more reasonable.
@@arglebargle5531 Just look at the rest of the information outside of the lottery gambling.
- Obsessed with patterns
- Paranoia, fearing the feds were after him even though they weren't, yet
- Manic ego, thinking his mere presence was putting his family in danger and trying to surrender himself to the police even though, again, nobody was after him at this point
- Psychotic breakdown when he started acting erratically and going around in his boxers
It is pretty clear that this guy has some underlying condition that was getting progressively worse.
That doesn't mean he wasn't addicted to gambling, but it is pretty clear that he had issues outside of it too.
@@arglebargle5531 The gamblers fallacy is a case of people misunderstanding a statistical concept, it's an issue of lack of comprehension, not intrinsic irrationality. Attempting to gamble based on dates which were personally important to him or based on numbers seen on license plates he happened to come across is a level of total disregard for basic logic that it can only be concluded that he was either also addicted to a mind altering substance, or that he had a physiological cognitive problem on top of the psychological pathology of addiction.
True story from about 20 years ago. Before driving to work I would usually stop off at a gas station near my house and pick up some snacks and gatorade etc. I was standing in line behind a elderly woman who was buying lottery tickets and talking about how she had never won anything in all the years shes played. She then said, "I wait by the phone every Wednesday, but no one has ever called me." Something clicked in my brain and I turned to her and asked, "You wait by the phone? Have you ever brought your tickets in to be checked?" She said, "Why would I do that? They call you if you win." Both the clerk and I stared at each other, horrified as she wished us a good day and walked away. Neither one of us could find the will to tell her that she had been throwing her money away for years. Still makes me sad thinking about it.... I wish I had said something, but even if she believed me I would have just broke her heart.
Man, that's sad... I honestly don't know if I could tell her either. I mean it's the right thing to do but it could lead her down a crazy path of checking years upon years worth of lottery results...
thats sad af
You should've told her that they just changed the rules this week and you have to go online. I bet she couldn't use the internet though. I probably wouldn't have thought of that in the moment anyways
Man up and tell her. At least of she wins it from here on in she'd know about it. You made sure she'll never know now. Pathetic.
sounds like she wasn’t the smartest cookie in the box, that one
When you are dealing with electronics and certain machines that cannot generate random numbers, there is always a pattern but companies building these generally make the patterns so ridiculously long that it is nearly impossible to decipher. But ball-rolling machines??? Those are totally random.
Also a reason why Cloudflare uses cameras and lava lamps for encryption.
@@cirion66 I thought this was a joke, that's actually amazing
Can confirm, I once dated a ball rolling machine and she was freaking unpredictable.
The slot machines are actually not real randoms but pseudo randoms, because computing "real" randoms requires a lot of computational power and environmental variables, so every slot would require hardware worth simillar to a low mid range gaming PC (there is a reason why people are paid 30$ an hour to just throw dices and protocol dice results). They just use seeded randoms and here you have some crazy info: those slots also use bluetooth to transmit winnings, losses and an API for the owner to change the chance of winning (which in itself says everything about casino luck). But there was once a Nokia phone which was able to intercept that bluetooth traffic and you could reverse engineer the seed, meaning once you found out the current position in the seed, you always would know the next position. Those phones are by now super rare, but that attack vector is still open.
I remember a guy in 2018 gaming the system by playing the same slot machine for thousands of times, noting every result, and reversing the pseudo random seed, making it possible to predict every future result (but I would not advise that in a big casino, albeit not illegal, you would have accidents with your kneecap in their back alley)
@@fatalityin1 interesting, i reckon you could try looking the bluetooth version as opposed to the whole nokia phone
Nowadays you won't get capped cheatin in casino, they could simply kick you out and banned you. On repeat offense they can call the cops on you.
Me and my mom went to a casino in Southern Oklahoma years ago. We went to a nearby gas station first and when we got back to our car we noticed a car next to us that had a back seat full of losing scratch off tickets. The pile covered the entire back seat and reached up to about halfway up the seats. And there was a guy in the driving seat scratching tickets. Whenever he got a losing ticket he would just throw it behind him in the back seat and keep on scratching.
I honestly feel sad for him. He wasn't addicted to getting rich. He was addicted to winning.
