To paint the picture for those who aren't familiar, the industry is enormous and, in NSW in particular, extremely powerful.
For a while (still? Not sure) in Brisbane, for example, you couldn't enter a bar after 1:30am unless it was a casino.
In NSW the sports clubs, of which there is one in every midsized town, have busses which circulate the retirement communities and bring the elderly to the poker machines for the day then drop them home again, broke. The busiest day is pension day.
Most small pubs have a larger and busier poker machine area than bar/beer garden area. Large "sports clubs" dedicate entire floors.
Australians lose the most money per capita to gambling by a significant margin.[1]
Yep, until folks see it they cannot understand the scale of these things.
It isn't just Crown in Melbourne, which for most folks is more like the traditional Vegas casino. All my local RSL's/Pubs are all about 50% pokie machines.
And yep, that complimentary bus is not there to bring the old folks in for a pot and parma.
Funnily enough, while it isn't the most pervasive, in New Zealand is where I have seen folks that are betting the highest. The wave of depression that hits you when see a lot of people all down on their luck betting $10 a spin every few seconds is just wild! I mean, yeah the Christchurch winter is bad but not that bad!
I'm not even Australian, but thanks to Wake In Fright, even I know gambling in AUS is something guaranteed to strip you of your civility and turn you into an outback maniac:
Recent immigrant to Australia here. Love the place, but the power of the gambling industry is alarming. Very interesting episode on the link with sports, and increasing earnings:
I started my career working on gambling apps, and it’s one of my red lines now when looking for work.
It’s an evil industry - full of dark patterns. I remember implementing a “cancel withdrawal” feature where essentially: the casino could deposit money in a customers bank account in a day when they request it. They instead choose to hold it in a pending state for a week, and allow them to cancel the withdrawal at any point in that week to immediately play with. Presumably so it didn’t feel as real as money leaving the gamblers bank account.
As a non-addicted, casual gambler (I recreationally play 1-2 no limit poker at casinos once in a blue moon), I'd hate to see casinos simply disappear, but yea they tend to be kind of sad places full of the people who can least afford to lose the money in their pocket. Don't know what the solution is. If you outlaw it, you're getting rid of a benign source of casual fun for folks like me who can keep it under control, and are not really addressing the underlying addiction of the victims--they'll just move on to underground casinos and/or more extreme gambling.
I found a local poker club, fortunately. $40 buy in tournament, no rebuys, every week, with the same 30 or so people that show up. Way more fun than playing at the casino with sad addicts and sad poker pros grinding $40k annual salaries.
Yea, I mean I do this too, including hosting my own home games. Our local club even hires dealers to help keep the games moving.
My fear is that there's no great way to outlaw predatory casinos that pick the pockets of the poor, that still allows responsible home games and private clubs. A lot of US states try/tried various ways, with rules about who can take a rake and so on, but it's difficult to make them ironclad and casinos are highly motivated to find loopholes and operate a millimeter from the edge of the law. And if you get too strict, suddenly you've criminalized grandma's $0.25 bingo game with the ladies.
Unfortunately, there's not a livable version of society where we "ban" gambling. Doing so just pushes it underground, and therefore inevitably into the hands of some kind of organized crime. I imagine the best compromise would be to create a state monopoly and make it easily (but not universally) available, while also trying to push some social stigma against it. Unfortunately for harmful vices like this, the anglosphere (and I assume a lot of other places) tends to oscillate between prohibition and hands-off marketism.
We are seeing similar with sports betting and marijuana in the US. Less than ten years ago, these were major crimes basically everywhere. Now, in large swaths of the country, you can't drive a mile without seeing a billboard for one or the other. Making them illegal again is not the answer, but we don't seem to have a standard way of shading things like this in any meaningful way.
(By the way, I'm not against people smoking a little weed or betting on football, but plenty of people do get momentum with both and it can have harmful effects for them. I believe the industries pushing both behaviors are in large part profiting off this small group of heavy "users". )
Why is this an argument? So push it underground. As a rule, old folks aren't going to take their pensions to Fast Freddy's strip club backroom poker nights. People think that because a law doesn't work 100 percent, it shouldn't exist.
What do you think gambling-addicted "old folks" who live in areas where gambling is illegal do today? They either hop a short flight to a place where it is legal OR head to Fast Freddy's. People absolutely do participate in illegal gambling when legal gambling is off the table, whether they are elderly or not.
