Slots: Praying to the God of Chance

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Medical Society State of New York

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A native New Yorker, David V. Forrest, M.D., is a graduate of Princeton University and received his medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic training at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he is now clinical professor of psychiatry. He was chief of the largest U.S. Army psychiatric clinic in Vietnam at the peak of American involvement there and received the Bronze Star. He is a past president of the American College of Psychoanalysts and the New York Clinical Society, and is a fellow of the Explorers Club.

In addition to writing hundreds of scholarly articles in psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, applied psychoanalysis, literary analysis, anthropology, and artificial mind, he has coauthored an educational videotape series, was a consultant to the television show Star Trek, has created a slang dictionary for foreign doctors, and, with his wife, Lynne Stetson, has developed a board game called The Ballet Company, based on her career in the New York City Ballet. He lives in New York City and has two grown children.

PRAYING TO THE GOD OF CHANCE

DAVID V. FORREST, M.D.

Illustrations by the author and Tara Jacoby

DELPHINIUM BOOKS

HARRISON, NEW YORK • ENCINO, CALIFORNIA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to all who provided assistance and encouragement and inspiration; first, to Nick Gardiner and Charlie Scribner, who made the Tinker to Evers to Chance play to Glen Hartley, who represented the book, with the legal help of Lynn Chu. I count myself lucky in much more than a casino sense to have had the support of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt as my distinguished editor. It has been a pleasure and an education to work with him, and with Delphinium Books. I am also indebted to Julian Bloch, Nancy Blume, Sandy Choren, Molly Connors, Scott Cooper, Tina Compton, Sarah Christina Babs Curley, John and Janice DeMarco, veteran slots player and my medical building’s receptionist, Linda God don’t want you gambling Eferstein, Ralph Eovino, Daniel Forrest, Paul and Adrienne Forrest, Michael Forrest, Nick Gardiner, Allan Goldman, Erik Johnson at W. W. Norton, Susannah Forrest Karajannis, the Karajannis family, Carl Lennertz, Paul Liebowitz, Dave Marsh, Pietro Mazzoni, H.M., Allan Mottus, Mary Murray, Kerry O’Connor, Open Road Integrated Media, Hilda Pedersen, Farah Peterson, Ted and Caroline Robbins of Trafalgar Square Books, Neil J. Rosini, Esq. and the copy editor Ellen R. Feldman. The annual Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Psychoanalytic Methods in Anthropological Fieldwork, led by Werner Muensterberger, M.D., and Daniel M. A. Freeman, M.D., and hosted by Joseph Lubart, M.D., and myself at The Explorers Club and other locations, provided inspiration by enabling me to hear decades of presentations by the leading anthropologists of our time. Anne Allison’s participant observation of cocktail waitresses in Tokyo may have been the most directly applicable. From his extensive library on gambling, Rich Pell recommended anthropologist David M. Hayano’s ethnography, Poker Faces: The Life and Work of Professional Card Players, another participant observation study that is a gambling classic. Finally, most thanks are due my wife, Lynne Stetson, without whose participation this book would not have occurred to me.

By way of disclosure, I am indebted to Mr. Donald Trump—although he had no influence on this book—because he threw the only cocktail party for returning Vietnam vets that I knew of, at least for those of us who contributed to the book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, edited by Bernard Edelman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).

No tax deductions were taken for casino visits made during the development of this book.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: The Why of Slot Machines

