Curious to know what everyone’s “guilty pleasure” of life in Japan is. By this I mean either an activity that mainstream Japanese society makes fun of or looks down on, or one that this sub frequently trashes.
For me it’s pachinko. I don’t do it compulsively, and it has to be a smoke-free floor, but for the occasional evening when I want to drop 5k-10k yen and just switch off every part of my brain but the dopamine receptors, I quite enjoy it. It’s no match for casino table games, but within the realm of video gambling I actually far prefer it to western-style slots.
Others?

Hello everyone! I have only been on Reddit for a few months but I learned so much from it that I figured I should try and give back to the community. English is my second language and this is the first time I ever write a full-length article, I hope you will enjoy reading it and I would be very thankful if you could provide some feedback about my writing, about the topic, or about anything else really… So here goes!
Why you should learn poker and game theory:
My story is similar to that of many: I learned about the game 10 years ago (during the golden age of online poker) when some friends of mine invited me to play a home game. Although I initially thought of poker as just another game of chance akin to playing slots or roulette in a casino, I quickly came to realize that there is a lot more to it as my more experienced friends would repeatedly get the best of me during these home games, which led me to start watching videos and reading strategy books to improve my skill… Little did I know it’d be the start of a journey that would impact many different aspects of my life way beyond the game itself, as most of the fundamental principles learned through poker can be applied to your decision-making outside of the game, especially when it comes to money management and investing. Now, let’s dive into a few of these principles:
​
- Risk management (i.e. Bankroll management)
When learning about how to be successful playing poker, the first big piece of advice most people come across is bankroll management or BRM. To understand BRM, you must first realize that poker has a lot of variance: you might be vastly ahead in a given hand but there is almost always a slim chance that you will lose in the end if one specific card hits. This implies that you will sometimes lose even though you were a 99% favorite, and that you will sometimes get unlucky and lose 2, 5 or maybe even 20 such encounters in a row. THIS is variance. It doesn’t mean that you played bad or that you made bad decisions, but rather that you got unlucky. Over time you will have lucky streaks and unlucky streaks, and these will average out in the long term… It’s just the way the game goes.
Now that we understand variance, let’s get back to BRM. What is it exactly? Let’s say you are the best poker player in the world but you only have 1000$ that you can EVER use to play with. Taking your whole 1000$ on one table and multiplying your stack at an exponential rate might seem like a good idea. Surely nothing can go wrong since you’re the best player in the world right? But variance can be a bitch ;) Even if you’re the best you will lose regularly and you will sometimes get unlucky, it’s just part of the game. The correct move here is to apply BRM, which means only using a small % of your available capital for each game you play in order to reduce the risk of going broke. Using only 100$ per game would already be a lot safer, but you still run the risk of going under on a streak of bad luck. If you only allocate 10$ per game you play, then it becomes virtually impossible for you to ever go broke, even on a huge streak of bad luck. Sure it’s not as exciting and you won’t be making money quite as fast as you could, but this is the way to go to make sure you don’t go broke…
This approach to risk management translates very well to investing:
- Only invest what you can afford to lose. Once the money is on the table it’s as good as gone, which is why you should only use your “spare” cash and never invest with your living expenses or worse, borrow money to invest.
- Diversify your investments. There is always a chance, however slim it might be, that you will lose most of your investment. This is why going all-in on a specific investment is generally a bad idea (this applies particularly well in the crypto space).
Proper BRM allows you to make sure that you will come out ahead in the long run if you play well, which basically comes down to making more good decisions than bad ones. But that’s assuming you don’t let emotions come in the way of your decision-making, which brings us to our next point…
​
- Emotional management (i.e. Handling tilt/Positive mindset)
Nobody likes losing… In the same way we enjoy winning because of the dopamine rush, we feel bad when we lose which is totally natural. Overcoming this and avoiding tilt (irrational decisions made out of angefrustration) is an essential skill for any successful poker player. You might play a sound game of poker and apply good BRM, but you will still lose if you let your emotions get the best of you.
After a loss, rather than being angry and frustrated, you should evaluate your decision-making. If your decision-making was good, you just got unlucky and you shouldn’t worry about it since you are playing for the long run (remember that variance teaches us that anything can happen in the short-term). If your decision-making was bad, you need to learn from your mistakes and move on. The key here is to always have a positive mindset: making mistakes is part of the learning process and should be seen as an occasion to improve. Being angry and ranting, on the other hand, rarely result in anything positive.
Again, this translates very well to investing:
- Don’t be impulsive, don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment. You should not FOMO because the price is pumping, nor should you sell because of FUD or price corrections. If you believe in a project, short-term price changes (did I hear someone say “variance”?) shouldn’t bother you.
- Don’t get stuck up on losses. You bought the top and it crashed immediately after? You sold the bottom right before a huge rally? Don’t let this bother you: what’s done is done and you just need to move on and make the best of your current situation.
- Have a positive mindset. Anger and frustration lead to nothing. Yes you could have bought in 2009 when you first heard about it, hindsight is always 20/20. Stay positive and keep learning/improving yourself.
The good thing about all this is that it goes way beyond poker or investing. Being aware of your emotions and how they affect you, learning how to handle losing even when you were “supposed” to win, etc… All this can tremendously help you in all aspects of life by making you less impulsive and more rational in your decision-making. Now, this leaves us with our last fundamental principle of a sound poker strategy:
​
- Basic stats and probabilities (i.e. Expected value/Odds)
To become an accomplished player, you will inevitably have to learn about these simple mathematical tools that poker players use all the time in their decision-making process, such as odds and expected value. To make it very simple, the expected value (EV) of any bet is (REWARD \ WinRate - RISK), meaning that if you can bet 1000$ with a chance to win 10k$ half of the time, your EV is *(10000\0.5)-1000 = +4000$**. Obviously these are great odds to take as long as you have enough capital to overcome variance. But things would be very different if the odds of winning were only 5% as your EV would then be negative *(10000\0.05)-1000 = -500$.*** Now this is clearly a bet you should not take…
Now that you know probabilities, statistics and game theory are useful decision-making tools in poker, guess what? They are also extremely useful in investing! Even better, the study of game theory with problems such as the “Byzantine generals” or the “Three prisoners” has been, along with cryptography, the foundation on which blockchain technology was built, enabling the trustless and decentralized services that are about to revolutionize our world…
Assuming this was enough to pique your interest and make you want to dig deeper, I’ll just add that just like the other topics we discussed and as you might have guessed, this translates very well to investing and also to pretty much anything in your life:
- Learn how to break down complex situations. Logical thinking paired with a statistical approach will help you break down any complex problem into several easier problems, making the whole thing a lot easier to approach/comprehend.
- Base your decisions on a methodical and rational approach. List every possible outcome along with its associated upside/downside, estimate the probability of each outcome to occur and make the best decision based on the information available.
My point here is that risk management, emotional management and statistics/game theory are all awesome tools that you should definitely add to your arsenal. Not only will it improve your money-management and investing, it will also be beneficial to your decision-making and to your life in general. Of course poker is not the only way to learn about these, but I personally found it to be the best practice ground to refine and improve them, which is why I strongly encourage you all to try it out and study the game.
I hope you enjoyed the article, and I wish you all a happy 2021 bull run! May we all come closer to retirement and financial independence!
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TL;DR: more than a game, poker is a school of thought. It teaches you to be reasonable, to assess the risk of every single choice you make, to overcome you emotions, to play the long game rather than the short game, to make informed decisions, etc… This has made me a lot wiser in every aspect of my life, which is why I strongly encourage to try it out and read about poker strategy.

This writing was copied from my blog https://nope-its-lily.medium.com/. I write about the NOPE and other options and market things there and on my twitter https://twitter.com/nope_its_lily. Cheers!
Check out Part 1 first about my thoughts on the short squeeze thesis. To clarify — I do think shorts are being squeezed in Gamestop, although this is auxiliary to the main driver of the stock’s momentum (and not, in my opinion, the primary driver of Friday’s exponential rise).
So okay, let’s go to the obvious question — if hedge fund tears didn’t cause Gamestop to rocket, what did cause it?
Wew laddy, +71.25% at the peak.
Gamestop in many ways is an extraordinary story, and has all the properties of a successful meme stock (salience):

1. Personal name recognition/Nostalgia-For better or worse, we all know/remember Gamestop (primarily from childhood), which is similarly why Hertez performed so well in the afterlife while Mallinckrodt hasn’t.
2. A hero and a villain — Much like Tesla, Ryan Cohen represents the hero in the Gamestop narrative, where investors can paint whatever picture of the future they want and justify whatever price tag they pay. Similarly, Melvin and Citron (I mean, even the name Melvin) and the hedge fund industry are (perhaps well-deserved) villains in the arc, helping obfuscate feelings of greed or risk by presenting it as a righteous cause.
3. A cataly-ish — For obvious reasons Gamestop is benefiting from the console cycle, but perhaps to a lesser degree than before (its massive real world presence during a pandemic doesn’t help much).
4. Humor-What could be more funny than investing in a relic of the early 2000s? Except maybe investing billions into 3d renderings of hydrogen powered cars.

