Big Win or Big Lie?

I was reading an article today which included a quote from a recovered disordered gambler. The quote included a phrase which I have increasingly come to dislike as I feel that it is too easily used to dismiss the significance and extent of mental disorder in gambling addiction. That phrase is the ‘big win’. Specifically, when used in a context that tries to explain away continued harmful engagement in disordered gambling as simply being the individual chasing a single big win which will solve all their problems. That is delusional nonsense, and when used by individuals who have experienced their own gambling harms it concerns me as it suggests that they have not really come to a proper understanding about their own gambling behaviours and the drivers behind them.

So, you might ask, what exactly is wrong with this phrase. After all, isn’t gambling all about trying to win money, and doesn’t it make sense that if gambling has left you in a financial hole then attempting to win sufficient money, through further gambling, to enable you to climb out of that hole must be a logical driver behind continuing to gamble. Even when it has proven unsuccessful in the past. My answer to this would be that, yes, if you have simply made a few bad bets then, in theory, devising and executing a ‘good’ bet which will recoup all your losses may indeed seem logical. But that only applies where gambling is still a controllable activity to which the gambler is capable of taking a detached viewpoint about the risks and rewards involved in gambling. Once a gambling disorder has taken hold then, quite simply, the individual has lost that ability to stay detached and logical. 

A disordered gambler may well tell themselves that one big win will solve their problems and would allow them to safely withdraw from further gambling, but this is a deception which the addicted part of their brain allows to be propagated in order to justify their own continuance in a harmful and addictive pattern of behaviour. A gambling disorder occurs when the brain redraws the default emotional responses which it assigns to exposing oneself to risk. Initially, gambling will commonly be result focussed – winning will bring an emotional high, as well as probable financial gain. However, once gambling becomes a normalised activity it will no longer be the winning that sparks this emotional reward but rather the thought and act of placing a bet, or spinning the wheel to initiate a gamble, which fires the brain’s pleasure receptors. The focus becomes the gambling activity rather than the consequence of whatever result ensues. Winning or losing simply nuance the main emotional ride which becomes embodied in the risk that the gambler is engaging with when betting or gambling.

If we think about it, gambling is effectively a synonym for risking. The bigger the gamble then the bigger the risk. Which is where risk becomes a dangerous thing to have as a primary and continued provider of emotional reward. The more one gets addicted to risk, the greater the risk one seeks out. But what is risk – is it doing something in order to gain from it, or is it doing something knowing that one might lose from it. The answer is, of course, the latter. One doesn’t risk ‘winning’ something, one only risks ‘losing’ something. And that is where the true danger of disordered gambling arises. The potential benefit of winning a gamble is a sideshow to the potential harm that losing it will bring. Individuals with a gambling disorder will be emotionally conflicted. At some level they fully realise that they are harming themselves but still they find ways of convincing themselves that they should continue doing so. The reason why, is because they have come to associate risk and loss with heightened emotional states of excitement. They are addicted to the high that risking even greater harm brings them.

My usual analogy here is that they find themselves playing a game of Russian Roulette. At first they take immense emotional excitement from the risk involved in holding a gun against their head where there is a one in six chance that pulling the trigger will cause a bullet to blow their brains out. But after a while, having somehow failed to kill themselves, this excitement lessens, and they feel the need to restore that old level of excitement by playing with two bullets instead of just one. Then three, four, and finally, five. Never six, six is not a risk, merely a certainty. Yes, filling all barrels with bullets and pulling the trigger is guaranteed to result in the very consequence which using just one bullet offered the potential for happening, but it brings none of the emotional reward which the previous uncertainty of risk did provide. Tragically though, sometimes when five bullets stop providing the sought after and re-affirming high which the disordered gambler finds themselves striving for, then they can indeed resort to filling all six metaphorical barrels and seeking a permanent end to their mental suffering. A totally extreme and improbable analogy, I will freely admit, but one which I feel is close to the self-destructive rationalisation which develops inside a disordered gambler’s mind. Desensitisation to risk/reward gradients, when combined with self-perpetuating guilt and ever diminishing self-esteem, all act to take positive resolution off the mental decision table. Active gambling addicts do not seek salvation, they seek continued punishment.

Which is where the ‘Big Win’ myth becomes a ‘Big Lie’. For a seriously disordered gambler it is always about losing big rather than winning big. For anyone to say otherwise is a distortion of the truth and I would simply ask any disordered gambler trying to say otherwise to look back at their past gambling and to tell me if they ever found themselves in profit, or in a position wherein they could have stopped and still managed to live a viable, financially secure life. The answer will undoubtedly be that, yes, at some point they could have been in either situation. So why didn’t they stop and put gambling behind them? Because it was never really about winning, ‘big’ or otherwise, it was always about risking losing.

The individual I was talking about at the start of this article has several life experiences in common with my own. They too committed fraud to enable them to continue gambling in a disordered and self-destructive manner, and they too went to prison for doing so. In which case one might quite reasonably enquire as to what it is that makes that person’s belief in their crimes being driven by ‘chasing the big win’ any less valid than my own belief that it wasn’t. Surely they know their own mind? I say no, they don’t. The ‘big win’ is an excuse, a smokescreen which is used all too frequently to explain away disordered gambling as being an ill-judged weighing up of potential gain over loss, to individuals who have never experienced the full thrall of gambling addiction. I can understand why this may find purchase with such people who have no personal experience of the condition. When faced with something which seems impossible to comprehend yourself doing then it is quite natural to take something which you have encountered before and expand it to fit the scenario being presented to you. The person overreached and dug a deeper hole while trying to dig their way out. The idea that the person ended up digging it deeper precisely because they had no hope of digging themselves out would simply make no sense.

At my own trial I, like many disordered gamblers who end up falling into crime to fund their addiction, was effectively a detached bystander letting the need for justice and punishment carry me along in a wave of guilt and regret. It was only much later in prison, while reading the transcript of my court appearance, that I came across the words ‘chasing the big win that never came’. According to my lawyer, that had been my own phraseology, and my justification for continuing to commit crime and continuing to gamble. I have had plenty of time to reflect, and to remember just what I did and didn’t say back then, and I can assure you that those words never crossed my lips. They are not the words of an addict but simply the words that a non-addict uses to explain addictive behaviour in a way that rationalises the irrational. I have since come to encounter this exact phraseology in many cases where gambling addicts are found guilty of fraud and theft and I now consider it to be a barrier to the proper understanding of gambling disorder and addiction as a cause of criminal engagement. I have even heard it used in cases where the accused has actually ‘won big’, winning far more than they were accused of stealing, and yet the fact that the accused did not then use these winnings to make good their crimes and instead gambled them all away again seems to pass over the heads of the ‘learned’ gentlefolk making such use of the phrase. To the judges this becomes not a sign of irrational behaviour but simply a further vindication of their belief in the greed of the offending party. They obviously wanted to win even more, to ‘win bigger’, what they had was not enough for them. And, in a way, such a viewpoint has some unintended truth in it. Whatever amount the disordered gambler won would indeed never be enough, not because of greed, but because of the self-destructive nature of addiction.

So, the ‘big win’ is indeed a ‘big lie’, whether it is being used to paper over the underlying mental disorder of an accused addict, or by just such an addict who has not yet fully grasped the truth behind their own past behaviour. When it comes to gambling disorder the only ‘big win’ that ever truly matters is when an understanding of the mental disorder causing it to occur is achieved. I look forward to the day when we can all share in that ‘win’. It will be a truly big day.