Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 134

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Popular Culture Review

rationality. The compulsive gambler sees order in chaos and is always ready to try
a new system to exploit it. The compulsive gambler cares more about statistics
and patterns, always believing that there is a cosmic harmony: God doesn’t
play dice, but He determ ined the rules for those o f us who do. The
compulsive gambler thinks that stopping to pick up a freshly fallen quarter from
an old woman’s slot cup in order to hand it back to her will count for something
more, that there is rational cause and effect, that God’s pit boss (“Peter the Saint”?)
will be rating the play and will comp him appropriately with a good turn at the
roulette wheel. This is the sickness, agrees novelist Edward Allen. The compul
sive gambler:
...brings too much rational baggage along, into a part of
the world where it does not work....A normal gambler knows
the dice and the cards and the wheels and the video chips will
play anything but fair....The healthy gambler winces, gets dis
gusted and finally writes it off, knowing the universe is
unfair...[but the] compulsive, frantic on a losing night, seems
to believe both in fair play and in the inherently balanced na
ture of the universe — and so goes on losing disastrously, la
boring under the conviction that the universe will relent, will
show a touch of human decency and will force the cards to pay
the wronged player back for all those previous acts of cruelty.18
The normal gambler has no rational delusions, no belief that determinism rules
our lives. This gambler smiles at the random nature of it