So it isn’t a surprise Gamestop captivated the attention of the internet; despite common belief, the legend of Gamestop extended far outside wallstreetbets (although the saga of DeepFuckingValue/RoaringKitty there helped bring substantial energy to the cause).
And how does the internet show some love?
Well, it buys calls.
For better or worse, most new investors have absolutely no concept outside of simple long call/put positions (probably for the best, from experience). In general, most new market positions view long options (and, let’s face it, mostly calls) as a highly leveraged bet on the underlying akin to a lotto ticket, which works beautifully for the following reasons:

1. Long options have asymmetric risk-reward, assuming risk-loving participants.

While in prior posts I’ve touched on the expected profit of options being zero, this is only true (it’s never actually true, due to seller’s, variance risk premium, and a host of other factors) under risk-neutral measure. In the real world, investors (especially on indices) tend to be risk-averse (weighting losses more heavily than chance of gain)… at least historically. The new class of retail investors, on the other hand, partly engendered by Robinhood’s extremely gamified UI tends to be risk-loving (“yolos”), favoring chance of gain over (higher) chance of loss.
For that type of an investor, options are akin to a casino due to convexity, or in layman’s terms, “the potential to go up a lot really fast” in value. This is of course true for stocks too (albeit less so, due to the implied leverage of options), but when an individual purchases a stock they have a rather large downside (the entire stock can become worthless). This isn’t the case for a call option, which only represents a portion of the total cost of the stock, but represents the entire upside.
2. Options have to be hedged… often in the underlying.
Before I get 1000 responses telling me this isn’t always true (especially on indices, where you have futures and all sorts of nice things) — it’s more or less true on a meme stock, which basically has no beta or correlation to any other stock (except perhaps other meme stocks). In general, one can anticipate that an option written by a market maker and sold to a retail investor (who owns a long position from that transaction) is hedged in the underlying stock, which obeys the same rules of buying and selling pressure. This is even more apparent in stocks with low float, which tend to move in price substantially with relatively low volume traded. You can imagine how few option contracts it similarly takes (given the implied leverage up to 100 shares worth of delta) to actually move the price (I’ve seen call options move the spot in real time, for instance, on Del Taco stock before earnings).
3. Option buying begets option buying.
What happens when a few individuals buy options on a stock? It moves up slightly (usually in proportion to how many options were bought, what time period they were bought in, and how large the underlying’s float is). This triggers the happy centers in peoples’ brains (yay, we’re making money) and triggers more buying of calls.
More interestingly, option convexity is largely due to the Greek gamma, which simply refers to the rate delta changes in response to changes in the underlying’s spot price. Delta more formally measures how much we expect the option price to change as the spot price changes, but more usefully for this example can represent how many shares equivalent the option contract controls at the given price. This is why delta represents the hedge ratio — if you, for instance, write a 100 delta (ITM) call option and sell it, you need to equivalently own 100 shares of that stock to neutralize your risk.
Delta is interesting (my favorite Greek) because it is heavily non-linear, and changes in response to:

1. Spot price (gamma)
2. Time to expiration of the option (charm)
3. Volatility of the underlying (vanna)

These are all second order derivatives, so you probably are lost by now if you didn’t take calculus at some point.
So why is gamma important here?
Source: quantik.org
Unlike controlling the equivalent delta’s worth of shares, the value of an option contract increases at a faster rate as it gets closer to in-the-money. This is (one of the reasons) why options have convexity — the value of an OTM call option contract goes up faster as it gets closer to ITM, with a potential for (5,10,100,200+)**-**baggers (multiples of how much you paid for the initial) if you play it right.
What’s even more interesting though than gamma alone, however, is pairing it with theta, the decay of an option’s value as the time-to-expiration draws closer. This tends to have a strong relationship to the implied volatility — theta represents the time value of the option (extrinsic), and implied volatility is largely the market consensus of the potential for the underlying to move in the time remaining on the option. However, as the days tick down, the time for that move to actually happen diminishes, and therefore the value of the option similarly goes down with it.
As IV increases, theta usually does (especially on short term options), and vice versa. (Helpful video by the tastytrade crew — https://www.tastytrade.com/shows/market-measures/episodes/theta-and-iv-05-17-2019)
So, given my tendency to ramble, the question is — why is this important? Let’s look at gamma and theta in the context of 0-day-to-expiration (0dte) options, and try to piece together what happened to Gamestop on January 22, 2021.

0 Days to Live

0dte options have long been a mainstay of the dopamine addicted day-trader community (including me, sometimes) given they represent the purest form of lottery ticket:

1. They expire at the end of the day — You don’t need to go to bed and worry about your position, because it’s either closed or worthless.
2. They’re cheap, generally-Theta in particular becomes exponential for 0dte options, and you can quickly buy positions on sale just to gamble as the end of the day grows closer.
3. They still represent implied leverage and have that tasty convexity-Like their more respectable brethren, 0dte options still represent the underlying and have all the neat Greeks (gamma, delta, vanna, pajamas, etc.) which make their payouts non-linear and fun.

In general, the optimal strategy to capitalize on 0dte long options is to buy as late as possible in the day, to allow theta to provide as much leverage to you as cheaply as possible.

Let’s Imagine a Scenario Here

Let’s imagine you have a high implied volatility stock that has been stable/slightly declining in price for multiple days. During that time period, theta is aggressively destroying the value of long options, while IV is similarly dropping (both due to theta and due to relative lack of movement). As we get to the final day (this is a weekly, for example), much of the option’s value has now disappeared.
This impacts both put and calls open, though. And let’s say a mean orange decided to start a war on your stock in the days before, causing a flood of short-term puts to hit the market during that week, which had minimal effect (largely due to continual call buying of longer-dated options coupled with actual shares buying pressure due to belief of a short squeeze/Ryan Cohen being the second coming of Christ).
What happens when those puts start to expire? As the days and then hours tick down, the hedges of those put positions (shorted shares) start to unwind, and buying pressure picks up.
Similarly, this buying pressure is noticed by market participants, who start to capitalize on the momentum by buying 0dte call options. These at first have minimal impact, largely because the inflow and outflow of call delta are roughly equivalent (somewhat of a bias towards inflow, pushing price up alongside share buying).
But towards the middle of the day, two interesting things happen:

1. Theta and charm become more and more prominent in both making new option positions cheaper and unwinding existing put and call positions.
2. Gamma starts to become more dominant due to the high implied leverage versus cost of 0dtes, leading to the virtuous cycle (option buying begets option buying).

These two effects tend to be complementary — as the hedges unwind (given the weekly puts from Citron/the short seller attack) for existing option positions, new 0dte positions can be bought and bought, each time pushing up the underlying as well as increasing the value and delta of other 0dte positions.
This can be neatly observed in the option volume versus open interest for the 1/22 series on GME:
This is fine.
Although more puts traded, the delta (for obvious reasons) of calls is much higher.
As the price of the stock goes higher and higher, this continues to attract more and more speculation, hoping to capitalize on the continued momentum. This continues in a loop:

1. The price of the underlying continues to increase as put hedges unwind, volatility spikes, and call options are bought (the initial delta hedge).
2. The increase in price leads to gamma of existing contracts increasing the delta of those contracts.
3. This leads to more shares being bought to hedge those increasingly higher delta positions.
4. This leads to more speculation and momentum.

An interesting property of $GME from Friday you can neatly observe is the highest strike in the series is $60, meaning that at Friday’s close, every single call option expiring 1/22 expired ITM. More interestingly is the relationship with gamma, again observable below:
Source: quantik.org
As a contract moves further and further ITM (at one point, GME hit $76 intraday), the gamma of the contract decreases as delta hits 100 on the position. This implies a cap on the momentum from the virtuous cycle described above — while continued call buying can of course drive up the price further, not only does the cost become prohibitive (given that a deep-ITM position is basically equivalent to buying 100 shares in payout), it becomes linear (and therefore boring). Once 100 delta is reached, there is no more cycle of increasing spot price causing increasing share buying, only normal share buying.
And that’s when it drops.
It’s hard to say whether the halt caused the drop (given the mental association halts have to pump and dumps for most investors). In this case the drop assuredly coincided with the halt, but more importantly, we can observe where the drop ended:
​
57.99 is such a pretty number.
In this case, we can observe the drop in price stabilized at $58, before rapidly jumping above $60. This is largely due to gamma and continued 0dte call buying buttressing the fall — as the positions fell farther OTM, shares used to hedge those positions are sold off, further driving the price down (in this scenario, the dealers are almost assuredly short gamma). However, similarly those positions-now closeOTM and close to expiry-become cheaper at a fairly exponential rate (due to theta and charm).
Speculators again gain conviction, pushing the price up above the highest strike (to the point where gamma provides no real extra push versus the clock ticking down).
This is what we call a gamma squeeze, and isn’t a terribly uncommon phenomenon. It largely follows similar patterns:

1. In general, gamma squeezes tend to happen closer to OPEX, due to both hedge unwinding (in the case of a previous put skew, for instance) and due to the 0dte effects mentioned.
2. In general, there is both a rapid rise (due to gamma looping and speculators joining) with a similarly steep cliff (especially if the available strikes is exhausted, like what happened to $GME).

Can it be continued forever, though?

In general, the answer unfortunately is yes.
Gamma squeezes in generally power meme stocks, and require a few elements to be true:

1. Continued supply of strikes and promise of convexity — Put gamma squeezes rarely happen because well, the maximum value of a put option occurs when the underlying hits 0. Calls, however, have an infinite potential payoff and strikes similarly can be added indefinitely. This allows continued creation of OTM options, which due to cheap premium and asymmetric risk-reward on longs power the gamma squeeze.
2. Continued momentum-In general, meme stocks follow the greater fool theory, despite promise of rocket emojis. When they drop, they drop hard.

​
Oopsies.
This is because, as previously mentioned, meme stocks are powered by long calls sold by market makers, who are chronically short gamma. Any selling begets more selling. Even periods of quiescence are dangerous, because without continued inflow of call delta, hedges unwind, and the selling pressure begins.

1. Continued attention-This is where salience shines. The major reason Tesla (the OG gamma squeeze) continued to rocket throughout 2020 was largely due to Elon Musk’s charisma and Tesla’s promise of a better world. It becomes a lot easier to stomach risk for an investor when following a strong personality with a killer story. This role was largely played in Gamestop’s saga by Ryan Cohen, and fed into (potentially unwittingly) by the battle with Citron and the mystique of DeepFuckingValue. It remains, however, to be seen if this will continue.

The moral of the story here is retail, for better or for worse, finally learned how to weaponize options. We’ll see what happens next.

