Lounge VCT vs GamblingForums.com: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Well, I misstyped the title -- but can't edit it. Gotta stop this phone stuff. It's supposed to be VCT. Hey, admin, can you fix it?

As usual, I'll synopsize the obvious.

One of my personal recurrent themes is the awareness that just because we have a word for something, that something does not necessarily exist as an actual thing or category. It's language hubris to always assume it does.

Such is the case for the word "gambling." At vegascasinotalk, "gambling," for the majority of posters, refers to a recreational activity with an assumption of loss. The vast majority (yes, I use clichés) of the VCT posts discuss how best to wrangle experiences and comps from those losses. The VCT posters are primarily 45+ in age, and probably out-earn the average American. They are also prime meat for the casinos.

At Gambling forums, the demography of the posters is certainly younger, and appears to have a lower average income. The emphasis is not about extracting comps from the dominant casino monopolies, but for socializing and networking while trying to beat the casinos through various strategies. How much is real or fiction is impossible to ascertain.

Given these differences, it's not hard to make the case that "gambling" is a very different thing for the two boards. It's not surprising that the higher-income losing gamblers on the VCT board have little in common with the younger, striving-to-win population at gamblingforums.

It could be said that the gamblingforums population is overly optimistic and simply fooling themselves, for the most part. Similarly, it could be said that the VCT population has surrendered to their addiction(s), and has embraced the rationalization of addiction as recreation.

It's almost understandable, then, why some established losing gamblers have such a vehement aversion to people claiming they can win. It triggers a "I'm smarter, I'm successful, he can't be able to do it response." One can almost sense a desperate intensity in the cynicism (not that there's anything wrong with cynicism).

Comments, criticisms?

 

Having only been here a few weeks, I have no idea how old most of the posters are, but this place reminds me of a grandmothers bar I bought before I gave it the enema it desperately needed.
I'm not sure how much gambling these folks do, but the common denominator seems to be obsessing over forums they insist they have no interest in ,yet seem to read constantly.