We left off last month with a discussion on how people tend to wipe their slate clean and disregard previous gambling results. I gave several examples of gamblers who had experienced four negative $1,000 results in a row followed by a single $1,000 positive result. We were talking about whether or not it would be apropos for them to claim their last result as a "win," keeping in mind they were down $3,000 overall. For most players, if this last result occurred on a different "trip" they would indeed claim and feel that they had won money on that trip. If you agree and fall into this category, please read on, so I can replace your calm assurance with clearly defined areas of total uncertainty.

Physically leaving + sleep in one's own bed = quitting and leaving (offer void where prohibited by common sense)

Oh, and you had to check out...and the sleep couldn't be a nap (Difference between nap and sleep forthcoming...well probably not! They are spelled differently.)

When defining trip results over long time spans, the almost imperceptible soto voce machinations of the Tabula Rasa Fairy (TRF) are difficult to detect and relate to how we as humans parse and perceive continuous time in distinct disparate packages that come to us either from natural celestial cycles or man made confabulations. The rotation of our planet, its orbit around the sun, and our faithful companion, the moon, all provide convenient lines of demarcation between then and now, albeit still subjective and applicable only to Earth dwellers. All other measurements of time are simply made up. Most people don't even know that we get our time system with its base 20 and base 3 components from a Babylonian system that worked best with their cuneiform writing.

Here's the problem: Most wagering in casinos comes in the form of independent random events. There are some rare exceptions, but for now let's stick to the ones that are completely random and independent, such as hands of video poker. If you focused on the word "random" in that first sentence, your attention was in the wrong place. Here, "independent" was the more important concept. Hands played in sequence have no more or less in common, nor are they any more or less related to each other, than hands played years apart, on different machines, by different people, or in different casinos. They are:

I'm reminded of the Steven Wright joke about the guy outside a locked convenience store that asks a guy inside, "Hey buddy, the sign says open 24 hours?" The guy replies, "Yeah, but not in a row!" Independent events are not related to each other, simply because they occur sequentially. It's fine to group your day's results for IRS gambling records as long as you realize that each and every hand you played was not related to any other, simply because they occurred "in a row" during an arbitrary period of time, like "today." It is a convenience, nothing more.

We are so used to linear thinking that we have no way to mentally quantify randomness and independent events, so we use the same common methods that work for us in daily life. When our example-tourists say they "won money this trip," nothing seems amiss, until we realize that they could just have easily told us they won money during, or on any of the following:

1. Their odd numbered hands.
2. Their even numbered hands.
3. Hands played with only one hand. (Left or Right)
4. Hands played while sitting. (Cross-legged)
5. Hands played while standing (on one leg)
6. Since their last bowel movement. (solid)
7. Only while 80's songs played on the intercom. (Excluding the Bee Gees. Disco is dead!)
8. Since the last time they cleaned out their belly button lint.

I knew a husband and wife who refused to file gambling loss statements to reduce their tax liability, because they didn't want to minimize their wins and ruin their fun. Apparently, this couple was leaving milk and cookies out for the TRF, and may have been in some sort of odd mythological, ménage à trois with her. Whatever the explanation, they took forgetting losses as a very serious indispensable and integral part of enjoying their gambling experience, and were actually willing to pay the IRS more than they had to for fear of shattering the illusion. If enjoyment is your only goal, then introducing the concept of loss carry forward into your mental reckoning will not be a welcome addition. Hot news flash: This is not the only instance in life where the "reward" for fantasy free rational thought is "less fun." Still want to believe in Santa? Many do. Only problem, he's not real. Nor are the results that our minds tell us are meaningful, when we sample independent events. Ah, there is the rub, "sampling."

Any attempt to group and then sample independent events, requires an arbitrary decision as to which ones you will include and which ones you'll discount. If you looked at only your odd numbered hands to know whether you had won or lost during an arbitrary period of time, you'd be instantly aware you were sampling. Nothing seems more natural than including what's happened during the course of your day in its own personal, clean reckoning. It is, however, not logical and it is still sampling; it's simply less obvious sampling than only counting half your hands played during that day and discarding the rest.

People may follow nocturnal sedation cycles followed by diurnal gambling or vice versa, but machines have no today, yesterday, or tomorrow but instead exist in a state of temporal grace, colloquially known as "right now." One can certainly accumulate a record of these independent events, but the only logical method of accounting for independent events is not to discount any of them. You cannot apply any aspect of normal daily time frames to independent trials, without essentially leaving the window open and a friendly invite for the TRF to visit. For any who have studied statistics, you should be intimately aware that, without fail, a larger sample is always better than a smaller one. Only in gambling are smaller samples favored, and not because they yield better information; for precisely the opposite reason, people want to be deceived ... it's more fun.

Sadly, a great deal of the fun in gambling comes from self-deception. In the event that you would like your tabula to remain un-rasa-ed, one can actually achieve this quite easily with reverse psychology. The next time you visit a casino and have a loss, upon leaving say aloud, "Please Cogtrickery, visit me tonight and wipe the slate clean, so I can forget this loss and claim what happens tomorrow as a win even if I'm still losing overall." You'll find the fantasy a little harder to stomach.

The TRF is a fickle femme fatale, who visits only those who do not request her.