This is gonna be a really long, rambling post about gacha, gambling, addiction, psychology and ethics. If you want the TL;DR, here it is: Joey and Garnt are at the very least irresponsible influencers, and at the very worst they might have a serious addiction that stems from a low dopamine life-style.
We all most likely watched the episode and know what happened and what was talked by who, but for further context, if you are unaware of anything, even after the memes, on the last episode of Trash Taste Podcast, specifically in the last 40 minutes of it, the Boys discussed (and argued) about the gacha game scene and gambling addiction. You can check it out on the sticky post on the top of the subreddit front page.
To cut it short, Connor argued that gacha games are just as if not more dangerous than actual gambling, specifically for a few reasons. First, it is a game of no return. In real life gambling, you can (fleetingly) get real money back from it, and even make a considerable profit. Gacha games simulate the act of gambling while offering no significant reward or value other than a measle amount of dopamine and a cute character to play with. Secondly, the game is marketed towards older kids, teenagers and young adults on an age range of 12-25 years old, an age group where most individuals are either not mature enough to manage their money safely or even financially independent at all, with most people in this range not even being active members of society yet. Furthermore, the gacha-gambling model is largely unregulated and unsupervised by authority figures, be it responsible adults, laws or any other regulating institution.
To this, Garnt (largely) and Joey (in a lesser but still significant way) responded that, while they agree no one should be able or willing to spend such large amounts in these games, they do not pose significant harm to most people, and even further, can present justifiable value enough to be acceptable in their current forms, with minor changes. At one point, Joey expressed the idea that if these games made it difficult for him to spend money, he would mostly just not play them at all rather than go free-to-play. Garnt attempted to defend the idea that spending on these games was not necessary and going the F2P route was not only possible, but easy. He himself, however, admitted to that not being the case with him.
This is the thick and short of it. Now let me get into the main argument this post is attempting to make.
Connor's position along the entire discussion was entirely and utterly reasonable, and not only that, but even after being soft-gaslighted into being less harsh on his stance, he still was the only one willing to take the problem seriously at all.
Garnt and Joey, kn the other hand, began the discussion with an ironic and memey tone, not taking it at all seriously. When Connor's stance didn't change and his points began hitting a little too close to home, that's when they got defensive of their point and tried to appeal to various fallacious arguments and unbelievable takes. Most notably, Garnt defended that "If you have a problem with gambling or if you have poor self-control, you just should not be playing Gacha Games", which beyond being obvious, is a bonkers thing to say. It would be akin to saying "if you feel depressed or suicidal often, you should just ask for help and not kill yourself" or "if you have a drug problem, maybe don't go buy drugs". It is a statement that hides behind it's obvious correctness to take away attention from the fact that this adds nothing of value at all to the discussion,nor does it make for a suitable defense of the system that gacha ganes operate in.
The first big problem with this entire thing is that the three of them, both in the podcast and with their individual channels, have a great influencing power. Having your opinion, no matter who you are, broadcast to over a few hundred thousand people world-wide is bound to influence or resonate with some of the audience. When the person in question is a respected figure, speaking to an audience of admirers or fans, most of which at a young age, and within a subject matter of interest to the audience, the influence rate will grow even bigger. In this midst, there is statistically no way at least a handful of people didn't watch this episode and felt like they had their actions justified. Add to this that the gacha community at large is either aware but indifferent to the similarities it has to gambling, or straight up defensive of the entire model, and you have a pretty dangerous mixture of things here.
The second issue I see and hope to convey on this matter is that both Garnt and Joey seem unaware of just how scummy and messed up the tactics behind gacha games are. It's not just rate manipulation and constant advertising. The entire development process is centered around creating the perfect space for you to spend copious amounts of money without feeling that you really spent them. It goes so much deeper than just making cute girls to sell you. From the game page on the app store you get it from to the main menu, to the game design, to the in-game systems, to the rates, to the promotions, to the update cycle, to the end game, to the daily challenges, EVERY LITTLE ASPECT of it is engineered to rewire your bain into believing that it's not that bad to spend, and having the desire to do so more often than you reasonably would.
This is a very important one, amd Connor briefly touched on it in his rant. Cassinos, actual gambling places, build and thought to make you spend and lose, are like a glass door compared to the five inch lead wall that is the gacha strategy. They show you the rates at all times. They offer you the option to set yourself a limit. They make you aware that you are spending money, they cap the age at a minimum of 21, they have a lot of systems in place to control bad spenders. Of course, most of those came from law and regulations, but even before that, back in the 18th amd 19th centuries, no normal adult would advocate or defend that 12 to 18 year olds should be able to gamble real money into pieces of paper or cardboard cutouts. So imagine thinking, for even a moment, that what gacha games do is even close to okay. It is not, by any measure, morally, ethically or lawfully, okay.
But it gets worse. Way worse. Here is where I began actually worrying about the boys, in particular Joey and Garnt, the latter most of all.
They seem to actually believe that the above exposed is somehow justifiable based on little doses of dopamine, memories and the abstract idea of "the experience" you get. They compare spending ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS on a game to get TWO DIMENSIONAL IMAGINARY GIRLS to a night out with friends where you spend a hundred dollars in food or drinks.
What the actual f*ck.
This is not just bad. It's really, really bad. It's unreasonably and unbelievably absurd. It nearly collapses the entire concept of reality from just how bad a take this is.
No. No, no, no. NO. In no way, in no conceivable theoretical way, one of those things is comparable to the other. Never. This is the type of thing that depressed people tell themselves to justify self destructive behavior. Spending copious amounts of disposable income into games just to get "a daily dose lf dopamine" going is insane. Just for reference, you can get dopamine for free by doing any of the following:
Exercising
Finishing a task-list
Cleaning your room
Working on a passion project
Playing any sport, specially with friends
Going for a walk with you pet
Having a conversation with a friend or significant other
Having a good meal
Waking up from a good nap
Watching a fun movie
Traveling
Hiking
Riding a bike
Radical sports
Reading a good book
Seeing a long-time relative or friend you missed for a long time
Getting a hug
Having sex
Sleeping cuddled with you SO
Holding hands
Kissing
Watching the sun set/rise
Going to the beach
Camping
Playing an actual good videogame that isn't f*cking Genshin or FGO
This is not an exhaustive list. It's literally just things I thought off the top of my head while writing this. Some of those activities require some money to do, and some are impossible during the pandemic. But most of them are free/cheap and easy to do at home or with little to no contact with anyone.
If getting a good pull in a lootbox virtual casino is the best way you can think of to get any dopamine release, or if that release is so significant to you as to justify spending more money than some people make in a week, then I'm sorry, but you have a serious problem. I mean it. I know the Boys can do most or all of those things listed up there and much more. I know for a fact they are not in a situation of loneliness, vulnerability or isolation, even in the current world situation. So why is it that Garnt thinks gambling is a good solution for boredom in the quarentine? Or why did Joey insinuate that making it harder for him to spend money would just make him drop the game?
And if these two, that as I said are in a very privileged spot of having easy access to healthy ways to produce dopamine and conquer isolation, are having this kind of relationship with these games, what's to say of people around the world, including many of their listeners/viewers, who either live alone and/or have no perspective of a successful career with easy access to basically limitless disposable income like they do? What's to say of the teenagers who spend all night up playing games, watching anime, jerking off and stealing their parents' credit card to buy pulls? What's to say of the depressed university students who have a shitload of debt thrown at them and live an isolated, virtual life right now? What about them?
Joey and Garnt might not have any problem controlling themselves, or have enough money to waste such that a thousand dollars into gachas doesn't feel unreasonable, no matter how actually unreasonable it is. But they are either ignorant of the actual problem, or (and I sure hope I'm completely off on this one) completely unemphatic to their struggles. Because "Just don't play" is not a thing someone with empathy for the gambling addicts would say. Connor was deadass on this one.
And that leads us to the final nail in this horrific, goldplated coffin. The memes.
Yes, the memes.
There are so many memes. Garnt mentioned that "no one memes on the guys going bankrupt" while doing just that for half an hour. The entire gacha culture is basically a serious sociological and psychological problem deep-rooted into the heart of the zoomer generation. And yet it wears a mask mad e of memes, that hides the actual problem under a nearly impenetrable layer of irony, self-pity and depressive jokes. But the subject is not that funny under the magnified lens of a closer look.
The easygoing demeanor with which gacha addicts and casual underaged gamblers treat the entire thing is so light on the mood, so soft on the eyes, that you may just forget that those people might be ruining their lives. It's not a joke. It should not be treated like one. The meme culture around gacha fames has created more gambling addicts among 15 and 16 year olds than any illegal casino would ever dream of. These young people are just laughing away ridiculous sums of money for a teenager to spend, and feeling none of it until it is too late to go back and give up.
I am not trying to guilty trip any of the Boyys here, nor am I accusing them of being apologetic of underage gambling. I'm just trying to put this entire thing under a serious light. Because it needs someone to do so. This post comes from a place of worry and love, not one of disrespect or accusations. I simply want the Boys to look at this in a responsible way.
I might be talking to the walls here. I might really be just shouting in the vacuum. But if I can try to make my voice be listened to, I will. Because I must. If you read all the way down to here, I have two more things to say.
One is: please, do not let the monetization model these games operate in get to you. If you've spent any amount of money on them and feel tempted to continue, I insist you don't. If you have only ever played them without spending, and are still having fun, you're free to do so, but tread carefully.
And the other is: gacha mechanics can ruin much more beyond your financial wisdom. They are actively harmful to the games industry as a whole. Instead of making good games out of passion, these developers are being led to create mediocre games out of greed from the higher ups. If gou care about gaming at all, or if you just give a shit about an industry many people love, I request that you understand why gacha games are a bad sign, and that you spread that awareness, if you can. This is a really important subject to me and I think ut should be to other gamers as well.
Thank you for reading. Have a great day. Save your money.
P.S.: Garnt, Joey and Connor. If you guys read this, I love you and what you do. I listen to this podcast almost religiously, and I really enjoy all of it. Please, take care of yourselves and have a great 2021. Peace. (This is a shot in the dark, the chances of them reading this are so low I feel almost stupid. But hey, I tried huh?)

I do not want to throw shit that the gaming industry as many people have already blamed the gaming industry for many things - violence, or mental disorders and whatever (which is ironic because many studies have stated that video games are actually useful and beneficial for one's mental health ... if used well of course)
With the monetisation design of many video games of nowadays like
- the 60 dollars price, plus the add-ons and the DLC,
- the microtransactions (especially in free games that force players to pay instead of wait for a certain action to end
- the demand and/or design to make money off of skin and cosmetic (which I think is really bad that certain players went for this type of market like in CS:GO which made players create a market for this)
- casino-style of getting rewards that may or may not force players to use their own real money to get the rewards that they want
- the potential targeting of children or younger players that may be tempted to pay more to get what they desire like children who play free games that are mostly designed to force players to pay more to gain that desired rewards like the currency system of most games, or the cosmetics
- updates and tweaks that may change the skill curve which provokes players to work hard to earn the desired rewards, whether it is loot or a victory and so on
- add-on and content that are meant to make players come back for more to keep them hooked for months or maybe even years.
... and probably a lot more
​
I get that these design elements are meant to make players want to be invested in these games and that is fine. I think you need to make ways to want players to want to play certain games over others, like the aesthetic, the feel, or any other type of flair that quenches the tastes of a player.
And many games have these mechanics that I mentioned, possibly as a means to make players hooked (and like every other object that is meant to be pleasing and give a dose of dopamine, they are meant to be rewarding and almost any rewarding object or action can lead to an addiction if not used well), and knowing the gaming addiction is quite real and very dangerous, it is a very worrisome thing that the reason why gaming addiction exists is that video games nowadays are even more intentionally designed than before to make players hooked at an unhealthy level.
It is as though games are intentionally designed like that of slot machines in a casino, the expectation of a reward, the demand for more, the temptation to pay more, and other clever psychological tricks that makes players hooked in a way that is insidiously harmful.
​
It would make a lot more sense that people would fight and protest more about the potentiality that video games are designed to condition players into addictions instead of protesting about other things that people claimed that video games are a part of violence