Slots as Merchants of Religious Awe

This Is Your Brain on Slots: The Psychiatry of Slots Play

Slots and Folks: Varieties of Cultural and Religious Experience

Words to the Wise: How Slot Machines Work and Appeal to Us

Part Two: Rethinking Your Slots Play

Raising One’s Consciousness About Slots Play

Giving One’s Inner Child Something Else to Do

Slots and Our Fate

Appendix

Bibliography

Introduction

Almost 40 million people play slot machines in the United States every year, according to an annual survey by the gaming company Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc. The money fed into slot machines in North America exceeds $365 billion, of which the casinos keep about $30 billion. The rest (or at least 90 percent of it) is redistributed—randomly of course—back among the players. In an article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in May 2004, titled The Tug of the Newfangled Slot Machines, Gary Rivlin offered the comparative perspective that all the movie tickets sold in North America in a year at that time totaled a mere $9 billion, and an expert estimate of the money spent on pornography in all forms totaled only $10 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported with surprise that gambling was the best performing industry of the year in 2004. Late-night funnyman Jay Leno once joked that Starbucks coffeehouses were multiplying so rapidly that they are opening new Starbucks inside old ones. The same might be said about the profusion of new casinos, in many of which Leno will be performing. It seems that municipalities everywhere are deciding they can solve their fiscal problems with a casino—and that if they do not, the money will flee to another state or to a casino run by a Native American tribe. Even Kansas, whence Dorothy was whisked off to Oz, has a casino resort. It was the thirteenth state to legalize gambling, a bid in the zero-sum game of trying to attract more money from other states than is lost to them, in this case, to Missouri riverboats. Even tribal casinos like Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, in Connecticut, which earn about $800 million to $900 million a year from slot machines, are expanding by running casinos in other states for less-experienced tribes.

Slot machines provide 70 to 85 percent of casino income. A machine costs about $12,000, and the casino may clear as much as $250 to $2,500 a day from it. The market has seemed inexhaustible, and most of its growth has been recent. As gambling—sorry, make that gaming—has become increasingly respectable and has emerged into the mainstream of recreation, slots are leading the way, displacing other forms of wagering, including horse racing. In fact, New York, Pennsylvania, and other states have lately passed laws permitting large slot installations, called racinos, at racetracks in the hope of reviving interest there. Compared to scratch-offs and other types of lotteries, these new machines have been the fastest-growing form of gambling in New York. The New York Post of April 30, 2010, reported that New York State generated a record $1 billion in revenue from video slot machines last year despite a shaky economy and a scandal [involving New York’s governor] that has blocked a plan to put slots at Aqueduct Raceway, which would be the state’s first casino located within the five boroughs. Slot machines appear to be America’s newest growth industry. While there has been some falloff during the recent financial crisis, this decline has to be viewed in comparison with larger contractions in spending, visible in the retail sector and even the patronage of Starbucks.

There are many possible reasons for this recent bubblelike expansion. The new economy of dot-com offerings rose and crashed, making the stock market look like a casino. This is not just my analogy but one also used by the founder of the Vanguard Group, John Bogle. The highly leveraged housing bubble made people feel flush. Once it had burst and the focus shifted to the bets investment bank Goldman Sachs had offered on it, the casino analogy became commonplace in the media. For example, in April 2010 The New York Times ran an editorial titled Wall Street Casino, and an article by Andrew Ross Sorkin titled When Deals on Wall Street Resemble Casino Wagers. The title of Vicky Ward’s 2010 book, The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers, clinches the point. In the wake of these revelations, many aging baby boomers with disposable income have looked elsewhere to invest.

The casino metaphor has also long been applied to our legal system. Disparities between the average and the highest incomes in the United States have become huge. Controversy and scandal have afflicted religious institutions, weakening or discrediting their interdictions of once prohibited individual pursuits of pleasures. Immigrants have arrived from cultures in which games of chance offered the only opportunity for achieving success. According to a 2003 Pew Research Center poll, Americans traditionally have led the world in not subscribing to the idea that success in life is determined by forces outside one’s own control. But the balance may be shifting between two long-standing American archetypes: the hardworking self-made man and the gambler the cultural historian Jackson Lears describes in his book Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003). Also, I prefer to reserve the term gaming for what one does strategically, even in a Machiavellian way, to maximize rewards in a system, such as a bureaucracy or a corporation. In our complex world, what is often referred to as gaming the system has become increasingly fashionable. In his book The American Religion (1992; reissued 2006), Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and arguably our preeminent literary critic, wrote a classic interpretation of what is unique about the creeds that have emerged on our continent since the founding of our nation. He noted that we as Americans stand out in our conviction that we are loved and favored by God and that we feel ourselves to be part of God. This could be another way of saying that our American exceptionalism is based upon a feeling that we are charmed and blessed with being lucky.

All of the above may be cultural factors in slot playing and might be considered elements in a top-down approach to understanding slot play. As a psychiatrist, I prefer to study the behavior of individuals, so you might say that I have taken a bottom-up approach to gambling. People joke about psychiatrists that we can never do anything without thinking about what it means, and I am no exception. I first played slots decades ago in Las Vegas as a recreation. In the early 1990s, one of our children was studying math at Brown University, and our trips there took my wife and me past the burgeoning Native American casinos Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods. Visits to them as they grew led me to become curious about what we and so many other slot players were doing and why. I began to talk to people on the slot floor, and to examine the slot-play experience as a mental phenomenon. What follows is intended as a user-friendly guide to playing slots, or what one might call, in fancier terms, an introduction to the psychoeconomics of slot machines.

