Do You Have a Number That Would Make You Quit Gambling Forever?

[SharpEddie47]

Question that sounds simple until you actually try to answer it.

For years I told myself the number was retirement money. Enough to supplement whatever I'd saved from consulting. A specific figure that meant I'd done what I set out to do and could walk away satisfied.

Last year I passed that number.

Still betting.

So either the number was wrong, or I moved it when I got close, or the number was never really the point and I was using it as a story about having an exit.

Has anyone got an actual number. Not a concept of a number. A real figure that you genuinely believe would make you stop completely and permanently.

And if you do: how confident are you that you wouldn't just move it.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Had a number. Reached it. Kept going.

Told myself the new number was the real one.

I've done this three times now.

The number isn't a target. It's a horizon. Every time you reach it the horizon moves exactly the same distance ahead.

I understand this completely. I'm still walking toward the current horizon.

The number is a story I tell myself about having an endpoint. The endpoint doesn't exist and I think I've known that for longer than I've admitted.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Honestly never had a proper number.

Always been about the experience not the accumulation.

I'm not trying to build something with the winnings.

Just... Saturday with money on the rugby. Been that since I was twenty-two.

So the question doesn't quite work for me the same way.

There's no number because there was never a financial goal.

Which might be more honest than having a number you keep moving.

Or might be a different kind of problem.

Haven't decided which.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

I've never thought about this before right now.

Do I have a number.

I don't think I do.

I'd have said winning enough to clear my credit card? But that's not really a quit-forever number, that's just a win I'd like to have.

The forever part is what trips me up.

Forever is such a long time.

I think the honest answer is I've never seriously imagined stopping. Which is probably information about something.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

Had a number. Sort of.

Told myself when I'd covered my son's first year of college I could walk away knowing the betting had actually built something real outside itself.

Reached that number eighteen months ago.

Modified the target to four years of college instead of one.

Classic Eddie-described behavior. Horizon moving.

The coaching angle on this: I tell my players that goals without deadlines are just wishes.

My number has no deadline attached to it.

A number without a deadline is a wish dressed up as a plan.

I've been wishing for an exit for twelve years.

 

[Klaus]

Yes. Have a number. Specific figure. Written down.

It represents the point at which the cumulative lifetime profit from betting, if invested conventionally, would produce meaningful passive income.

At current trajectory: approximately six to eight years away.

Have not examined whether I would actually stop upon reaching it.

Reading this thread I am examining it for the first time.

Honest assessment: I would probably continue in reduced form. Describe it as recreational rather than serious. Maintain the methodology at lower stakes.

The number may be a retirement from serious betting rather than a retirement from betting.

Which is a meaningful difference I have been avoiding.

 

[oli_sussex]

No number.

Had a professional endpoint at the exchange. Clear conditions for leaving. Met them. Left.

That decision was about working conditions and ethical concerns. Finite and achievable.

Betting is different. There are no working conditions to escape. No ethical line I've already identified as the trigger.

Without a specific grievance to resolve the endpoint has nothing to attach to.

The number would have to be arbitrary. Arbitrary numbers don't hold when the moment of reaching them arrives.

I have instead a set of conditions under which I would stop. Not a number. A situation.

Not sure I want to examine whether that situation is achievable either.

 

[DublinDegen]

no number...

never had one...

this question makes me realize that having a number means you have a relationship with betting that includes an exit...

i've never had an exit in mind...

not because i planned to bet forever...

just because thinking about stopping was too uncomfortable to do properly...

the number would have required me to imagine life after betting...

couldn't do that...

still finding it hard...

the number isn't the problem...

imagining what fills the space where the number used to be...

that's the problem...

 

[TaffyTipster]

Conor got to the thing faster than the rest of us.

The number isn't about money.

It's about whether you can imagine the after.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Conor's right.

The number is a proxy for the question you can't ask directly.

Can you picture a life where this isn't part of the structure.

If you can't picture it you invent a number and defer the question.

If you can picture it you either quit or you realize the picture is less appealing than you expected.

 

[FadeThePublic]

The picture being less appealing than expected is the one I don't hear discussed.

Everyone assumes quitting is the desirable outcome that the betting prevents.

What if some of us have looked at the picture of life without it and found it genuinely less interesting.

Not proudly. Not as a recommendation.

Just honestly.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

Fade that's an uncomfortable thing to say but I think it's true for more people in this forum than would admit it.

The betting isn't just a habit you're trapped in.

For some of us it's also something that makes the texture of daily life different from what it would be without it.

Quitting means accepting the flatter version.

The number is the thing that's supposed to make the flatter version feel like a reward rather than a loss.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Wait.

So the number is supposed to make us feel like we won something on the way out.

So that stopping doesn't feel like giving up but like graduating.

Is that what the number is for.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Princess that's exactly what the number is for.

It's the story that makes the exit feel like success rather than defeat.

The problem is you can always tell yourself you haven't graduated yet.

The graduation keeps getting postponed.

 

[Klaus]

Princess and Eddie identifying the psychological function of the number precisely.

It is a face-saving mechanism.

Not a genuine exit strategy.

A genuine exit strategy would have conditions beyond the number. A date. An accountability structure. Someone who knows about it.

Mine has none of those things.

It is a number in a private document that I control and can revise at any time without consequence.

That is not a plan. That is a comfort.

 

[oli_sussex]

Klaus describing a number that exists to be moved.

The private document with no accountability is the tell.

If the number were real it would be shared. There would be someone to answer to when it arrived.

The privacy of the number is the evidence of its function.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Bronwyn doesn't know my numbers.

Any of them. What I win, what I lose, what would make me stop.

She knows I bet. She doesn't know the rest.

Which means there's no one to hold the number for me even if I set one.

 

[DublinDegen]

therapist asked me about a stop number once...

i said i didn't have one...

she asked what i'd need to feel like stopping made sense...

sat with that for a long time...

said i'd need to feel like i had enough of something else that i wasn't leaving a gap...

she said that was the most honest answer she'd heard to that question...

didn't feel like progress at the time...

reading this thread it feels like it was...

the number isn't the thing...

the something else is the thing...

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

Conor that's the thread right there.

The number is a distraction from the actual question.

Which is: what would fill the space.

If you don't know what fills the space the number is meaningless.

You'll reach it and look at the empty space it was protecting you from seeing and keep betting.

 

[ThePuntingProf]

I had a number once and Margaret knew it, we agreed on it together early in our serious betting years, a figure that would represent genuine supplementary income over a lifetime and would justify the time and energy the whole enterprise had consumed, it was a shared number with a shared meaning, when Margaret died the number lost its function entirely, it had been meaningful because it was the point at which we would do something together with what betting had built, without her the number became just a number, I have continued betting for eleven years since she died and have never set a new number because I cannot construct the picture that would give a new number meaning, what would I be quitting toward, the original number was a door as we discussed in the last thread, the door required her to walk through it with me, without her the door is just a wall with a number written on it, I still walk toward it out of habit, I no longer know what I expect to find when I arrive.