What I am about to say has, in it's basic form of "Tarkov is a bad game" been said many times. I normally wouldn't take the time to state something this obvious but I truly want to like this game which makes it considerably more frustrating as battlestate perpetually fails to do anything about the glaring issues it contains. I am also in the mood to watch fanboys scramble to defend the indefensible and spam "git gud" only further proving my point.
Tarkov is a game which in it's pretentious attempts to be "hardcore" seemingly forgets the rudimentary fact that it is a game. games are, on a fundamental level, supposed to be at least one of two( or three depending on how you look at it) things: fun, challenging (and/or competitive if competition isn't just challenge but pvp). To say that Tarkov is not fun is just beating a dead horse at this point. The game seems to go out of it's way to avoid being fun as the developers appear to have conflated "hardcore" and "not fun". While the rush of exfil-ing with "phat loot" might be perceived as fun by some this is much like saying that winning at a casino is fun. The difference with a casino game is that they are in general designed to have of the previously mentioned categories (fun, challenge, competition) whereas Tarkov fails to be any of the three. A casino game can manage to be fun, sometimes through it's design for some players, but always because what you are playing for is real money which has benefits in society and your life as a whole. This takes casino winnings beyond being just "chips on a table" whereas Tarkov has nothing outside of the perpetual, circular grind. At some point "phat loot" in and of itself is just pixels on a screen when there is no meaningful system that getting the loot is a part of. you get the loot, to sell it, to buy gear, to get the same loot, to buy the same gear onward into infinity with no end goal or grander system in sight.
Challenge (or it's pvp form, competition) is a tricky subject that it seems allot of people have a weak grasp of. For instance the question: "is something impossible challenging?" or "Is impossibility the peak of challenge?". It almost seems logical that something impossible would by it's very nature be extremely challenging but I would say no: once something becomes impossible it ceases to be challenging because challenge implies a correct set of actions that would lead to success and that this set of actions has some level of difficulty to complete. Here we enter the real problem with Tarkov, not being fun wouldn't be such a problem in and of itself if the game were truly challenging or competitive.
What Tarkov really is, when it comes down to it, is a gauntlet, largely comprised of bullshit. You enter a raid and then proceed to try and jump the various hurdles which are put in front of you in order to reach that juicy "phat loot" dopamine hit at the end (which as I have stated, is really just an illusion). There are a considerable number of hurdles in any given raid which would be fine if the game was a functional and correctly tuned system where crossing each of those hurdles is something in control of the player. What makes Tarkov a truly bad game is the number of hurdles which exist that the player has no real agency in jumping. These hurdles resolve to being a probability chance of being impossible. I will get to what these hurdles are in a moment but first another question about challenge:--let's say you have a boss in an old school game, except this boss' mechanics are that you simply run over a series of colored stripes on the ground, the stripes are many different colors and each one has an effect. In order to win you must simply reach the boss by crossing these stripes. The thing is that each stripes' effect is a different probability chance to kill you. there is no correlation between the stripes color and it's chance to kill so you can't try to game the probability in any meaningful way. you simply run to the boss and either get there because none of the random chances to die were rolled or you die and start over--
Is this game challenging? let's ignore how rudimentary and not fun that game would be and instead focus on if that game is challenging. It is possible to win and so as a whole the game is not impossible so surely it isn't the same as the initial example of an impossible game at the beginning of the post. Yet again I would disagree, this game would not actually be challenging because the player doesn't have any recourse to effect the outcome. In order for a game to be challenging there needs to be something to player can do to influence his chances of success.
Me, my good friend and my brother have been playing this game for a couple of years and have accumulated an almost comical amount of screenshots and recordings which demonstrate the same kind of unpredictable and inflexible gameplay hurdles as described in the hypothetical game earlier. These recordings include:
- shooting a complete bambi who didn't have a helmet on, undeniably in the head, with bullets which we can confirm deal more damage than the head has hp by a large margin and proceeding to have that person kill one of us in a single shot with a pistol through our helmeted head.
- obvious hacking.
- seemingly being killed by what felt like a console command while in full cover with no sound of a weapon discharging or being hit by a round
- hearing footsteps while looting, trying to exit the loot menu and it proceeding to lag out long enough for that person to cross a hundred feet and kill one of us before we could even control our character
- shooting someone in the head with SNB, knowing it should pen most helmets, them spinning around and killing one of us, getting to the postgame screen and seeing that none of our damage was absorbed by armor.
- dealing upwards of 150 damage to someone's torso without killing them
-shooting someone multiple times, seeing blood, knowing you hit them, getting one-tapped, going to postgame and seeing that it claims you didn't hit them
- getting shot in the head by someone who clearly had no way of seeing your head
- trying to move into cover and being stopped by some tiny object on the ground which is hardly taller than my character's foot itself
and these are just a small sample of the things and primarily those which seem to be unintentional oversights or bugs. This isn't even to mention the horrid design decisions that lead to meaningless unassailable "hurdles" such as:
- the infamous "rng scav instakill" where scavs seemingly just roll on a table of where they will hit you which leads to being one-tapped by a mindless NPC based on nothing but RNG.
-being queued with teams of 3 as a solo-getting
-10 kills in a match only to die of hunger even though your character has only been in raid for 30 minutes (probably translating to a couple of hours of "game time" which still make no sense to be dying of hunger in)
- getting shot and realizing you forgot your salewa so you have heavy bleeding and nothing to stop it with because the game makes it a pain in the the ass 15 minute process just to put gear on your pmc
- getting shot, having light bleeding and only 2 tourniquets and a hemostat which for some reason magically only work when you're bleeding "heavily"
-the general prevalence of "you shoot at eachother until somebody gets randomly one-shot" which is what most combat breaks down to
what this in effect means is that your choices, gear and ability often have little to no effect on whether or not you survive a raid much of the time. This also means that there's no way to really learn from dying and avoid it next time because there is either no explanation for what occurred or no possible way it could have been avoided. There are likely ways to game some of these bullshit hurdles to work out in your favor but all that means is that someone else is hitting that bullshit hurdle instead of you. This is pre-emptively in response to the incoming "but Pestily survives raids, therefore it is because he is good and therefore the game is not a meaningless soup of rng nonsense". Someone like pestily is extremely skilled at the parts of the game which a player can control but still dies to nonsense on stream all the time. A game is supposed to be made to be played by it's community, not by 10 streamers on twitch and everyone else just watches them play instead.
This has been allot of words to state the obvious fact that "tarkov bad" so I'll end it here. I didn't even get to the analysis of how the game's trajectory seems to have very little chance of ever improving the game in a serious way and may in fact be a downward spiral of adding worthless complexity to the game that only serves to make it less fun in an vain attempt to reach the orgasm part of the "hardcore" circlejerk. I would just like to remind everyone that responding with some flavor of "git gud" only serves to prove my point that this game accomplishes nothing but to feed into a toxic community of "hardcore" players who circlejerk over how "hardcore" they are without ever stopping to question if the game which they think proves their status as "hardcore" actually contains any meaningful difficulty or competition. seemingly either ignorant or uncaring that they are dumping their time into something which has no real value outside of being a gauntlet of coin tosses.

Well it's been a long while since I posted and even longer since I first joined here. I doubt anyone remembers me, but I was super active on here.
Anyway, it's been a rollercoaster...was doing well in 2019, only lost $2,000. Was doing SUPER in the first months of 2020 until July...Casinos opened up and my exclusions were expiring. Bad news. Started going down hill again and probably lost around $15,000 - I started getting a grip on myself and then I discovered something I wish I never had: a way to work around online gambling. Gambling isn't leagel in my state, but unfortunately I found a way to do so anyway. I won't go into too much detail because I don't want to trigger anyone or give someone ideas and how to do it, and have them go down the same path.
What transpired from December 28th until Today is abousltely disgusting and I wish it never happened. In the less than a month I lost nearly $14,000 to online gambling. The convenience is a terrible thing. I made it to top tier after losing this much. They try to lure you in, and succeed for the most part.
I started reading Allen Carr's book which really did help me for a while, but unfortunately I did not have the correct barriers in place at the time and I got lurredd back in.
Today January 20th I made a decision to start putting up the barriers. I closed my method of funding the account & in the process of closing the online account.
This bring my total losses to somewhere over or near $100,000 - this may not seem like much but factor in my age (23) this is an amount that's extremely hard to swallow. Think of all things I could have done. People I could have helped. NOPE. I rather have a 15 minute dopamine rush instead.
I know I can do this. I went 6 months with no bets in the beginning of COVID. I know and I will do this.
I've come to the realization without barriers, this won't be possible. At least for me. The rush is too much to handle.
I hope in one month I can make a post and proudly say "Today is day 30"
Reddit is a diary for me too look at my past mistakes and hopefully for others to see you're not alone. We just have to pick ourselves up.

