When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?
IPL has sparked a betting craze. Crores of people, aspiring to be crorepatis, are trying all sorts of P&C to pick a team and place a bet.
So I picked the worst possible combination because I had no idea about many players. They offered me a discount, and allowed me to make my first bet of ₹39.
In the end, my rank was 1 crore something.
Here I have written about it in detail.
Game of Skill vs Game of Chance
Happy Reading. 🙂
Just to be absolutely certain, I solved some CSAT questions through guesswork. And got those right.
At the end of it, I was so high that I’d have played the Russian Roulette with five rounds in.
“From Mahabharat to Modi-Bharat, betting and gambling are portrayed as escalators to moral and financial doom. Which is why the epic hero ended up gambling away his own wife, and the present government has permitted it under a Khiljian tax burden. Needless to say, it stifles free will and is a glaring manifestation of an authoritarian regime. “my full time communist, part time gambler friend whatsapped me yesterday. Since he fought the election for the post of student coordinator in the department 3 years ago, he has been talking in the manifesto language. He likes to take his chances, and has been trading for quite some time- an act of bleeding the capitalists internally (as he calls it). He has a betting whatsApp group called “The Awakened Proletariats”, which has more members than my contact list.
After convincing me that Betting was good not only for my iq and personality development, but also for my weight loss (neural activity burning calories- some high level bio I couldn’t understand since I wasn’t an awakened proletariat), he told me about this new app called Dreamy 11. It’s a popular platform with star cricketers promoting betting as a fresh, radical and rewarding investment. The stars stress the word crore, and there is a press conference with the winner, who always looks like a middle aged SBI official in need of money.
Dazzled by the dream of being a crorepati, and forgetting all the wheels I had spun in Amazon General Knowledge contests without winning a cowrie worth of merchandise, I downloaded the app from the play store and contacted a veteran gambler from my college. He was a respected gambler, and would bet on everything from cricket to tic tac toe. Towards the end of his graduation, he became obsessed, and his sentences came out like bet calls. He used to go to dates and blurt out things like: I would bet ₹500 rupees that you’d order Honey Chili Potato. When the girls never contacted him again, he was ready to bet ₹1000 that they were all gold diggers and had found a wealthier sugar daddy. He also claimed to have made a breakthrough in game theory, which was a spectacular feat given he was a Sociology student. There was a whole mythical universe around the man. People stopped asking answers from the toppers during the exam, instead, they placed their faith in this guy. Sometimes, even the topper asked a question or two.
However, I couldn’t believe my eyes when the veteran gambler wrote that he’d quit gambling after he made losses of astronomical proportions, the figures of which he did not reveal, but it was sufficient to say he’d to pawn off some of his hard earned money and borrow some more, and was keen to discourage me from getting into what he had earlier called the “one true sport of human civilisation”. It felt so atrocious, as if a soldier had deserted his platoon and switched sides. I told him to teach me some game theory, and he said he had undergone hypnosis to forget that.
Instead of being a guide, he sent me some quora answers explaining Dreamy 11 winners were all bots. The quora guys wrote lengthy answers backing their claim, using high brow maths, and the only thing they could convince me of was that they were a bunch of sore losers.
I flipped a coin and called heads. Heads it was!
I flipped again and called tails. Tails it was!
I did this exercise for half a dozen times and got it right every time. My error rate was 0.00. Take that, losers! Tonight was my night.
Just to be absolutely certain, I solved some CSAT questions through guesswork. And got those right.
At the end of it, I was so high that I’d have played the Russian Roulette with five rounds in.
So I opened the app and it asked for my id. Then it offered me new user discount and allowed me to select players for tonight’s match. That was the first time it dawned upon me that I wasn’t a true cricket fan. Because apart from star cricketers, I hardly knew anyone. I couldn’t gather 11 recognised faces together.
But had I known the players, it wouldn’t be a game of chance, it would be a game of skill. And tonight was the night of chance. I have no idea how I don’t even require a molecule of ethanol to get as audacious as a barrel down pirate could only dream to be.
So I picked random players, including three that were not even playing. I had absolutely no idea about the pitch, I couldn’t tell the batsman from the bowler, and had no clue how they counted points.
But I already declared on all relevant whatsApp groups and chats, including NoBrokerz, that I was going to be a Crorepati. I asked them, just for fun, to list whatever debt I owed to them. Surprisingly, most of them came up with a large amount which I never borrowed of course. I also added to cart the iPhone I have been dreaming of lately, and planned to donate a significant amount to charity for kids suffering from major diseases. I was soaring so high in that terrain of Baronian affluence that I switched to sitting cross legged instead of the spiderist sprawl that comes natural to me. I wikihow-ed Victorian mannerisms, and for some reason google started showing me tooth aligners.
As the match began, it turned out it was a bowling friendly pitch. And I hadn’t selected Arshdeep. Rabada flopped. I didn’t know if the other two were bowlers. Head was my captain, and the first to fall. I was out of the winning zone in the 4th over of the first innings, and never came close.
At the end, my rank was some 1 crore 50 lakh in a contest of 1 crore 51 lakh people. I found other disturbing stats too. If my rank was even 50, I would have won only ₹15000. Imagine winning against 1.5 crore people and receiving 15k at the end. If this is not poverty of aspirations, I don’t know what is. I also found out that the player who topped had a female DP but a male name, and his 13th team had won it.
Needles to say, I was sunken with grief. I went back to quora, and surprisingly, all the math now made sense to me. Those wise people had demonstrated it so clearly, without a thread of doubt, that all the winners were bots. I sent the quora link to all my creditors, along with financial investment articles from Harvard alumni. The NoBrokerz people offered me a cheap 2BHK in consolation.
I called my communist gambler friend and yelled at him. He yelled back like a general, and said revolution was never a rosy path, and urged me to continue.
“I often run into losses. But I don’t stop. Rather I steal money from my capitalist father’s store counter. Bleeding the capitalist, but in another way. “
While I was trying to sleep, a random thought fluttered for a while. What if I have a better luck tomorrow!
I stretched my hand, got a coin and tossed it a few times in the dark.
Turns out when you toss a coin in the light, it’s a game of skill; when you do it in the dark, it’s a game of chance. And I’d say never take a chance, particularly if you’re a proletariat without a capitalist father.
roastedmoongfalis 