Is Gambling A Good Way To Make Money Fast?

By Kalinda Rose Stevenson

Gambling To Make Money Fast

Gambling is a way to get money fast. The question is, does gambling really teach you what you need to know about how to make money?

I began to wonder about this question when I attended a real estate seminar in Las Vegas. I make no judgments about the ethical or moral aspects of gambling. I also make no judgments about gambling as a pastime. Obviously thousands of people find gambling fun. What struck me as I walked through the casino on my way to a real estate seminar was the connection between gambling and making money.

If you want to get money fast by gambling, you have to beat the odds. Walk through a Las Vegas casino and you will see people mechanically feeding slot machines, hoping for a payoff, motivated by a combination of greed and hope.

Las Vegas dangles before people the promise of winning lots of money. Money is both the price of playing and the tangible reward for winning. But the real game is much deeper.

How The Gambling Game Is Stacked Against You

Unless people are hopelessly naïve, they know that the house wins most of the time. The slot machines and the poker tables and the roulette wheels make tangible the eternal human hope to win against the odds.

Watching people in casinos reminds me of college psychology classes about conditioned behavior. Rats, mice, and pigeons can be conditioned to trip levers again and again as long as they get a reward once in a while.

People sitting in front of slot machines behave the same way. Gamblers mechanically feed coins into the slots, and pull the lever, again and again. When someone wins, lights flash, special music plays, and coins clatter. The human lab rats pulling levers on nearby slot machine see the lights, hear the music, and hear the clattering coins, and think, “Maybe I’m next.” 

If no one ever won in Las Vegas, the casinos would close down. But the casinos fix the odds so that people win often enough to keep the hope alive and keep pulling the levers, waiting for the payoff.

If you go to Las Vegas and look around you, you’ll know that it took more than a few pennies and quarters to build these monuments to excess in the desert. The casinos on the Las Vegas Strip are massive creations of glitter, gaudy colors, glimmering lights, and the constant ding-ding-dinging of slot machines. All you need to do is to look at the size of these casinos to know one irrefutable truth. Each casino makes much more money than it pays out in winnings.

What Gambling Doesn’t Teach You About How To Make Money

So what does gambling teach you about making money?  Gambling has some inherent limitations as a way to teach anyone how to make money.

The most important limitation is that whether you win money or lose money is not really up to you. You might win. More likely, you will lose. As a method for getting money, gambling depends upon chance, luck, and computer programs designed to give the lion’s share of the money to the casino.

How Can You Get Money?

You can get money several ways. The first way most of us ever got money was as a gift. Maybe your uncle gave you a dime when you were five years old. Or you got a five dollar bill from your grandmother in a birthday card. Or maybe you inherited the family fortune. The money came to you as a gift.

The second way to get money is the one that most of us know the best. You earn it by working for it. Whether an hourly wage, a salary, a flat fee for work done, you get money in payment for your time and effort.

The third way to get money is to make money through transactions, by offering products and services for sale. This is the essence of business.

A fourth way to get money is to invest money with the intention of getting more money than you started with as your investment earns interest.

A fifth way to get money fast is to win it by beating the odds. The fact is that people do beat the odds now and then. You might be one of the lucky ones.

The most important distinction between making money and other methods of getting money concerns responsibility. Gambling with the hope that you will get money fast from slot machines and gaming tables is a fundamental displacement of responsibility.

 Who Is Responsible For Making Money?

During the same period of time that thousands of people were sitting in casinos, feeding coins and bills into slot machines, hoping for the big payoff, I heard several speakers talk about their strategies to make money through real estate investments.

The key difference between the gamblers and the speakers was not the desire to make money fast, but the sense of responsibility. The gamblers were waiting for slot machines to pay off. The real estate investors were creating strategic action plans to make money through their own efforts.

When it comes to playing the odds, the gamblers hope to beat the house at its own game. The real estate investors learn that they are the house, and that the reward comes from their own efforts to make money rather than luck.

This is the real secret of making money. You increase your own odds to make money when you become the house and play your own money making game.

The fastest way to learn how to make money is to understand the difference between making money and other methods to get money.  Find out the difference in the Best Books Award winner, No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors: Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Real Estate Game That Transforms Your Money Struggles Into Financial Abundance.  It’s not just for real estate investors, but for anyone who wants to understand what money really is and how to make money.

For Your No Money Limits Life,

Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.

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