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an aim as that ? Luck must not only turn till loss ha been recouped, but run on till great gains have been made. And no gambler was ever yet content to stay his hand when winning, or to give up when he began to lose again. The fatal faith in eventual good luck is the source of all bad luck; it is in itself the worst luck of all. Every gambler has this faith, and no gamble who holds to it is likely long to escape ruin.
GAMBLERS FALLACIES.
IT might be supposed that those who are most familiar with the actual results which present themselves in long series of chance games would form the most correct views respecting the conditions on which such results depend--would be, in fact, freest from all superstitious ideas respecting chance or luck. The gambler who sees every system--his own infallible system included --foiled by the run of events, who witnesses the discomfiture of one gamester after another that for a time had seemed irresistibly lucky, and who can number by hundreds those who have been ruined by the love of play, might be expected to recognize the futility of all attempts to anticipate the results of chance combinations. It is, however, but too well known that the reverse is the case. The more familiar a man becomes with the multitude of such combinations, the more confidently he believes in the possibility of foretelling --not, indeed, any special event, but the general run of several approaching events. There has never been a successful gambler who has not believed that his success (temporary though such success ever is, where games of pure chance are concerned) has been the result of
skillful conduct on his own part; and there has never been a ruined gambler (though ruined gamblers are to be counted by thousands) who has not believed that when ruin overtook him he was on the very point of mastering the secret of success. It is this fatal confidence which gives to gambling its power of fascinating the lucky as well as the unlucky. The winner continues to tempt fortune, believing all the while that he is exerting some special aptitude for games of chance, until the inevitable change of luck arrives; and thereafter he continues to play because he believes that his luck has only deserted him for a time, and must presently return. The unlucky gambler, on the contrary, regards his losses as sacrifices to ensure the ultimate success of his 'system,' and even when he has lost his all, continues firm in the belief that had he had more money to sacrifice he could have bound fortune to his side for ever.
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