Banning subsidized travel to casino’s alone would go quite far. Similarly banning slot machines from having sound, flashing lights, animations etc would reduce though obviously not eliminate the draw.
Vice has a cost. Anti-vice has a cost. There is no such thing as a free lunch and you're going to pay the piper somewhere. While I'm not a gambler myself, the "Just don't do $vice$" moral argument just never works on it's own.
I've played enough poker (and similar games) on computer (against bots, no real money) to know that 1) I am quite bad at assessing the expected value of my moves; 2) I am quite... what's the English word for someone who gets way too excited from the thrill of gambling and forgoes the caution? "Hasardeux" is French for it, but I don't think "hazardous" has that sense in English? Anyhow, I do know quite well that were I to gamble with real money, I'd very soon go broke and it's not a difficult observation to make, even for someone as bad at self-reflection as myself. So, I don't gamble.
And yet apparently there is something about gambling with real-life consequences that is very attractive to oh so many people who (again, apparently) can not replicate the similar experience in a less life-ruining way, so they return to gamble again and again?
> I am quite... what's the English word for someone who gets way too excited from the thrill of gambling and forgoes the caution? "Hasardeux" is French for it, but I don't think "hazardous" has that sense in English?
Does the word have to denote (literally mean) that the person is emotionally excited and engaged at the same time? If so, then perhaps "a daredevil", "hotheaded", "impetuous", "impulsive" or "rash".
There are a lot of close words like "reckless" or "irresponsible" which are often used when the person is excited, but technically they don't require it. Someone can be quite reckless while also half-asleep doing something they don't personally care about.
> what's the English word for someone who gets way too excited from the thrill of gambling and forgoes the caution? "Hasardeux" is French for it, but I don't think "hazardous" has that sense in English?
The best I can come up with is "adrenaline junky", but that isn't specific to gambling; I feel like people use that to refer to people who like base jumping or something.
Poker players would label you as being strategically too "aggressive", but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with emotion, it's just what they would call the way you play.
There are several terms of art in poker that describe various versions of this:
action player — This is fairly neutral, and describes what I think you mean. Someone who likes to gamble. Sometimes these players are really bad, sometimes they are only sort of bad. These players make bank when playing against weak players who overfold and aren’t willing to gamble.
VIP — This is a polite way to say “donator”. Many/most action players are VIPs. Their attitude is that they can gamble in the pits or gamble at the poker table, and often times the poker table presents less bad (or even good) odds when compared to the house.
LAGtard — LAG is short for “loose aggressive”. LAG can be a very profitable style, especially when deep stacked. That said, LAGtards tend to play the style badly.
spewy — describes someone who puts a lot of chips into the pot, often times in questionable spots. Noun form is “spewtard”.
I guess you're getting downvoted because people think you mean HN by "here", but you meant amongst gamblers. And you're right, it is the most apt term gp was looking for.
I definitely was not. "Courageous", "adventurous", "risk-taking", "reckless", "impudent", "bold", "daring", but with something that would mean "...almost and even to a fault or own peril", but without an inherent negative moral connotation is what I was looking for.
It doesn't have an inherent negative moral connotation when used amongst gamblers. It's been reclaimed, so to speak. But I suppose we're not amongst gamblers here, so, fair enough.
I don't recall the name of the paper, surprising to me, it was fairly detailed on how the 'satisfaction' gamblers experienced was from the familiar losses, not the occasional wins, viewed in that light it's even more tragic.
> [...] pokies users at risk of addiction (this groups makes up one-third of users).
> [...] According to the Productivity Commission, 88% of players restrict themselves to less than $1 for each bet. Problem and at-risk gamblers don’t.
These fractions of problem users are higher than I expected. Previous reading in the area (A World of Chance; Brenner, Brenner, and Brown) had led me to believe problem gambling is about as prevalent among gamblers as problem drinking is among drinkers.
What makes up the discrepancy? Does the commission have a looser definition of problem use than Brenner and Brenner? Or are drinking problems also more widespread than I believe?
Because it's fun to have diminutive version of many words. And because it differentiates us from boorish Americans - or as they are also known in Oz, seppos.
seppo is short for septic, which is short for septic tank, which rhymes with yank, and yank is a word used for any American. And although yank comes from yankee, we mostly don’t discriminate between north and south so it is a general term.