F him
I've read that with gambling addiction, the addiction isn't even to winning- its to anticipating winning. The dopamine peaks while the roulette ball is still rolling, the horses are still racing, etc.. So whether the addict wins or loses, their brain still got what it was after: dopamine from anticipating pleasure. That's why it's so hard to quit.
@@rustydowd879 kinda like a cigarette smokers craving start to die as they are walking outside rather than actually smoking
if that was true he could have just played for lower stakes
Never start gambling. Not even stocks. It sucks ..
Even if someone had recognized what he was doing right away, there's no way they'd have been able to convince him to stop. It's always the same with people gambling on random numbers. They always think they have a real system, but they're always just fooling themselves. The guy I knew who was the worst in that way, known as Chef Ra, would play Joker Poker in the bar I hung out at, once in a while winning a little, but always ending up with nothing. I felt sorry for him--his life just kept getting worse, until he finally died in 2006, in his sleep.
Rest in peace, Chef Ra 🙏
tell that to all cryptobros who thinks they can predict the market
I applied to work at a casino, and while I didn't stay because of the constant smoke in the air, it was still sad to see the same people coming up to the money cage with their "winnings" just to show up an hour later asking if there's an ATM since they ran out of cash on hand. They'll do this all day, every day, and even though there's pamphlets and signs warning them of addiction and how to recognize it, clerks never bring it up and none of the customers believe they have a problem in the first place.
I thought working retail and watching people spend their government handouts on candy and soda was bad, but seeing these people in that endless loop was just depressing.
If a casino worker said something directly to a customer about gambling addiction just after a big loss, he might start screaming and telling the supervisor that he is being harassed. I saw a lot of people say nasty things to the people at the money cage. Even after I'd lose, I never blamed the people at the cage. Whenever I turned in my chips they'd almost always say "good luck."
I don't see what your problem with government money is. All your money was magicked into existence at the touch of a button too.
I have a deep fascination with scams and scammers so this channel has been a great find. It almost always seems inevitable, the scammer ultimately scams themselves as much as anyone. I like that much and with such conviction and eventually you start to believe your own bs.
It creates such a vast web where the moment one part comes down it all falls. It is super interesting to learn how they are built up though.
This comment made me more intrigued with his content, first video I've seen. You comment made me sub tho
Theres nothing funnier than scammers getting offended that their scam isnt working
@@themug406 such a narcissistic way of thinking (Not you) but yeah your 100%% right. Been addicted to this channel btw. Anything reading these comments
Subscribe. This is good youtube content.
Most scammers do not scam themselves, you just only hear stories about the ones that got caught
I have both the addiction gene and the gambling gene. I started on loot boxes, and realized my problem only years later, after I had quit overwatch due to associating it with near fatal illness. I was 10, legally gambling
its the fault of your crappy parents to first allow you to play a game that is not for 10 years and secondly allowing you to spend money there for lootboxes. why should others suffer because your family sucks
Candy crush is also gambling, the basic game just does not have cash involved, but the `win`, probability and addiction is right there, for everyone to get addicted.
Lmao "gambling gene" pure pseudoscience BS my friend, same with "alcoholism gene". It's an excuse and a boogeyman the medical community uses to push drugs and a "its not your fault" narrative.
You were a young kid who found a way to soak your brain in dopamine, there wasn't some sinister gene taking control away from you.
I used to be friends with a silver spooned fella, only through business....he constantly badgered me about doing cash deals through his father's company, I continued to decline & eventually found another company to deal with my stock control, though the relationship was compromised after taking my business elsewhere we slowly became friends again...long story short, his father handed the business over to him & within 3yrs the company was sold for £6.5mil, he then spent every day apart from the days he was hungover at the Casino's, it left him totally broke, nothing.
"He was on Adderall for his ADHD", I think that may explain a few things considering the possibility that he was probably abusing it if others described him as "looking like he was on a cocaine fueled frenzy"
Absolutely
You’re exactly right.
@P C Being very anxious would probably make him look like he was on a “Cocaine fueled frenzy” - From a person who is anxious a lot.
Also, people with ADHD aren’t necessarily hyper. ADHD - I is where there is less an emphasis on hyperactivity than inattentiveness [ADHD - I literally stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, primarily Inattentive], and quite a few people with this type may experience no hyperactivity at all, which is also why it is much harder to diagnose than ADHD - H [Primarily Hyperactive] and ADHD - C [Combined type. AKA: Hyperactive and inattentive].