Hello everyone! I have only been on Reddit for a few months but I learned so much from it that I figured I should try and give back to the community. English is my second language and this is the first time I ever write a full-length article, I hope you will enjoy reading it and I would be very thankful if you could provide some feedback about my writing, about the topic, or about anything else really… So here goes!
​
Why you should learn poker and game theory:
My story is similar to that of many: I learned about the game 10 years ago (during the golden age of online poker) when some friends of mine invited me to play a home game. Although I initially thought of poker as just another game of chance akin to playing slots or roulette in a casino, I quickly came to realize that there is a lot more to it as my more experienced friends would repeatedly get the best of me during these home games, which led me to start watching videos and reading strategy books to improve my skill… Little did I know it’d be the start of a journey that would impact many different aspects of my life way beyond the game itself, as most of the fundamental principles learned through poker can be applied to your decision-making outside of the game, especially when it comes to money management and investing. Now, let’s dive into a few of these principles:
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- Risk management (i.e. Bankroll management)
When learning about how to be successful playing poker, the first big piece of advice most people come across is bankroll management or BRM. To understand BRM, you must first realize that poker has a lot of variance: you might be vastly ahead in a given hand but there is almost always a slim chance that you will lose in the end if one specific card hits. This implies that you will sometimes lose even though you were a 99% favorite, and that you will sometimes get unlucky and lose 2, 5 or maybe even 20 such encounters in a row. THIS is variance. It doesn’t mean that you played bad or that you made bad decisions, but rather that you got unlucky. Over time you will have lucky streaks and unlucky streaks, and these will average out in the long term… It’s just the way the game goes.
Now that we understand variance, let’s get back to BRM. What is it exactly? Let’s say you are the best poker player in the world but you only have 1000$ that you can EVER use to play with. Taking your whole 1000$ on one table and multiplying your stack at an exponential rate might seem like a good idea. Surely nothing can go wrong since you’re the best player in the world right? But variance can be a bitch ;) Even if you’re the best you will lose regularly and you will sometimes get unlucky, it’s just part of the game. The correct move here is to apply BRM, which means only using a small % of your available capital for each game you play in order to reduce the risk of going broke. Using only 100$ per game would already be a lot safer, but you still run the risk of going under on a streak of bad luck. If you only allocate 10$ per game you play, then it becomes virtually impossible for you to ever go broke, even on a huge streak of bad luck. Sure it’s not as exciting and you won’t be making money quite as fast as you could, but this is the way to go to make sure you don’t go broke…
This approach to risk management translates very well to investing:
- Only invest what you can afford to lose. Once the money is on the table it’s as good as gone, which is why you should only use your “spare” cash and never invest with your living expenses or worse, borrow money to invest.
- Diversify your investments. There is always a chance, however slim it might be, that you will lose most of your investment. This is why going all-in on a specific investment is generally a bad idea (this applies particularly well in the crypto space).
Proper BRM allows you to make sure that you will come out ahead in the long run if you play well, which basically comes down to making more good decisions than bad ones. But that’s assuming you don’t let emotions come in the way of your decision-making, which brings us to our next point…
​
- Emotional management (i.e. Handling tilt/Positive mindset)
Nobody likes losing… In the same way we enjoy winning because of the dopamine rush, we feel bad when we lose which is totally natural. Overcoming this and avoiding tilt (irrational decisions made out of angefrustration) is an essential skill for any successful poker player. You might play a sound game of poker and apply good BRM, but you will still lose if you let your emotions get the best of you.
After a loss, rather than being angry and frustrated, you should evaluate your decision-making. If your decision-making was good, you just got unlucky and you shouldn’t worry about it since you are playing for the long run (remember that variance teaches us that anything can happen in the short-term). If your decision-making was bad, you need to learn from your mistakes and move on. The key here is to always have a positive mindset: making mistakes is part of the learning process and should be seen as an occasion to improve. Being angry and ranting, on the other hand, rarely result in anything positive.
Again, this translates very well to investing:
- Don’t be impulsive, don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment. You should not FOMO because the price is pumping, nor should you sell because of FUD or price corrections. If you believe in a project, short-term price changes (did I hear someone say “variance”?) shouldn’t bother you.
- Don’t get stuck up on losses. You bought the top and it crashed immediately after? You sold the bottom right before a huge rally? Don’t let this bother you: what’s done is done and you just need to move on and make the best of your current situation.
- Have a positive mindset. Anger and frustration lead to nothing. Yes you could have bought in 2009 when you first heard about it, hindsight is always 20/20. Stay positive and keep learning/improving yourself.
The good thing about all this is that it goes way beyond poker or investing. Being aware of your emotions and how they affect you, learning how to handle losing even when you were “supposed” to win, etc… All this can tremendously help you in all aspects of life by making you less impulsive and more rational in your decision-making. Now, this leaves us with our last fundamental principle of a sound poker strategy:
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- Basic stats and probabilities (i.e. Expected value/Odds)
To become an accomplished player, you will inevitably have to learn about these simple mathematical tools that poker players use all the time in their decision-making process, such as odds and expected value. To make it very simple, the expected value (EV) of any bet is (REWARD \ WinRate - RISK), meaning that if you can bet 1000$ with a chance to win 10k$ half of the time, your EV is *(10000\0.5)-1000 = +4000$**. Obviously these are great odds to take as long as you have enough capital to overcome variance. But things would be very different if the odds of winning were only 5% as your EV would then be negative *(10000\0.05)-1000 = -500$.*** Now this is clearly a bet you should not take…
Now that you know probabilities, statistics and game theory are useful decision-making tools in poker, guess what? They are also extremely useful in investing! Even better, the study of game theory with problems such as the “Byzantine generals” or the “Three prisoners” has been, along with cryptography, the foundation on which blockchain technology was built, enabling the trustless and decentralized services that are about to revolutionize our world…
Assuming this was enough to pique your interest and make you want to dig deeper, I’ll just add that just like the other topics we discussed and as you might have guessed, this translates very well to investing and also to pretty much anything in your life:
- Learn how to break down complex situations. Logical thinking paired with a statistical approach will help you break down any complex problem into several easier problems, making the whole thing a lot easier to approach/comprehend.
- Base your decisions on a methodical and rational approach. List every possible outcome along with its associated upside/downside, estimate the probability of each outcome to occur and make the best decision based on the information available.
My point here is that risk management, emotional management and statistics/game theory are all awesome tools that you should definitely add to your arsenal. Not only will it improve your money-management and investing, it will also be beneficial to your decision-making and to your life in general. Of course poker is not the only way to learn about these, but I personally found it to be the best practice ground to refine and improve them, which is why I strongly encourage you all to try it out and study the game.
I hope you enjoyed the article, and I wish you all a happy 2021 bull run! May we all come closer to retirement and financial independence!
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TL;DR: more than a game, poker is a school of thought. It teaches you to be reasonable, to assess the risk of every single choice you make, to overcome you emotions, to play the long game rather than the short game, to make informed decisions, etc… This has made me a lot wiser in every aspect of my life, which is why I strongly encourage to try it out and read about poker strategy.
Edit: I couldn't crosspost from cc so I just copied the post as I figured it is relevant here too :)

Today i lost 1.2k. Well my original deposit was 300, built it up to 1.2k through sports betting. But when i went under a 1000 i started chasing losses. Bet 500 on red. It landed black. Shit, Ok its gotta be red this time.. bet 500 again. Nope black again. Damn it was so hard not to deposit again after. I felt like i went thru a lot building up that much money, it felt unjustified.I felt like such an idiot playing fucking roulette chasing my losses. I even told myself i wouldnt do that. But ive been here before.
3 years ago i had it way worse. Lost 16k gambling online. All credit card debt. Ofc i couldnt pay it, pretty soon i had collections calling 3 times a day. Everytime i saw their number id get a hit of anxiety. Never picked up. What was i supposed to say? "Hi i gambled ur money and lost it all"?. Well eventually they sued me and so i had to figure something out. Settled for about 30% for both credit cards. The last card i actually settled yesterday, while playing blackjack. I thought it was funny at the moment, thinking i overcame my addiction, and if i could follow the rules and strategies i set up for myself, ill be good. But once i started losing big numbers relative to the stack i had, i couldnt stop doubling, tripling down. It was like i was possessed by a demon making the most perfect excuses in the world. Those excuses sounded fucking delicious. "U only deposited a fraction of what u have now anywayss" "what if u could double ur money right now? That would be soooOoO awesome wouldnt it?" "Imagine if u could get another double after this!" "CMOON BET ON RED 1 MORE TIME AND U WILL BE 50X UR ORIGINAL DEPOSIT!" Its more persuasive than a hot chick trying to have sex with u. I dont even think drugs can replicate the dopamine and adrenaline rush u get when so much is on the line. This is when i remembered. This shit runs in my family.
many many years ago my uncle spent 200k of borrowed money gambling in russia. He lost it all and was held by the russian mafia. My grandfather who also was a gambling addict had to pay the debt in order for them to let him go.
My grandfather was a rich man. Owned a hotel and was very very well off, but he couldnt beat his gambling addiction. Lost everything including his hotel. My dad told me he attempted suicide many times only to bail because of his fear of death. He had everything.. now he asks my dad for money occasionally and he doesnt even make a fraction of what grandpa made. Went from a millionaire to a begger overnight. Being old, its hardto financially recover from that.
I realized, in gambling eventually ur gona lose it all. Whats the fun in winning 10 dollars if u have 10000? Its the psychology of gambling that makes casinos billions. We are hard wired to lose and the house was designed to win. I dont wanna do this anymore, I feel like i cant enjoy watching sports without betting now. Having money on the line made the thrill that much better. Higher highs, and lower lows. Exactly the same wave pattern as drugs. I want to get into (crypto) trading and have been learning. I have holding position and some money laying around i wanna try trading with. I dont know how my gambling problem would affect me. I lost money i can afford to lose, im not financially ruined at all. But mentally im ruined with regret and shame. I had a huge urge to deposit and bet half my checkings on red again but i managed to hold that off, sounds fucking retarded right? Well i wouldve thought the same yesterday. But in the moment i was not in control, like something switched on inside me. But the pain of past history wouldnt let me do that. I controlled my pain with the possibility of even more pain. How would i feel being even more in debt than last time? Now thats a shitty feeling. Fuck
Tl;dr : lost 1.2k today chasing losses. Was very hard not to deposit again. 3 years ago i lost 16k of borrowed money (credit card) had collections calling me everyday until i got sued and then settled. If there wasnt a credit limit i probably couldve went way higher.
Uncle lost 200k in borrowed money in russia and was held by the mafia until grandpa paid it off.
Grandpa then lost his hotel and all assets gambling, attempted suicide multiple times.
All in all, im glad i only lost that much today. It just hurts to see all that profit disappear just like that. Mentally its very painful. I wanna put in another 5k and double up. But i know itll never end until i lose it all again, this time 10x more than before. Fuck man