Like all words in Aussie only context can make it insulting - it can just as easily be used in a friendly way. Apparently the word seppo is not used much, maybe mostly by older Ockers. I’m summarising a long discussion on the word and usage that goes into more detail: https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-australians-call-a...
> what is it with Australians and having the cheesiest names for everything
It is just language diverging memetically. A small part of it is signalling you are not a stuck up snob.
The wannabe hoity-toity “I’m better than you”-types try and change their accent and word usage to match some “educated” upperclassish snobby accent and then they speak down to others and try to correct their English. Some of the snobby accent is memetic - due to hanging around a particular social group.
The accusation of baby-talk and cheesy comes across as aggressively stuck-up to me.
I’m from New Zealand and it is fun to see some snobby bitch get drunk and then hear her accent shift to some bogan accent(≈hick drawl) from their childhood. I’ve seen the same thing with some suits in a bimmer in a wealthy suburb change their whole demeanour to rural farmer-types given circumstances. In New Zealand farmers are often wealthy and their kids often get expensive private education and move into professional jobs.
I once saw a sign in Australia warning about crossing train tracks. In the land of the free, the sign would have all the coziness of a Secret Service agent:
KEEP OFF TRAIN TRACKS - $100 FINE PER VIOLATION
But this was Australia. So it actually read something like this: "Cross tracks safely and only at the provided walkways. Or cop a $100 fine. Don't say we didn't warn you, mate!"
That's arguably a lot better than the British ones:
- They give an safe, alternative action, which might not be obvious to some people.
- They state the authority by which the fine is issued (too small to read fully from the photograph, but something like "...Regulation 2003"). Interestingly, a historical railway sign preserved at Beamish has the name of the officer by whose authority the fine would have been issued at that time[1].
- The fine is given as 'up to' the maximum. As I understand it, the British fine is only £1000 if it can be proved that the violation was made wilfully, and non-wilful trespassing is usually (perhaps always?) only subject to a fine if done subsequent to having received a warning.
The English/British and their media are not as jarringly foreign as Americans, because Australian culture and language diverged from English culture much later than American did.
There's also 5x fewer of them, so they are less of a threat to our minority culture than Americans are - Americans don't realise just how dominant American English is in the Anglosphere and how hard it is to resist.
Australian slang represents something important about Australian values - mateship, the Anzac spirit, a fair go. Aussies don't talk like poms, because they aren't like poms.
I posit that its due to hardship - not to suggest all Australians are super hard off, but it is certainly true that acronyms/shortened words are more common in rural (think high intensity physical labor) or speed-sensitive contexts (think Wall Street, engineering jargon in a engineering context, such as software, or SMS text-messaging).
Given their origins as a prison labor camp, coupled with a legitimately difficult environment (hot, arid, isolated by thousands of miles of ocean, fairly wild/aggressive wildlife such as crocodiles, snakes, kangaroos), their propensity to shortened, almost mono or duo-syllabic words makes plenty of sense in that context.
And finally I've seen the (variation of the) argument usually applied to the Russians, about their slavish nature ("During the Stalin's reign, half of the country was in jail and the other half was the jailers" etc.) leading to the impossibility for them to form a civilized and liberal society, which is usually retorted with an example of the Australians... being applied to the Australians itself.
No, one doesn't need to be of good breed to be freely able to speak multisyllabic words.
> No, one doesn't need to be of good breed to be freely able to speak multisyllabic words.
Eh? Not what I'm saying at all. Breed has nothing to do with it... circumstance has much more to do with word shortenings... not sure what I got downvoted for...
I suspect it is just something we picked up from our British heritage, the whole slang thing.
Apple and Pairs, Up the Stairs - all that.
I do find it funny when some folks have been here for a few years and they have picked up all the slang. Someone I used to know had been here for 10 years but still had a very thick Italian accent. It was always a joy when he would bust out a sentence like "I took the mars bar up the Tulla but it was right chockers. All I wanted for a Chook!". Translated, "I took the car up the freeway but there was a traffic jam. I wanted a hot chicken."
To paint the picture for those who aren't familiar, the industry is enormous and, in NSW in particular, extremely powerful.
For a while (still? Not sure) in Brisbane, for example, you couldn't enter a bar after 1:30am unless it was a casino.
In NSW the sports clubs, of which there is one in every midsized town, have busses which circulate the retirement communities and bring the elderly to the poker machines for the day then drop them home again, broke. The busiest day is pension day.