@@user-pl9pu8ys8s adderal has 0 “calming” effects that’s literally 100% you just telling yourself that. Addedal is literally a few chemicals away from meth. It’s an upper. That’s why college kids take addys so they can stay UP. also adhd dossnt exist
@P C it can calm you down but not all ADHD means hyper. I'm very mellowed actually
I grew up working behind the lottery machine in the Detroit area. The state-sponsored gambling and the cruelty it inflicts on poor people is endless. But I watched a lot of people with resources piss away their money.
We had a sign on our machine that said "lottery, a tax on people who are bad at math." When we removed the lottery machine from our store, which was a rare thing to do and surprised a lot of people, it made our lives so much better.
As grandma used to say “Don’t worry about college , there is always the lottery”
Such an unwise woman.
LMAOOOO
What's unsettling with this and so many cases is that the gambling addict, when caught simply declares themselves bankrupt and the people who are out of pocket as a direct result of the lies and deceit normally suffers the same fate if not worse than the actual gambler.
This is why gambling addicts don’t get much sympathy. I’m a small time sports bettor who earns a little extra income from it and i can honestly say most degenerate gamblers were scumbags before their addiction. Everyone always says “oh they’re not addicted to money they’re addicted to winning” but yet every time they go broke they always go looking for other peoples money. First the banks. Then later they just start scamming normal people. Then when they finally hit rock bottom their first and only concern is to figure out how they can protect THEMSELVES and avoid any financial accountability. Meanwhile, the people they scammed get left out to dry. They’re really no better than the Casino. They’re just not as clever. I’ll always say that the only silver lining is that gambling truly does have a way of separating an undeserving rich man from his money.
If you ever managed to find a secret system to win over and over again I think they would stop paying on the third claim and open a massive investigation 😂
I'm pretty sure the lottery board starting their internal investigation to make sure there wasn't an employee who was somehow rigging the machine.
@@boat6float No, because they were making more off him than they were paying out, no reason to interrupt him. Kira didn't make that very clear until later in the video.
Funny how people believe that they can win the lottery. I thought about buying one ticket, just because how improbable it is, but thinking you can win is unreasonable
Yeah, with the lottery essentially you're paying a dollar to have a little shot of dopamine right as the winning numbers are being read and you're looking at your ticket
Yeah it's crazy to think though, it's unreasonable to think that you'll win the lottery because the chances are so low. But the chances of somebody winning the lottery have to be above 0, given enough time and redraws. Therefore, while it's unreasonable to think you'll win the lottery by buying a ticket, it's also unreasonable to think that it's impossible to win by buying a ticket.
We have MANY PEOPLE from the Balkans here in Australia. Not unusual AT ALL for them to get addicted to gambling. They very often seem to have a big ego which doesn't help.
I’ve met a big ego gambler before. They’re convinced that they can beat the system because they think they are so much smarter than the average Joe that gets duped by the system. They had that same holier-than-thou attitude in other aspects in life, so I’ll admit I found it greatly satisfying to see them get squashed and have to get humbled.
Smartest person from the balkans
Why mention Balkans? Most people here in Ireland love to gamble. Same in UK.
Maybe the Balkan culture is more superstitious, so they think they can get lucky…
"You are a wealthy man now. And one must learn to be rich. To be poor, anyone can manage." A quote from Gus Fring from Breaking Bad which perfectly explains why I would never buy a lottery ticket. Unfortunately what most people fail to realize is that money is not the key to happiness, and is often the key to depression and arrogance. Statistically, most who play the lottery are not financial rockstars, and such a person suddenly gaining hundereds of millions is almost guarenteed to run out in a short matter of a few years at most. After that in many cases the winner is in worse physical and mental state than before he or she had won because money has replaced their desires that were once simple in life. In this sense winning the lottery is actually losing to gambling addiction.
Maybe, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take! 👍💵
@@ryanblanchard2508 how many hours did it take to spend it?
imagine someone asking you what you do for a living and you ACTUALLY say to them " i win the lottery"
The fact the lottery and casinos exist tells me not to use them.
This is why I'm against all sorts of luck-based "games" for real money, such as the lottery and roulette. It only preys on the addictive personalities. I'm not against poker or any other skill-based "gambling". Although there are risks of addiction with those games as well, they aren't purely chance so there is a chance of getting ahead of the curve.
Or we could, you know, hold people accountable for their own actions.