Hi everyone, so first I have to say that I am not a AN per se so if you want to downvote my post into oblivion feel free to do it now. BUT.... I.... I dont know man, I have this thoughts on my mind lately and thought this is the right sub to post them. ( sorry if the following its gonna be a bit disorganized but my feeling of anger and despair are speaking now ).
CHAPTER I - A BEEF WITH EXISTENCE
So i have this "beef" or very "controversial" view about life or existence in general that I wouldn`t express it even to a serial killer. In fact I think a serial killer would be less controversial than my thoughts.
I simply dont understand this "LIFE IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING" view. I mean ok sure its nice if people can overcome hardship trough it, but fore me it simply does not work. I also had this view when I was little but with the time it changed. I dunno what happened to me but I think I somehow realised that I simply was not "made" for this world. Since I was little I was "weak", I thought "Better be dead that endure this"
I get angry and frustrated when i see people in terrible conditions. AND I GET ANGRY WHEN PEOPLE SAY: "At least there are ALIVE" like WTF I would rather be dead !
But this view... IS SO CONTROVERSIAL SO DISGUSTING THAT I SHOULD BE SENT TO HELL FOR ETERNAL SUFFERING AND TORTURE. I just dont get this "Life in spite of everything" view. Yes existence can be beautiful but in most cases, AND I MEAN IN MOST CASES ITS HORRIBLE.
I was not one of those "Death is not an option Never" I was more "Better death that this inconvience" I AM WEAK, I DONT DESERVE EXITENCE!
CHAPTER II - CONTROVERSIAL MIND
Something else I... AM KIND TERRIFIED IS... other people. Now I dont mind people as humans, I mean people`s view on life. The view on life of the most people can condemn you to misery WICHOUT escape. (I know edgy)
If you are brought in this place without your consent and cant leave when you want... THIS SEEMS LIKE A PRISON FOR ME. Now of course I do NOT say suicide is good but how its handled in society is.... I dont know if I should say terrifying or not. And i dont really mean.... I simply dont know how I should say it. To be kept alive because "LIFE IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING" by people with this view against your will, be confined..... I dont know man.... There is something terribly about it, i just get shivers by thinking of it. Like when people say "Suicide is not the way out. It never should be" i understand them but WTF (The next two paragraphs are about me ranting about video games so you can skip that)
BTW do you know that the game "Fallout" dived a bit into this theme. SPOILER ALERT. In Fallout New Vegas Mister Robert House in in a machine that keeps him alive and so controls the whole casino with wires connected to his brain. After you find him you can kill him OR.... Now get ready for this... JUST DISCONNECT THE CABLES AND LEAVE HIM ALIVE BUT WICHOUT BEING ABLE TO CONTROL EVERYTHING. So just starring in the dark forever being kept alive by the machine. He actually BEGS you not to do it but rather kill him. I just cant imagine the ones ( even tho is just a game ) who actually choose this option but I hope they dont come close to me.
Than in fallout 4 "Nuka Cola" DLC you can find the founder of Nuka World.... DECAPITATED, CONSCIOUS BEING KEPT AKLIVE BY A MACHINE IN A BASEMNT. When you find him HE BEGS you to shut down the machine that keeps him alive saying "... I was here for hundreds of years awake just starring a wall.... please pull that lever and end it..." And I was just... oh no. And i just start thinking what if no one ever discovered him... what if no one want to let him die. JUST STARRING A WALL FOR HUNDRED OF YEARS...
Now I know I know... "Dude you literally get upset about video games !" and you are right. But I... dont know those things stand out to me.
And here are some thoughts about prison ( I watched some documentaries ). Now I know those people dis bad things that need to be punished BUT what kinda shocks me is when inmates want to commit suicide. I mean, yes for them it should not be a easy way out but still the fact that you are locked in a cage and not allowed to "exit" is kinda f#cked up. I mean I saw in a documentary on "the prison of the future" how they designed "suicide-proof" showerheads and thought "fck now there is really no way out". You are forced to live until your death in misery every day. Like I said maybe those people deserve it but still.
CHAPTER III - THE STATE OF NATURE AND LIFE ITSELF
WARING I know a lot of ANs like nature a lot, this is not directed at them, just my thoughts
Is said that Charles Darwin got depressed after find out how nature "works". And I see people GLORRYFING nature like... dude only the torture devices invented by humans can be more brutal (And humans come from nature so it says something) .
And then... this just this..."Well nature is brutal yes but its also beautiful. its good and bad" I just cant stand this. Yes nature is brutal and peaceful.... WICH 90 PERCENT BRUTALITY AND 10 PERCENT SERENITY. And also animals cant see the beautiful... BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO FIGHT FOR SURVICAL. I mean I just want to know how those people think.... what they think when they say this. Do they say it just as a coping mechanism (what I am not against BTW).
Oh and when people say "Well thats life" (Is it a coping mechanism) I mean YES but... Gosh it brings my rage-meter to 100.
Oh and when some anti vegans say: "If we would stop eating meat those animals would not be able to survive in the wild and would just stop existing" I mean... I would just walk to one of them and say: "Do you mean this seriously ?" But than I remember: "LIFE IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING". I saw the comment (I dont take part in those debates) of one saying: "Better existence in hell than non exitance and the worse part is when you think those people make the decisions for other sentient beings. But hey we also do this so yay! hypocrits.
But I know I would be treated like a psychopath, like a mass murderer. This thoughts are just UNACCEPTABLE. I cant even watch movies about saving the world are the universe... I cant fight in my head anymore... I want to say it... existence is a curse.
CHAPTER IV - MYSELF AND NORMALITY
If I am depressed and take pills and would become "normal"... would I still have this views ? If everyone is deluding themself about life, it kinda feels like "We happy few" scenario. Are we "sick" ? Well we are clearly not "Normal" so this brings the question: what is normal ?
I remember in a old discussion here on reddit someone saying: (It was a discussion about depression) "...Normal people dont realize they have a cheat code: dopamine. Life sucks so we need dopamine to funtion. Depressed people lost this cheat code..." . I dont know why but this stuck with me. Are depressed people... normal... am I normal... are you normal... normal
Sorry about this one but sometimes I get into this philosophical questions and...
EPILOGUE
Sorry for long post guys. It was nice to let all emotions out. In society you cant do this under no circumstance, like i would have the courage (yeah I am a coward). This post was meant more as a rant, I wanted to let some steam out of my head and sorry for no TL;DR but I simply didnt know how to "compress" this.
So special thanks to the wonderful guys and gals who read it. Thanks to all the ANs, effilists (I know even for ANs this is controversial) and maybe also lurkers and NUs. A good day and in case I don't see ya, Good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.

Yesterday I posted this question and got several really helpful responses - thank you all.
The most helpful response was that of my wife who had a very rational discussion with me about the value of sex. How for her it was something she can only imagine with me. I’ve really struggled to understand this and I think yesterday I got a deeper level that I want to share one to thank you all for the help and two to help anyone else struggling to understand what we have done.
I’ve screwed up my feelings and understanding of sex. I’ve done this through years of watching pornography, escaping into fantasy of sex with other partners, discussing sexual matters with other men and women online, and ultimately acting out many of these fantasies in person. I don’t want as clinical as perhaps my descriptions appear, I did have feelings involved but they weren’t deep. There was trust and power transfer involved but as someone rightly pointed out I was still able to easily move from one partner to the next - it wasn’t deep connection.
Because of that it is really hard for me to tackle this issue directly. An analogy was far better for me to suddenly have the Gestalt shift.
Money still holds value to me, I haven’t entirely erased its value through some irresponsible behavior and attitudes over decades like I have sex. My wife shared a simple analogy and it’s still blowing my mind. What if she gambled away our entire life savings - all our cash, all our retirement assets, our home, everything wiped out. When she said it my brain nearly exploded and I’m still able to get this visceral sense of violation just thinking about.
I had sex with other people. I wiped out everything she thought she knew about us and me.
I’m already changing my attitude about sex. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that even throughout the reconciliation process I kind of still had hope in the back of my mind that we would come together and then I would eventually be able to convince her we should invite other partners into the bed with us. I’ve dreamed about watching her pleased by someone else - I thought it was all about transcending jealousy and letting her experience pleasure that I alone can’t give her. In reality this would be a nightmare for her and I see it now. I see how for her sex is this very special thing we share.
All along I thought “intimacy” during sex was something about what we said to each other. Like if I only knew the right words I could “be intimate” too. I now see that it’s not special because it’s intimate, rather it is intimate because it is special. I see why it is so hard to define it.
I also see now that it is insufficient for me to just never put my penis inside someone else. Every time I look at some mom at the kids school and think how fun it must be to be her husband and bend her over the kitchen island, I remove what is special between her and I.
I also see that just me having these insights does very little to ease her pain. Back to our analogy, if she told me she suddenly understands the value of money now that she lost all our assets and so I should just trust her with unfettered access to our bank account, I wouldn’t magically be healed. Hell no I’d still watch the statements like a hawk and probably be scared every time we passed an ATM or casino.
And I see how just calling it quits with each other doesn’t somehow restore my assets and let me start over fresh with someone new. Indeed someone new might come help me dig out of this financial hole and lift me up, but it would mean a lot more if she kept working and contributing back to our savings to at least get us on our feet again is like the least she could do.
I needed this money analogy not because I’m some greedy asshole but because right now sex and love are so ruined in me. I need to restore their value in me. And I need to restore the trust with m wife. And then I can restore the intimacy.
Oddly this gives me some relief from sexual desire. Like just this bit of understanding makes me want the next sexual encounter to have that meaning it has been missing. I don’t just want to have an orgasm and get the dopamine. I needed to write all this out to have some record for myself when I do start feeling like just acting out again. I want to remind myself that acting out isn’t what I want or need.
Thanks for listening.

I really wanna gamble today. I’ve been bet free for 60+ days now. The impulsive problem gambler in me keeps saying have one final round at the casino. Stop betting before midnight then you can start your Day 1 on 1/1/2021. Throw away your 60 something days of sobriety. You might win some money. You miss gambling anyways. Why deny yourself something you miss?
I do miss gambling. I think about it frequently. I miss the dopamine hits, and winning jackpots. I miss embellishing about my winnings to friends and other problem gamblers in the casinos. I miss laughing and cursing with other problem gamblers whenever we beat the dealer. I miss the atmosphere and being a “hotshot”.
There’s so much more about casinos and gambling that I don’t miss. I don’t miss the depression and desperation after a gambling binge. I don’t miss not being able to afford nice dinners and other luxuries because of problem gambling. I don’t miss not being able to buy Christmas gifts for my family because of my gambling. I don’t miss calls from bill collectors because of late payments. I don’t miss being harassed by my landlord because of late rent payments. I don’t miss eating ramen three times a day for a week because I couldn’t afford to buy anything else. I don’t miss the shame. I don’t miss the regret. I don’t miss almost everything involved with gambling. I don’t miss lying to family and friends. I don’t miss manipulating people to try to get more money so I could gamble. I feel like I could write novels about how many things I don’t miss about gambling.
Whenever I have feelings about going to the casino, I have to look at this list and remember how much harm I caused because of my problem gambling. The bad far outweighs the good. I have to be strong and continue to abstain from gambling. Things in my life are getting better. I don’t want to throw away my progress.
Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s continue to beat compulsive gambling together.