Most small pubs have a larger and busier poker machine area than bar/beer garden area. Large "sports clubs" dedicate entire floors.
Australians lose the most money per capita to gambling by a significant margin.[1]
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/552821/gambling-losses-p...
It isn't just Crown in Melbourne, which for most folks is more like the traditional Vegas casino. All my local RSL's/Pubs are all about 50% pokie machines.
And yep, that complimentary bus is not there to bring the old folks in for a pot and parma.
Funnily enough, while it isn't the most pervasive, in New Zealand is where I have seen folks that are betting the highest. The wave of depression that hits you when see a lot of people all down on their luck betting $10 a spin every few seconds is just wild! I mean, yeah the Christchurch winter is bad but not that bad!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WDK5PByQgM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mh7qZq0f_w
Fly 1: Bet you I can run up this wall faster than you.
Fly 2: Bet you you cant.
They say Australians will bet on two flies running up a wall. If you have a gambling problem, call this number yada yada yada.
Other poster from the same restaurant:
Win a trip for two to Las Vegas.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2023/may/10...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_Australia#New_Sout...
It’s an evil industry - full of dark patterns. I remember implementing a “cancel withdrawal” feature where essentially: the casino could deposit money in a customers bank account in a day when they request it. They instead choose to hold it in a pending state for a week, and allow them to cancel the withdrawal at any point in that week to immediately play with. Presumably so it didn’t feel as real as money leaving the gamblers bank account.
Used to be if you set, e.g. a £50/month deposit limit, then you couldn't deposit more than £50 a month.
They recently changed it to be a net limit, so if you withdrawl £500 after a win, you can now deposit £550.
While it can be argued that it still acts as a guardrail for maximum losses, it absolutely encourages problem gamblers to deposit more.
cardies = video poker
https://theconversation.com/pokies-reforms-explained-how-goo...
My fear is that there's no great way to outlaw predatory casinos that pick the pockets of the poor, that still allows responsible home games and private clubs. A lot of US states try/tried various ways, with rules about who can take a rake and so on, but it's difficult to make them ironclad and casinos are highly motivated to find loopholes and operate a millimeter from the edge of the law. And if you get too strict, suddenly you've criminalized grandma's $0.25 bingo game with the ladies.
Maybe go see a movie instead.
We are seeing similar with sports betting and marijuana in the US. Less than ten years ago, these were major crimes basically everywhere. Now, in large swaths of the country, you can't drive a mile without seeing a billboard for one or the other. Making them illegal again is not the answer, but we don't seem to have a standard way of shading things like this in any meaningful way.
(By the way, I'm not against people smoking a little weed or betting on football, but plenty of people do get momentum with both and it can have harmful effects for them. I believe the industries pushing both behaviors are in large part profiting off this small group of heavy "users". )
Why is this an argument? So push it underground. As a rule, old folks aren't going to take their pensions to Fast Freddy's strip club backroom poker nights. People think that because a law doesn't work 100 percent, it shouldn't exist.
Banning subsidized travel to casino’s alone would go quite far. Similarly banning slot machines from having sound, flashing lights, animations etc would reduce though obviously not eliminate the draw.
Trivially so. People with gambling addictions don't wind up as old folks with pensions.
True
But we can regulate it
We can limit the damage
And yet apparently there is something about gambling with real-life consequences that is very attractive to oh so many people who (again, apparently) can not replicate the similar experience in a less life-ruining way, so they return to gamble again and again?
Does the word have to denote (literally mean) that the person is emotionally excited and engaged at the same time? If so, then perhaps "a daredevil", "hotheaded", "impetuous", "impulsive" or "rash".
There are a lot of close words like "reckless" or "irresponsible" which are often used when the person is excited, but technically they don't require it. Someone can be quite reckless while also half-asleep doing something they don't personally care about.
The best I can come up with is "adrenaline junky", but that isn't specific to gambling; I feel like people use that to refer to people who like base jumping or something.
In contrast, "junky" is an adjective to describe a generally bad state or quality. "Junky adrenaline" is probably medical waste.
Ex: "It's not safe to travel in a junky car driven by a junkie. Worse still to sail on a junkie's junky junk."
Is this ‘a gambler’? Addict, risk taker or similar?
action player — This is fairly neutral, and describes what I think you mean. Someone who likes to gamble. Sometimes these players are really bad, sometimes they are only sort of bad. These players make bank when playing against weak players who overfold and aren’t willing to gamble.