Gambling preys on people's vulnerabilities and causes massive harm. Most of the money extracted comes from poor people who can ill afford to lose it.
It's manipulation and addiction.
“Suckers are born everyday and feared men grow on trees”
@@clownworld4655 where in the comment did it say anything about not holding people accountable. do you honestly think gambling isn't purposefully addictive and predatory. yeah we all have agency and free will but we can be manipulated and our weaknesses strategically preyed upon and any person or business who does that is evil. not only gambling businesses but any business that benefits from making their customers addicted to their product (like social media) does a lot of research on how to make their product as addictive as possible. social media apps are structured to keep you scrolling and checking your notifications and casino buildings are structured to keep people there longer, disorient them and their sense of time, and the games are designed to keep you playing. and it obviously works very well
The lottery is people willingly giving money to the government instead of it being taken by force.
You shouldn't be against that. Taxation is awful.
This is the form of true crime I’m obsessed with - Greed for money and power will always churn out these stories
I can relate, I spent years trying to develop a "winning system" running "what if" analysis but my tests never delivered consistent results; my average win ratio for a small prize against draws that would have been played was around 2 percent. Fortunately I spent only $50 to find out it wasn't profitable and stopped wasting my time on a delusional pastime. In this guy's case, he actually won big on more than one occasion, so it's not hard to imagine falling into the same trap of thinking you can keep consistently beating the odds.
I never win ANYTHING realated to chance except when I was 24 I won a few bucks on the slots. I just played and turned off my "worry system" that normally controls my every thought and I won.
Now I cant even consider trying it again
@@worsethanhitlerpt.2539 I stopped playing slots when they switched them from coins to bills. Greedy bastards.
So can I relate have spent so many hours and pounds in developing strategies... Key is mind control
Fascinating story. The descent into the number madness is scary stuff! Thank you!
And to think he was only 1 ticket away from breaking even
If you want to win the lottery, start one.
Exactly. Good point sir.
There's a reason the government regulates them! 😁
Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Haven't heard that in years.
You get numb to wins, you get numb to losses, you just want the next gamble
I pity this man because he recongized the issue and even turned himself in to get help, but was turned away. I'm glad he lived from in that hotel room because his loss would of been a much bigger impact
The infuriating thing is, the man was genuinely talented. He could have had it all without the gambling.
Fascinating, and very sad. A couple of hundred years earlier Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who was a straight-up genius if not appreciated in her own time (she was the first computer programmer, about a century before there was a machine that could run her code), ruined herself bcause she was convinced she had a "system" for betting on the horses. Cleverness doesn't seem to immunise against gambling addiction.
His talent was lying to people.
@@zh84 Very true.
@@Ironclad17 Among other things.
He had schizophrenia dude
I love those in depth reports you make mate. Keep them coming
I actually felt really sorry for him listening to this story. Addiction is so misunderstood especially when it’s one that doesn’t destroy you physically… at first.
I've tried to explain to my Dad that people who win either end up broke in a short time, or commit su***de because being responsible with the money usually causes friends and family to shun you as, they feel entitled to the money.
The Lottery is a Surprise Mechanic.
Also super trippy to watch this late at night and hear Kira say the name of my hometown. A2! Ann Arbor!
Damn, I don't know how the family can survive after that. Thats a lot of debt.
3:46 I remember from the 80s some guys actually partly 'beat the system'. Back in the day they had painted the numbers to lottery balls so that changed the weight of the ball for ever so slightly. They used computer to calculate the results for drawings what to bet next week. I don't remember how much they won. Not much, but more than just what you would consider just 'noise'. Of course when the balls wore and were changed they had to start over. And no, this was long time ago (80s is surprise surprise) so some details might be wrong.
Monk the TV show made a ep pretty similar, but the guy in the 80s probably didn't have to worry bout Monk haha
Something similar happened with a roulette wheel. I believe it was MIT, but they realized that the wheel isn't truly random. If you had access to specific data and tests you could determine the outcome but the casino would be unlikely to let you get that level of access. However they later devised a method that was less accurate but didn't require access to the wheel.
Brb gonna find a job at the lotto
@@killaken2000 The most famous roulette breaks were by Richard Jarecki in the 1960s and 1970s. He and his accomplices tracked large numbers of spins on roulette wheels in European casinos. He then analyzed the data looking for roulette wheels with statistical bias that he could use to win more than he lost.