Posted this OPINION in WALLSTREETBETS but bot mods didn't like me disrupting the ECHO CHAMBER
GME is the REAL fakeout, hence why all the MSM support, Celeb pumping it. After their friends short cover, GME can just issue more shares to you fools and suck up all your hard earned life-saving money to distribute to their banking buddies.
You can only take the MONEY out of WallStreet by buying Physical.
THE ONE WEAK SPOT ON THE WALLSTREET BEAST IS SILVER.
Paper Silver slammed down like tick tock clock work, Physical silver SOLD OUT everywhere like TP.
Physical premiums are 10x normal.
IT'S ALL MANIPULATION, ONLY WAY TO WIN IS JUST GET OUT THE GAME WHILE YOU CAN.
USD is the biggest CON GAME.
Cut your losses with the MANIPULATED game and get something physical they cant control.
Every failing hierarchical oligarchy in history ROSE to power on PMs and their demise was from not being honest aka inflation aka market manipulation = MONEY PRINTING.
Old enough to see national debt go from 10 to 20 to now 30 trillion, not included unfunded liabilities which is like north of 100 trillion. For the rich BOOMER population which squandered this nation's wealth from the World's biggest CREDITOR nation to the WORLD biggest DEBTOR nation, they about the enjoy their life's savings of manipulation and real estate gains on the backs of the indentured Millennials and gen Z.
Greek drachma, Spanish Milled dollar, Deutsche Mark, US dollar -
STUDY YOUR HISTORY!
Article I, Section 10, Clause 1:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts*; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.*
WHY WHY WHY PHYSICAL?!?
CUZ PEOPLE and GOVERNMENTS are lying scamming con-artist like ROBINHOOD taking your taxes to "give to the poor" only to line their own pockets. Taxation without REPRESENTATION IS THEFT AKA THE REVOLUTION AND FOUNDING OF USA. But everyone forgot that shit and everyone has a hand in everyone else pocket from LAWS, regulations, licenses protecting the little guy from free market transactions.
Hard learned lesson in life, but you youngi'ns will learn you've been lied to your whole life about almost everything and almost everything the GOV does is illegal!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oVxNMwm7ks&t=660s&ab_channel=PeterSchiff
LET THE BANKERS TWIDDLE THEIR THUMBS BACK AND FORTH PUSHING FAKE PAPER PROFITS!!!
Leaving the manipulated market and a return to REAL money is the only way to gain control of your future, otherwise you just stay in the carnival casino system and get milked dry into your old frail age and shoot you up with a new vaccine back by "SCIENCE". BEEP BEEP BING BING CHING CHING keeping you hooked on the next dopamine rush paper number spike on whatever worthless stonk you want is how they make money.
💰 🙌

i've been checking the "last 10 games" stats for a while and it's exactly like gambling tbh. same as playing in a casino: i just consistently loose time & time again but every so often i hit the random 'jackpot' match where i totally dominate.
obviously their motivation for this is money, but i'm not sure exactly how it promotes micro-transactions. maybe it maximises the time people spend watching the killcam / the melee-kill animations, and that makes then see more purchasable content? or maybe it stresses you out and makes people purchase things for the dopamine hit?
regardless of my opinions, activision have submitted 2 patents for skill based match making that is designed to promote micro-transactions, so it’s clear their priority is money above all else.
unfortunately i think this means that they analyse every aspect of your gameplay style and use it to match you with players who can reliably defeat/not-defeat the tactics you use so you only win the matches the want you to win.
this theory explains why the lobby is purged and re-chosen after every single multiplayer game but persists as long as the users are willing in zombies (even when matched up with randoms). and also why Call-of-Duty has one if the biggest player bases but it takes relatively long to find a match

My long-ish 'rant' that is borderline full on psychoanalysis; Feel free to tl;dr and answer the title in comments.
As usual I spent more time thinking about packs than making one. There are quite a few types of packs but for this discussion I will list a few; Obviously #1 is kitchen sink, though it's not really an abstract category because being all rounded it's a combination of playstyles. And obviously really any pack, even highly specific, will have a combination of aspects.
Crafting is exemplified in things like skyblocks - nothing to explore, just craft. Basically it emphasises the Skinner Box aspect; make thing A to make more of resource A to make machine B to make resource B, automate, etc. And an obvious subset of this is questing like Sevtech - while it has the other elements, it's still centred around this loop.
RL Craft (yes I know it's overrated) and Valhelsia are on the combat and building ends of 'Adventure'. And then you have dedicated 'Adventure' packs like Journey to the Core or Regrowth or Survival Islands, Crash Landing, Exoria, etc, etc. - what I will respectfully call gimmick packs, being the broadest category. They are all wildly different yet the common thread is some sort of intrinsic limitation that provides meaning. And really this area is pretty endless in that you could have the entire overworld covered in snow, ocean, spawn in the nether, Galacticraft with tweakers and custom gen, etc. And of course things like Hostile Worlds, Storms and Tornadoes, Tough As Nails, etc. These radically change what it means to exist in the world by undermining something (almost always safety) that is taken for granted. Though here is also TerraFirmaCraft - undermining the vanilla system almost entirely (and obviously stuff like Pixelmon, Craft to Exile).
Perhaps the pack has this change in mind specifically, like "Safety Lost is a survival focused mod pack, focusing on challenging survival through mechanics rather than enemy difficulty or expensive recipes. Rather than just trying to make everything a slow and painful grind Safety Lost tries to make things tense by using mods like Hardcore Darkness and Tough As Nails to add new pressures and dangers rather than filling the world with monsters and increasing resource costs and tedious amounts of work. "
And finally on the other end of the spectrum are townys, harvest moons, stuff like Peace of Mind, etc. and any sort of play that is centred around building. Are these types an exhaustive list? Probably not.
I personally think that a combination of these leads way to a 'purposeful' pack - i.e. something that moves away from the degenerate fantasy escape / slot machine with extra steps. Though we can completely remove singled out elements like combat (e.g. Peace of Mind) or exploration (skyblocks), and that's perfectly fine. But if you were to remove most ~ all but 1 element it feels more and more like a fabricated game that just happens to use Minecraft as the game engine. It stops being a world / simulation and starts being a casino.
Take Factorio as a simpler example. If you remove the threat of combat then it becomes a crafting loop and is edging closer and closer to being like a dressed up idle game or something. Similar can be said for SkyFactory, and if we are going to be cynical we could say that the major game loop is basically the same as an idle game, who's saving grace is complexity of automation and not merely just clicking upgrade.
Personally I've struggled with the addiction that comes. Nothing can feel better than sitting down to start a new world a build a little cabin, when life is stressful and you don't feel like you're going anywhere. That's what I mean by enjoyment and purpose - like actual enjoyment and purpose.
In a way it's actually hard to conceive of any instance of Minecraft that isn't ripe to be extremely addictive and psychologically regressive. After all it's designed to be a 'children's game' (despite the median consumer being well older). We can point the finger at Minecraft as a base or the mods themselves as a game that is inherently designed into addictive and often shallow loops; but I don't think that's completely true. And obviously it's entirely up to how someone chooses to spend their time in a healthy way. In saying that I think it's largely just how the potential of modded has developed. For instance the massive popularity of SkyFactory can be attributed simply to the fact that it's the most obvious direction to go with the modded feel, e.g. rf feels very modded as opposed to vanilla. SkyFactory is simply the top piece of a pyramid which at the bottom are mechanics like pipes, rf, etc. Likewise with RL Craft, and so on.
One solution is to see Minecraft as a simulation as opposed to a game. What I mean is that all of the above analysis is analysis of Minecraft as a game. If we analyse it as a simulation, then primarily Minecraft is about spaces and form, and the primary factors are things like movement and block types. From this perspective we could say Minecraft is quite underdeveloped. You can walk, sprint, swim, and that's about it. Modded tends to opt for obtaining something close to creative flight. And block types are largely trivial (maybe Mojang had a similar idea with powder snow).
When I think about the ways Minecraft was constructive or 'served its purpose' as opposed to being a drug, it's when I stepped back and learned the more broad principles about what I was doing - like how to build in a way that's open to future needs, 'functional aesthetics', or simply viscerally feeling that a 100x100x100 cube really is made up of a million blocks - something that while we know mathematically is hard to appreciate until you're placing them.
Some of my memorable experiences in Minecraft: Building my first shelter, building a nice shelter, completing the crappy cobblestone stair case down to bedrock the first time, realising I could just jump into a water pool and get down in 3 seconds, building a tower near my base so I could find it because I didn't know about F3 coords, connecting a river to the ocean, creating a waterfall and ridding it down in the boat (we've all done this, right?), laying minecart track when I was still blissfully unaware how useless it is, nether highway, building a wall around a village and then having a zombie spawn inside and kill everyone anyway. Setting a modded fan to max vertical push and using it as my hand glider launch pad, etc. etc.
Clearly I'm biased towards building but don't get me wrong I love melting my dopamine receptors on Omnifactory as much as the next guy. I said most memorable, not most enjoyable. If anything I love automation, resource amassment and power creep cause it's addictive af and appeals to what nerds are good at.
We could say that Minecraft is doomed to be degenerate because there's no nuance in crafting or building. Plugging Lego pieces together. And on the other hand we would say: Why ruin Minecraft's simplicity. I mean you could literally make a pack where people have to learn to program Lua just to progress. (and I'm pretty sure something like that exists already). I think it's less about adding legitimate barriers to dopamine as it is removing the necessity of quick shallow dopamine loops to progress in the game. Paradoxically, making things easier and moving away from Avaritia would actually make the game harder.
​
What all of these memories have in common is they gave the adult lego blocks an in-world purpose. OK, towny is the best? Clearly not. Obviously towny can be basically just as bad because it can be it's own power creep. It's not merely in-world mechanics over magic box.
One continuation is heavier platforming; to have more block types and movement. Here we can give more movement abilities by default or easy to renew, like double jump, leap, side step mods (these already exist). Different move speed on different blocks is tempting but it could easily kill the fun. Or make all the blocks slippery like ice, speed up the mobs, hilarity ensues. It's not the platforming that's important. The general idea is to just 'be' in the world is more pleasing - to 'incentivize' building of projects that are fun to test, not fun to complete, caving because it's fun, not because you need ore W for magic box P, etc. In vanilla these might be the many carnival style games seen on SMPs and so on. My point isn't that this is what would make a 'better' pack - just one example of a pivoted philosophy. And to, immediately contradict myself, a big appeal of modded is obviously, exactly; Get ore W for magic box P. It appeals to the git r' dun mentality.
Previously I would fuss over various 'psychopathic' aspects of the game - As many have pointed out, Survival should really be called Conquest. You are the pillager of the villages, not the hero. You're the one that desolates the environment for consumption. It's a power fantasy. So you have mods like pollution of the realms, Nature's aura, etc. Yet it's hard to see these as anything more than chores and minute hurdles to be automated over. And it's impossible to remove the Mine out of Minecraft even with mods like Harder Branchmining, Heat & Climate (makes you suffocate in underground airblocks). These will all simply be interpreted as chorelike things to be overcome with more power. Speaking of - that's the exact 'issue' with things like Tough as Nails and Hardcore Darkness. (I'm not saying they're not part of a solution, just that they aren't the secret sauce).
I'm not sure exactly what this would look like. Prospecting and adventuring for biomes can be boring, on the other hand if it is varied enough it's a lower dopamine, higher engagement activity. I also had the thought that mods like Bountiful and Vending Machine more accurately resemble the reality we live in. The question becomes; On the one hand playing the game exists as an extremely accelerated version of tangible success (which we can learn from and/or get addicted to) on the other hand it exists as a realm for the things that we would never do in real life - an outlet or sharpening stone. And then there just the simple fact that the purpose of the game is be an extreme fulfilment of the natural drives.
Tl;dr I don't think it's things that need to be added to the game, rather a minimalism that avoids certain dopamine high activities, such as grinding for ore tripling or unlocking heavily gated content. That way players can be in the moment as opposed to chasing some addictive completion curve.

