The Chinese and Gambling

From the LA Times:

Gambling Seen as No-Win Situation for Some Asians
Community leaders and social workers are putting pressure on casinos and legislators to help those who may be addicted face their problem.

By John M. Glionna, Times Staff Writer

A 1999 poll in San Francisco's Chinatown, commissioned by a social services agency, found that 70% of 1,808 respondents ranked gambling as their community's No. 1 problem. In a follow-up poll, 21% of respondents considered themselves pathological gamblers and 16% more called themselves problem gamblers — rates significantly higher than in the overall population.

Current data suggest that 1.6% of Americans can be classified as pathological gamblers, a condition recognized as a psychiatric disorder. About 3% more are considered problem gamblers...

"Asians are a huge market," said Wendy Waldorf, a spokeswoman for the Cache Creek Casino north of San Francisco. "We cater to them."

Each day in San Gabriel, Monterey Park and San Francisco's Chinatown, scores of buses collect Asian customers for free junkets to Indian casinos and to Reno and Las Vegas.

Many Nevada casinos also maintain business offices in Monterey Park, where hosts keep in regular touch with Asian high rollers. To reach more run-of-the-mill gamblers, casinos run ads in Asian-language print and broadcast media and conduct direct-mailing campaigns to ZIP Codes with high numbers of Asian residents.

Most gambling venues celebrate Asian holidays, hire bilingual staffers and feature the latest nightclub acts from Shanghai, Seoul and Manila.

Cache Creek Casino has a tank featuring a popular 2-foot-long dragon fish named Mr. Lucky. Dragon fish are considered good fortune by many Chinese gamblers, who often rub the tank for luck...

Many Chinese are fascinated by the mystical qualities of luck, fate and chance. The Chinese New Year — this year Jan. 29 — is a time of heightened wagering, when bad luck of the old year is ushered out by the good luck of the new.

Numerology also plays a crucial role in many Asian cultures. The number 8, for example, is considered extremely lucky by many Chinese, while 4, when spoken in Mandarin and Cantonese, sounds like the word for death and is avoided.

Though Chinese believe most strongly in such concepts, other Asian cultures, including Vietnamese, Korean and Filipino, hold similar beliefs — depending on China's political influence in their history or the extent of Chinese immigration there.

A friend of mine hosted a poorly-rated horse racing TV talk show from Santa Anita, near Pasadena. Nobody in LA ever said to him, "Hey, you're that horse-racing guy on TV." But when he'd go to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Hong Kong millionaires would stop him and tell him they watched his show on satellite TV every week.

I vaguely suspect that not having much of an advanced religion inclines the Chinese toward often channeling their religious impulses toward the manipulation of luck. Every religion has some of that tendency toward magic, but ones with a more advanced theology are more likely to rise above a conception of religion as primarily a technology for the control of luck.

It's also interesting to consider the possible connections between Chinese numerology and strong Chinese math skills.

By the way, I've been wondering why I find casino gambling so boring and depressing. I think it has to do with the fact that gambling machines are invented precisely to produce random results, so there's almost no hope for me to use my pattern recognition skills to figure out overlooked secrets of it works. It works to produce random results, not patterns. Judging from the Google Ads for lucky amulets and the like that this posting elicited, I suspect many gamblers imagine that they are on the verge of uncovering underlying patterns, which helps make gambling so interesting to them. Well, the money helps too.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer