Anything for a Flutter

For the third straight week, $11,000,000 in bets went through the mutuel windows at California's Santa Anita race track. In England last year, people bet -L-500,000,000 on horses and dogs. Since most bettors usually lose, why do they keep at it? In London's Spectator, a reformed English bettor named Edwin Leonard Packer made a remarkably clear dissection of the anatomy of gambling.

"I started, as usual, with small stakes. Winnings from small sums soon cease to satisfy, and when I staked and lost larger amounts, the anxiety occasioned was considerable. This anxiety has a twofold effect. It creates an inconsistency of disposition, good or bad temper showing itself according to the fluctuation of fortune --which is injurious to the backer's immediate circle and in particular to children. . . . Secondly, the anxiety which follows a losing run, the empty feeling in the stomach ... in time come to be appreciated in a masochistic fashion. They are part of the tension which gambling provides and which in my opinion is its principal attraction.

"If an investigation were made into the activities and interests of the regular gambler ... it would reveal an almost total lack of interest on his part in politics. The man who likes a flutter every day is not concerned with . . . the international scene and the current High Court case. Waiting for the results after the bets have been placed has a peculiar effect on the mind . . . drains work of any interest it may have, and deadens initiative."

Gambler Packer found himself reluctant to record his losses: "The prestige of the gambler is dear to his heart. When he is winning he will tell you. When he is losing he uses such phrases as 'breaking even' or 'just keeping my end up.' . . .

"Losing regularly does not cure your gambler, nor will taxation, curtailment or prohibition. . . . He gambles because it provides an emotional tension which his mind demands. He is suffering from a deficiency disease, and the only antidote he knows is betting.

Edwin Packer knew no cure for the disease: a man just had to break himself of it. He concluded: "Our industrial civilization has produced, in spite of progress and the emancipation promised by science, a sense of boredom and frustration in the common man. ... A restriction on gambling in any form may merely serve to direct the emotional drive into other and perhaps less socially acceptable channels."

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