VIP — This is a polite way to say “donator”. Many/most action players are VIPs. Their attitude is that they can gamble in the pits or gamble at the poker table, and often times the poker table presents less bad (or even good) odds when compared to the house.
LAGtard — LAG is short for “loose aggressive”. LAG can be a very profitable style, especially when deep stacked. That said, LAGtards tend to play the style badly.
spewy — describes someone who puts a lot of chips into the pot, often times in questionable spots. Noun form is “spewtard”.
I think degen is the common term that used here. It's short for degenerate.
Sir, I think you mixed up your HN account with 4Chan...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/degenerate#Adjective
>(of a gambler) Addictive or compulsive.
> [...] According to the Productivity Commission, 88% of players restrict themselves to less than $1 for each bet. Problem and at-risk gamblers don’t.
These fractions of problem users are higher than I expected. Previous reading in the area (A World of Chance; Brenner, Brenner, and Brown) had led me to believe problem gambling is about as prevalent among gamblers as problem drinking is among drinkers.
What makes up the discrepancy? Does the commission have a looser definition of problem use than Brenner and Brenner? Or are drinking problems also more widespread than I believe?
it's like a bunch of babytalk only it's said by literally everyone.
seppo is short for septic, which is short for septic tank, which rhymes with yank, and yank is a word used for any American. And although yank comes from yankee, we mostly don’t discriminate between north and south so it is a general term.
Like all words in Aussie only context can make it insulting - it can just as easily be used in a friendly way. Apparently the word seppo is not used much, maybe mostly by older Ockers. I’m summarising a long discussion on the word and usage that goes into more detail: https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-australians-call-a...
> what is it with Australians and having the cheesiest names for everything
It is just language diverging memetically. A small part of it is signalling you are not a stuck up snob.
The wannabe hoity-toity “I’m better than you”-types try and change their accent and word usage to match some “educated” upperclassish snobby accent and then they speak down to others and try to correct their English. Some of the snobby accent is memetic - due to hanging around a particular social group.
The accusation of baby-talk and cheesy comes across as aggressively stuck-up to me.
I’m from New Zealand and it is fun to see some snobby bitch get drunk and then hear her accent shift to some bogan accent(≈hick drawl) from their childhood. I’ve seen the same thing with some suits in a bimmer in a wealthy suburb change their whole demeanour to rural farmer-types given circumstances. In New Zealand farmers are often wealthy and their kids often get expensive private education and move into professional jobs.
- They give an safe, alternative action, which might not be obvious to some people.
- They state the authority by which the fine is issued (too small to read fully from the photograph, but something like "...Regulation 2003"). Interestingly, a historical railway sign preserved at Beamish has the name of the officer by whose authority the fine would have been issued at that time[1].
- The fine is given as 'up to' the maximum. As I understand it, the British fine is only £1000 if it can be proved that the violation was made wilfully, and non-wilful trespassing is usually (perhaps always?) only subject to a fine if done subsequent to having received a warning.
[1]: https://www.deviantart.com/rlkitterman/art/NER-Public-Warnin...
There's also 5x fewer of them, so they are less of a threat to our minority culture than Americans are - Americans don't realise just how dominant American English is in the Anglosphere and how hard it is to resist.
Given their origins as a prison labor camp, coupled with a legitimately difficult environment (hot, arid, isolated by thousands of miles of ocean, fairly wild/aggressive wildlife such as crocodiles, snakes, kangaroos), their propensity to shortened, almost mono or duo-syllabic words makes plenty of sense in that context.
No, one doesn't need to be of good breed to be freely able to speak multisyllabic words.
Eh? Not what I'm saying at all. Breed has nothing to do with it... circumstance has much more to do with word shortenings... not sure what I got downvoted for...
I suspect it is just something we picked up from our British heritage, the whole slang thing.
Apple and Pairs, Up the Stairs - all that.
I do find it funny when some folks have been here for a few years and they have picked up all the slang. Someone I used to know had been here for 10 years but still had a very thick Italian accent. It was always a joy when he would bust out a sentence like "I took the mars bar up the Tulla but it was right chockers. All I wanted for a Chook!". Translated, "I took the car up the freeway but there was a traffic jam. I wanted a hot chicken."
Guess intellectual curiosity isn't everyone's forte. That's fine.
They must be doing it intentionally to infuriate you (the only cocky in Oz with sufficient snags for the barbie).