Jarecki claimed to be using computer calculations to predict the numbers. This story was a complete lie, but it was necessary to protect his opportunities. Eventually the casinos realized their roulette wheels were biased, so they began replacing roulette wheels on a frequent schedule and worked to develop improved versions less susceptible to bias.
@@CoastalSphinx interesting. I don't remember exactly who it was but maybe it was Thorp and Shannon (Shannon was at MIT then) or it could have been the Eudaemons from UC Santa Cruz. Supposed there was another group that published a paper in Chaos claiming that their method used chaos theory. It was a long time ago so I only remember the basic premise.
'that's where most people quit, while they're ahead' Kira showing he outright doesn't understand gambling/gambling addiction at all lol
Yeah, that’s where people *should* quit; the problem is that they often don’t.
This was a pretty good doc. Thank you for doing it, and for displaying the documentary sources.
That's a really light prison sentence for defrauding that many people of so much money.
Boris Becker doesn't agree 😎
Never could I have imagined that someone would dig a hole so deep over a simple mathematical misunderstanding. Random is random. Well, nothing is really random, but merely unpredictable with the available tools and time at hand.
Glad to see you back. Great video as always Kira
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. Meanwhile, the guy fell for this old trap:
The "gambler's fallacy" is the belief that the probability of an event is lowered when that event has recently occurred, even though the probability of the event is objectively known to be independent from one trial to the next. This paper provides evidence on the time pattern of lottery participation to see whether actual behavior is consistent with this fallacy. Using data from the Maryland daily numbers game, we find a clear and consistent tendency for the amount of money bet on a particular number to fall sharply immediately after it is drawn, and then gradually to recover to its former level over the course of several months. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that lottery players are in fact subject to the gambler's fallacy.
To be fair for the pseudo randomness from computers this might actually be the case
@@petelee2477 I'm sure there are places in √2 where some four digit sequence is repeated immediately. There would be no periodicity either. Longer repeating sequences would be further apart on average. Obviously this is not a random number. If you start at some arbitrary location and spit out digits from there, it will look random.
I was wading through the comments to see if anyone would mention gambler's fallacy. Casinos and lotteries are built to exploit human psychology. In addition to gambler's fallacy, many also fall victim to confirmation bias (cherry picking data that supports an outcome they hope for instead weighing all data objectively as a whole) and sunk cost fallacy (where person refuses to abandon a course of action they've invested heavily in). All those factors dogpile on each other to make gambling addiction hard to break even when a person is aware of the mathematically low odds.
@@philw3039 I think the biggest trick casinos uses is the bright flashing lights and noise when a slot machine pays out. There are often enough slot machines in a group so that there are payouts happening within seconds of each other, at least at large casinos. Of course the payout rate is fine tuned and the house still wins.
The saddest part about this entire story is that he could have retired, put $20M into the S&P 500 and made around $2M per year for the rest of his life.
Amen. Some people just can’t quit while they’re ahead.
How are going to put $20m into investment, if you win $28m you are only walking away with $9m after taxes and cash out
@@rickyrickman5458 okay put 2 million in then. That’s more than enough to retire big hoss. I thought he won another 28 million on top of his other wins I didn’t realize that was the total.
If I won the lottery I would remain anonymous, not showing my name, face, nothing.
Some states don't allow this, unfortunately.
This goes to show really how unlikely it is to win the lottery. If a person can spend thousands and still barely win, it's not something to get entangled with.
You know, back in school I had a teacher that played 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 on the lottery back in the Dale Winton days. I mean - it’s got as equal chance. Can you imagine 😂
Why not? If I won with anything, I would want it to be that.
So many math teachers are going to be ecstatic about their $20 each when that combo finally comes up.
You bunch o lewsers.
Everyone knows the winning numbers are 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.
It's one of the stupidest things you can do. Sequential picks, famous number combinations etc means you will be sharing the jackpot with 100s of people. Imagine actually winning and then only receiving like $50K. Literally just use an RNG tool.
@@xaIlGG No, you don't just use a random number generator, you only pick numbers greater than 31 - nobody's birthday means you share less if you win with unpopular numbers.
This is why I only play the lotto with 1 lot when I have plenty of spare money.
NEVER gamble more money that you're willing to lose.
AND if you win the big one, shut up about it, so you don't suddenly get a lot of "new friends".