Day 15 (20/12/20) yesterday received some professional fees, five figure sum, with more money feeling better, less burdened, then noticed my mood is lifted, the increase of serotonin, would triggered a temptation to gamble, to try my luck, and I started recalling those moments I had big wins, when $7 became $ 7,000, where few hundreds became $ 14,000, $5 became $25,000, when a wager on a number in roulette turn hundreds to thousands, BUT I reminded myself these are illusionary, it works on my biological weaknesses, the addiction to the dopamine rush, the animal-self, I would be the white mice in the lab that keep pressing the lever for the food to come until I died from exhaustion, according to some psychologists. This serotonin trigger is different from the trigger of desperation that made us gamble. It is a happier person thinking foolishly why not go to the casino for some fun, just try a little, I am not that unlucky. WRONG!!! IT IS A MOUSE TRAP!! I think many of us here had that feeling before. Thus, I won’t give a single cent to the casino or lottery booth anymore after 8 years. Fuck them, and eternal curse to the owners and those involved in these operations. Think of the losses and what happened after that when you lose everything you had, the suicidal thoughts, the mindless walks to the ATM to withdraw more money to lose, the overdrafts, the credit card bills, the loans, the desperate phone calls, the disappointment with yourself... the people around you... the wins you can recall to tempt you to gamble again are Loss Disguised as Win, and in the long run we will all lose. Remember how you won so much and lose it all quickly... because it is an obsession, we couldn’t walk away, because we chose to walk into the door into a place where we cannot tell night or day and What we have LOST are not just Time and MONEY, but also OURSELVES. By not playing I feel like a true Winner!! On 2 Jan 2021 I won again by not gambling, and I want this feeling more, it could be just as addictive to stay away from gambling. Winning daily by not gambling. I went swimming instead despite the cold. Hope all the friends here would be able to stay strong, disciplined and not relapse...

Am I getting a dog for the wrong reasons?
So I want to get a dog. I live dogs, and that’s my main purpose for wanting one, I just love them a ton. However, there’s a second reason I want to get a dog. I get quite lonely at times, and in my loneliness, I make really bad decisions. For example, today I had a slurry of bad decisions that snowballed into a pretty bad day. Got up, didn’t have any plans with anyone and was just home alone all day with nothing to look forward to. Video games weren’t fun, reading wasn’t fun, all I wanted to do was to spend time with other people, but that wasn’t going to happen because everyone I knew was busy. I felt so alone and isolated. Now I’m not excusing my actions, but I believe my loneliness led to these subsequent decisions. I went to the gas station and bought a 6 pack of beer. Drank most of that then took an Uber to the casino and blew 200$ on blackjack. IF I would have had a dog, would I have still done the same thing? I don’t know. I think at the very least I would have been less likely to do it. Maybe I wouldn’t have had such an urge to gamble and to drink and to “have fun” because I would have already been getting those feel good chemicals from playing with my dog or going on a walk with it. No booze or gambling needed...what do you guys think? Am I just a hopeless gambling drunk who craves the high of dopamine rushes? Or would a dog 🐕 be a good fit for me and bring stability and happiness to my life?

Today i hit day 145. I stopped gambling because after doing my conscript service in FDF i wanted to go back to school, and living with strict budged and gambling just doesn't work out at all.
This has been really easy. First 2 weeks were the hardest for me. I restarted my countdown when I relapsed and lost around 200 euros, won 500 and lost again about 300 euros. Also because of corona all the slots in Finland are closed and Veikkaus is doing really bad. (Wich is good because Veikkaus is a government owned monopoly with really bad return %'s compared to maltan casinos for example)
I get spammed with Casino adds till this day, and that is one of the biggest reasons I don't play anymore. They remind me every day that I would of had 7-10k euros to have fun with for the time of 3 years.
Overall I feel great. I always knew casinos were a scam, but I never cared. It was just for the dopamine hits when you win big. Now I get my dopamine from somewhere else like going to gym, walking a dog, or just generally doing something productive.
To anyone who is thinking about quitting, just stop today. Don't quit, just stop for some time and ask yourself have you recently been more happy? If you have been, just keep going for longer and longer. Don't think it as quitting, but more like pausing. That pause can last from few days to rest of your life.
Thanks.

Am I getting a dog for the wrong reasons?
So I want to get a dog. I live dogs, and that’s my main purpose for wanting one, I just love them a ton. However, there’s a second reason I want to get a dog. I get quite lonely at times, and in my loneliness, I make really bad decisions. For example, today I had a slurry of bad decisions that snowballed into a pretty bad day. Got up, didn’t have any plans with anyone and was just home alone all day with nothing to look forward to. Video games weren’t fun, reading wasn’t fun, all I wanted to do was to spend time with other people, but that wasn’t going to happen because everyone I knew was busy. I felt so alone and isolated. Now I’m not excusing my actions, but I believe my loneliness led to these subsequent decisions. I went to the gas station and bought a 6 pack of beer. Drank most of that then took an Uber to the casino and blew 200$ on blackjack. IF I would have had a dog, would I have still done the same thing? I don’t know. I think at the very least I would have been less likely to do it. Maybe I wouldn’t have had such an urge to gamble and to drink and to “have fun” because I would have already been getting those feel good chemicals from playing with my dog or going on a walk with it. No booze or gambling needed...what do you guys think? Am I just a hopeless gambling drunk who craves the high of dopamine rushes? Or would a dog 🐕 be a good fit for me and bring stability and happiness to my life?

Am I getting a dog for the wrong reasons?
So I want to get a dog. I live dogs, and that’s my main purpose for wanting one, I just love them a ton. However, there’s a second reason I want to get a dog. I get quite lonely at times, and in my loneliness, I make really bad decisions. For example, today I had a slurry of bad decisions that snowballed into a pretty bad day. Got up, didn’t have any plans with anyone and was just home alone all day with nothing to look forward to. Video games weren’t fun, reading wasn’t fun, all I wanted to do was to spend time with other people, but that wasn’t going to happen because everyone I knew was busy. I felt so alone and isolated. Now I’m not excusing my actions, but I believe my loneliness led to these subsequent decisions. I went to the gas station and bought a 6 pack of beer. Drank most of that then took an Uber to the casino and blew 200$ on blackjack. IF I would have had a dog, would I have still done the same thing? I don’t know. I think at the very least I would have been less likely to do it. Maybe I wouldn’t have had such an urge to gamble and to drink and to “have fun” because I would have already been getting those feel good chemicals from playing with my dog or going on a walk with it. No booze or gambling needed...what do you guys think? Am I just a hopeless gambling drunk who craves the high of dopamine rushes? Or would a dog 🐕 be a good fit for me and bring stability and happiness to my life?

Hello everyone i am new here and i am also here to end this horrible addiction.
Last week i was on a 4 day streak and i got a lot of useful stuff done. However last Sunday i visited a porn site, because my coomer brain took over and my logical brain said it just will be a short glimpse. After being on the site i couldn't control myself anymore and fapped. It was like somebody else controlled me. I knew it was wrong and that i will feel bad afterwards but i just couldn't do anything against it. I am trying to do NoFap since 6 month, but i always fail after 4 or 5 days, because i get in this situation where i can not control myself anymore. I fapped every day since the relapse on Sunday. It never was this bad since i started with NoFap. I felt like an absolute worthless piece of sh*t after my last fap. I was laying two hours in my bed and just thought about how miserable i am.
However i realized that i have to fundamentally change my approach to fight this addiction. Until now i just tried not to fap and after every relapse i said to myself, that it will work out the next time. But this kind of thinking just caused another relapse after a couple of days. So i really have to use very aggressive methods to bring this to an end.
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So here is what i think will help me:
-create an account on Reddit and post about your plan -> i think this will give me extra motivation and i also will feel responsible to not f*ck up again (can't really explain why, but it will put me under some kind pressure). This is also the reason why i am making this post here.
-do never take a glimpse on a porn site -> most of my relapses happened because of this
-don't go on social media sites
-leave every site with content that can make you horny immediately
-don't think of girls -> i had relapses (especially in the evening when going to bed) where i started to think about girls and then i couldn't stop thinking about them. So i got hornier and hornier until i relapsed. I know this will be tricky because i have to catch myself every time when having these kind of thoughts and directly think of something else
-don't do other things that are not beneficial -> i made the experience that it is more unlikely for me to fail when not doing other useless thing because than i am disciplined all the time.
-view porn and girls that are trying to make you horny (for example porn actresses) as your biggest enemy -> i think this kind of thinking psychological helps me because it personifies the addiction in some way
-When the urge to take a glimpse on a porn site or fapping is to high: first watch the video "THE ETERNAL COOMER" (always makes me feel bad to see how i could possibly end). If that doesn't help: go back to this post and read it and also read other things on this subreddit. If that still doesn't help: do something else that releases dopamine (video games or something like that). If that doesn't help: do something where you will feel bad and guilty afterwards like gambling in an online casino until you loose money (this will then hopefully remind me of the same shitty feeling after a relapse)
-don't meet with girls -> if i don't meet with girls and don't go to parties i eliminate the risk of talking to a girl and then thinking about her afterwards and getting horny
-don't write with girls
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So i am ready to suffer and to win against the coomer side of my brain. I will try to stay 100 days clean. I also will try to post the progress here and sorry for my maybe not perfect english. I wish every other person here the power to defeat this addiction. Stay strong boiiiis!

99 days since my last gamble, i got enticed into betting on a csgo game, has no intention at all of going on the online casino. But as soon as the dopamine becomes familiar again, im hooked. Ive never become unhooked before, without a crippling loss thats brought me to tears. 99 days ago i was say on the floor in my uni dorm crying think8ng is this gonna be the death of me. Well no it isnt, i have to prove that now. Im sitting exactly even after a 36 hour binge, lucky to say the least. This will be the first time i ever stop without a huge loss, and will be a proud moment if i can get it done. Intend to tell my mum by the end of the week, when its behind me, cause otherwise ill have to tell her in bits with a huge loss, and puts fears into whether i can even control my own money. Come on pal, win the first few battles when you get that huge hooking urge, and you'll have the strength to beat them all. Do me proud.