Sixty Days of Addiction

I'd seen it all before, of course -- presidents of companies, CFOs and other captains of industry, legislative leaders, world class athletes considered the best of the best. All show up in Las Vegas with plans, with systems, with great concentration, energy, and indomitable will. They come to conquer the games, to feed at the great cash trough in plain view, and to collect the respect and acknowledgement of further greatness that comes with that conquest.

They play negative EV games, using all of the skills and abilities that have made them the very definition of American success. They play negative EV games, the science of which has been crystalline and solved for decades. They challenge the math. And they lose.

The more they play, the more they lose. Panache doesn't help. Channeling James Bond doesn't work. Thoughts and prayers have no effect. The more they try, the more they lose. At home, they start with the small lies to friends and family. Lies they themselves almost believe because their checkbooks are barely dented, or they have separate secret stashes of funds. They tell lies about breaking even or losing just a little or bigger lies about winning this or that. In their minds, they compartmentalize the  results of one session from another, convincing themselves that maybe they aren't really lying.

The days pass. The math looms, intractable. Implacable. The science and the math and the models of risk of ruin sit there, facing them each time they play.  The will, the influence, the charm and experience that led these people to all of their worldly successes can't budge the math or the science or the charts. The reality of the situation cannot be seduced by their skills or reputations.

So these people lose more. Since they cannot affect the games, they turn their will and influence and seduction to the people at home. They hide the reality. They borrow, they lie, and still they play. They need to be a winner, but their financial straits start to slowly leak, oozing into view for those closest to them. The friends who notice are dismissed. The players take up with hosts who tell them what they want to hear. They surround themselves with enablers, who augment their lies.

And then, one day, the checkbook reads zero, and all that could be borrowed has been borrowed. The president of the company, the world famous athlete, their behaviors are laid bare by the stark reality of their gutted finances. By now, their families know that they have lied  and that they've been lying for a long time. So the business elite and former mega-rich athletes step to the public podium at long last and admit what they have done.

The math was always there to be seen, the statistical models of risk of ruin clearly laid out. But for whatever reasons, no matter the cost to themselves or others, they had wanted to play the game. The game of perceiving themselves as expert, as winners, as above the mere models of mortal man. As beyond the science of probability.

Addiction to hubris, to accolades, is a terrible thing. In gambling, it doesn't matter if your name is Barkley or Milch or Tose or Mickelson or Jordan or Bennett. The numbers do not care. If you play negative EV games, you lose. When science and math are ignored, when risk of ruin models take a back seat to hunches and "knowing a lot," that ignorance doesn't change the science, the math, or the models, and it doesn't detour the oncoming freight train known as reality.

For the last 60 days, the addictions of an American president have been on display. On Sunday, March 29, he was finally forced to come clean, admitting that his two-month take on reality had been seriously flawed. Hopeful adjectives finally stepped aside for the math and the models. Because some of us lost 60 days of preparation, the cost of this American president's addictions to hubris, self revelation, and applause will be enormously high.

He should have known his day of public reckoning would come. After all, he once owned casinos.


March 31, 2020
Bob Dietz