Wow! He had everything! I feel so sorry for his family.
who would spend 5 years in prison for 30 million dollars
Having spent many years working in casinos, they are houses of misery.
The same people come in for their 'shift' at their 'lucky' machine every day, some from open to closing.
They fight each other over pennies, ask valets to bring their cars up so they can dig through the ash tray for change, take out lines of credit the casinos are more than happy to give.
Many of them are elderly, often lonely and abandoned by family. They throw down their rent, mortgage payment, or social security income onto the table and lose it all.
They come in miserable, and leave miserable. It is an awful, awful place.
A new Kira video means It's gonna be a good night!
Overwhelming majority of people with addiction problems need to hit rock bottom before they’re finally willing to see reason.
It's very important to have a set standard of life. If you always dreamt of a specific life, don't try to imagine something bigger. If you already guaranteed your life expenses till death, why continue? The biggest mistake of all such people is to never know when to exit stage
I was a gambler. I was convinced I saw patterns. I had apps on my phone running analysis on horses, and lottery. I had a break down. It lost it all and then some. Lucky for me, I never fell into it as far as victor did. The state doesn't care. Gambling is the hidden tax that keeps the corrupt system going.
You past it all now?
He won 3 times? That's incredible in itself.
after buying millions of tickets, it was bound to happen
I bought one lottery ticket one time when I turned 21 and I still feel like an idiot for doing it. That was 20 years ago.
Relax
I used to work with an investor who was scammed twice for huge amounts. Despite me catching it early and showing him where the funds were, how it wasn't going into the business etc, greed took over and I was "wrong". It's no surprise this kind of scam happens over and over because everyone wants that great deal to be true.
As an old-man rambling aside; I play FF14, and I've noticed people calling in-game gambling "Gamba" now. Cutesifying something that really can lead to very damaging real addiction. I'm probably over-reacting, but it still sounds wrong to my old gnarled ears.
nah man you're reacting appropriately. that's probably embraced by a lot of the publishers of games that feature gambling, to make it more appealing (maybe even to kids?)
When I heard "Rob Peter to Pay Paul" in your clips. It makes me want to listen to "Peter Paul and Mary" haha.
Jeez, at some point he had over 30 mi in his bank account? That means it's time to retire! Why would you need to keep gambling? Such a greedy guy.
Almost like he might be addicted
He that longs for riches will never be satisfied with its abundance.
Lottery has no morality and no mercy.
My father was a gambling addict and I watched him gamble until he lost the only thing he had left, his family
Did he lose you in a bet like Homer lost Maggie on the Simpson's?
And this is why ALL forms of gambling should be illegal. It ruins lives and the world knows it but doesn't care. Hell, gambling's a MASSIVE problem in video games and is only getting worse as time goes, but people just keep letting companies get away with it.
It makes sense why so many lottery winners lose their winnings. People that play the lottery are usually financially irresponsible to begin with. You can be great at making money and great at business, but if you suck at managing your personal finance it doesn’t matter.
If I had a nickel for every time someone used the lottery to cover a financial crime, I would have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
My father won $10k playing slots at a casino and the machine he won on became his lucky machine. Over the next few years he dropped over $100k on that same lucky machine and probably won a total of another $10k.
A very well told story, I somehow feel sympathy for the man.
I read he had Adhd I have same illusion and same feeling
I worked security at a casino a while back and we had little cards we were meant to give to people we seen too often or suspected of being addicted. One time while sitting at my podium a guy Ive seen often came through and stopped to chat with me. He talked about how deep in the hole he is in and he said "Right now im just trying to recover some of my loses" I tried to get him one of the cards and told him to cut his losses and go but he was just too deep. Was super sad to watch.
I heard that most big lottery winners after a few years end up in a worse financial state than they started with.
They just burn all their winnings on unsustainable luxury and eventually the money run out.
How one handles a small sum of money, is how they'll handle a large sum of money/windfall.
In the case of 98% of lottery winners, they have the added pressure of family/friends/random people with their hands out, or offering bad financial advice.
Just read an excellent article at The Atlantic about this guy. Great video!
Found an error at 10:20
The property that was already owned appears to be the mansion purchased on the same date, not the medical plaza.
The medical plaza was a "roughly 75,000-square-foot building" (as visible at 10:17 at the top of the screen) and was purchased for $3m if I read that right.
