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So happy..

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Even if I've been a long way from happiness.. all I have to do is close my eyes and remember my connection to everything, and the moments I am deeply happy.. when I am remembering my roots, my connectedness.. there is not a shadow.. of any doubt or deceit.. or fault or glitch or wrongdoing or guilt.. and I know that the reservoir of more happiness than I could ever need, has never left me, and was and always is my source..

I got a book today. And my check was in the mail too. The book was about poker, and I have been so glad about poker lately. I am so glad, and I know it is a secret, but there is no harm in telling that secret, that managing money is one of the most important skills in life. And it is a skill that they don't teach you in schools. Maybe this country would not be in the debt situation it is, if the teachers taught the children not to accumulate debt, and how to use their money.

Why do we think it is the norm to be in debt, of tens of thousands of dollars? Why should it not be the norm to have an equal amount to that in surplus, in net-worth?

They should teach money management, and simply education of expectation. Instead, people are widely, vastly in ignorance. For one reason, gambling is considered taboo, so it is not taught in schools. People do not understand how money has expectation, no matter where it is, it has some changing value.

Expectation is what money will be in the future. It's a simple mathematical concept, one that is taught in our math, but its application is utterly foreign to the average citizen, unless they thankfully educated themselves on its existence. If money is sitting in a bank, then its expectation is negative, equivalent to the rate of inflation. If they are getting paid interest, then the expectation is whatever difference between inflation and the interest.

In gambling - every bet has an expectation. The bets of all the games a standard casino are meant to be negative. Some are fixed odds, such as craps and roulette and keno, and in some they are always changing, such as blackjack and poker. The former cannot be beaten, the latter can.

In the fixed odds games, the bettor may win or lose any particular bet, but, for every $100 bet, is expected to in return receive some percentage, less than 100, of the original bet. In roulette the house advantage is 5.26%, in craps it is 1.41%. So in craps, if you bet you may win or lose, and it is near 50% likelihood both ways. But as the number of bets you make increase, the chance that you are down also increases. If you average the number of trials, you will find your return per bet will come nearer and nearer to -1.41% - or in other words, a $1.41 lost on average, per $100.

However, there is also a certain chance - I would have to do the math for craps, but roughly around 10% or so - that you will always be down - that is, that you will never have been above 0 in all of the times you've bet. So a sequence could be, you lost twice, then you won once, then you lost, etc... and you never broke even again.

As you can see, that is pretty terrible. But if you knew about this, wouldn't you be far more likely avoid games like craps and roulette? In fact, I haven't told you everything, and I can tell you the more I know about gambling theory, the less likely it is I would ever play craps.

Guess what. As bad as craps is - the lottery for example is worse. It is worse in terms of expectation. In fact, expectation for the lottery is around -50%.

Okay, you say, So what.

A person who is 50, who has smoked an average of a pack a day since he or she was 18 - if they had invested that money in the stocks of the tobacco companies, would by the present be millionaires. What does that matter? I don't know, what would you do with a million? Is it just an airy game? No, it's not. They would really have more than a million dollars.

However, it doesn't take a million years, I mean, 40 years, to have a million dollars. You can experience the result of correctly managing money immediately.

Updated 12-10-2011 at 08:29 PM by NikolaiI

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