The mansion in question was 16,500 square feet and was purchased the previous year for $215,000 (Visible at 10:25)
Small thing in the scheme of the story, but have a comment.
Interesting video as always
No, I think you're misunderstanding what's being stated. The original 3m purchase was of a bigbox store property.
The $215,000 was for a 16,500sqft plaza building(strip mall style). This property was one that he already owned. So he was just using it as a way to deceptively get a loan, or out from under it.
I'm guessing he then closed the deal to start construction on the mansion.
You could possibly buy a 16,500sqft strip mall for 200k(probably not nowadays), but there's definitely no way you'd ever touch a similar sized mansion for that price. He was behind in payment to the construction contactor for that amount alone.
@@FlipLoLz Think you might be right.
The mansion is being mentioned as a side note, and what follows isn't quite obviously returning back to the original topic.
As you mentioned though, I think only that sentence related to that mansion. It's poor structure, but the fault there would be with the article itself and not KiraTV.
Cheers for the reply.
I love this kind of content. This and the one on the guy who tried to take on Anonymous are my favorites!
He “continued to chase the Dragon”?
I didn’t realise he was smoking heroin
That's how the lottery beats you. You would have to spend more money to win than the actual payout. That's not by accident.
yep. imagine if I said "let's play a game. on average for every dollar you give me, I'll reward you with 97 cents back..!"
most people would be saying how ridiculous that game is... but yet that's basically what gambling is.. over the long run even if you do win, you will lose. and averages always win in the long run
15:00 The moral of the story, kids, is that you can make tens of millions of dollars by only spending 4 years in jail in the US of A.
Viktor! My grandfather was a real-estate agent and very esteemed in the Serbian community throughout Canada and the upper US, and he knew Viktor.
No one quits when they are ahead
I find these types of stories fascinating... an obviously brilliant mind taken over by irrationality. So sad.
There’s a good story of a mathematician who won money from Hong Kong racing. You can find the story here on TH-cam. He won so much that he left a ticket unclaimed to prove a point
@@SpiritualDeclutter Indeed! I have seen that video. Great story! Makes me wonder how these scenes (horse-racing, poker) will deal with machine learning.
Less than 5 years in prison is actually pretty lucky
When I was really young, I studied Kabbalah and they have a number mysticism thing where each letter equals a number and certain numbers have certain meanings, etc. Basically, number mysticism. I would spend hours adding up numbers and looking at numbers. For instance, I still get a big thrill when I see the number 418, Even though I know that it's just a damn number.
I think there's a part of the human brain that can get overpowered by this. Beautiful mind was a really good example of how it works. I've noticed that people with schizophrenia, people who study cabala, and compulsive gamblers all basically do the same thing when they try to interpret numbers.
And I'm glad I stopped studying Kabbalah. It really wasn't anything.
why number 418?
The Lottery is a tax on people with poor understanding of probability.
I will remember this vid and will rewatch every time after my FGO pull sessions. 😂
Playing Fallout: New Vegas was my first experience with gambling
I played 3 rounds of blackjack before deciding the entire thing was dumb. Wasted 500 caps on that bullshit, too
Going to a J Lo concert?... This man really didn't appreciate money
"I am in the process of fixing my behaviour" 🤣🤣🤣
Just need one big win.
The Lottery run by state or government should be a crime
I disagree. The government is a criminal organization. It suits them perfectly.
But everyone else would just cheat and rig the system but never our sacred government, never! 😜
The state should have the morality to ban those with addictions from playing the lottery. Singapore has casinos but you must show an ID to get in not because they are checking your age but because those with known gambling addictions are not allowed to enter. The is based on a law in that city-state.
> playing the lottery now and then or once a week for fun or just because it's nbd - totally reasonable and if you're in the UK for example you're helping charities and good causes
> thinking you can 'game' it - legitimately a sign of a mental illness / addiction
Help charities directly then if that's your excuse.
@@McVaio it's not an excuse and you entirely missed my point
A person can be intelligent, clearly understand probability and statistics, and still become a gambling addict. It hits people who are highly competitive, and people who are filling a void in their life. Like alcohol and drug addiction, it's very arbitrary, and just as devastating.
Not as arbitrary as you think if you understand it at the individual level
greed, like anything in excess it will lead to ruin, greed just happens to be one of the most common ones and is also literally whats driving us into the ground rn