PART

1

THE WHY

of

SLOT MACHINES

SLOTS AS MERCHANTS

OF RELIGIOUS AWE

MINDLESS AND MINDFUL SLOTS

Slot players are often maligned as mindless because there is little or no strategy involved in pressing a button to initiate a spin of the reels. When I proposed this book, a number of editors at various publishing houses told me that they assumed slot players don’t read books and people who do read books don’t play slots (never mind the bookstores at casinos such as Foxwoods). I have found the opposite to be true. Slot players are avid readers who love to lose themselves in books. The really smart gamblers, it is said, noisily play games with complicated betting rules, like craps, or are busy using math skills to count cards at blackjack. My first reaction to the skeptics was that their unfavorable depiction of slot players is not valid because they have defined the mental realm of intelligence too narrowly. Who is smarter, an options trader shouting bids around the pit at the stock exchange or a monk in meditative prayer on a mountaintop? It is a contrast between apples and oranges: The two are as different as raccoons and skylarks. Slots are not at all like poker, which is a zero-sum game in which winners enjoy taking from losers, and even professional players may get into physical fights. Slot players, like the skylark singing silently in their inner flight, have none of the competitiveness, boisterousness, and braggadocio of other gamblers. They play quietly and individually, but they root for one another to win and often congratulate a nearby winner, even if they inwardly feel envy or have just left that winning machine. Call it what you will, but there may be a bit less of the slob factor, too. Slot players are mannerly. They tend to be gentle, thoughtful, and pleasant folk. Although one plays slots elbow to elbow when the casino is crowded, unlike my experience at table games, I cannot recall ever moving away from an objectionable slot player, except to avoid secondhand smoke.

The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said that to cultivate the mind, one should not emphasize concentration but rather attention, because concentration forces the mind to narrow down to a point, while attention is without frontiers. Spared the need to strategize or count, and cloistered from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, the slot player’s mind is set free, as in meditation. The repeated ritual mantra of the melodically spinning reels of the slot machine, like so many Tibetan prayer wheels being spun again and again, is the slot player’s communion with Immensity, and by this I do not mean merely an immense win. The Immensity found in these machines is the force of chance that drives the world and rearranges the winds and the universe of stars. It is a connection with the possibility of fortune in the form of enormous and smaller sums of money, and with Fortune itself, which governs us all. For the slot player, play is no less than a stairway to one’s lucky stars. The point is not that slot players are consciously aware of their cosmic prayers but precisely that they are not, and that they would benefit by knowing the nature of their need that is fulfilled by their play. It is commonly said that many activities other than explicit prayer—like one’s work, for example—are also prayer. But slot play, as we shall see, has special claims in this regard.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A SLOT MACHINE?

For those who are unfamiliar with them (or the Martian readership, as my editor puts it), slots are gambling machines with three or more cylindrical bandlike reels, part of whose circumferences appear side by side in a window to display three or more of the symbols printed on them. When a button is pushed or a lever on the side of the slot machine is pulled (hence the nickname one-armed bandit), the reels spin vertically and independently, stopping automatically. If three like symbols line up on a horizontal midscreen pay line, the machine records a payout for the player. To play the slots, one feeds coins into slots on the machine, hence the name; now, more commonly, the player feeds currency or tickets with winnings or balances cashed out from other (ticket in–ticket out) machines. Video slot machines (as opposed to electromechanical ones) simulate the appearance of reels and often have features or bonus rounds typically offering free spins or animated touch-screen choices that reveal one of an assortment of higher-payout credits. One credit is worth the denomination of the machine, be it a penny, a quarter, a dollar, or five dollars. A jackpot payout results from the machine’s highest valued symbol combination, as listed on the machine or available onscreen. A progressive jackpot progresses or mounts up as a succession of players play until one wins it, whereupon it resets to a predetermined base level and begins mounting again. Usually several linked machines in a row, or bank, contribute to the progressive amount so as to make it higher, and sometimes the machines are even hyperlinked to identical machines in other casinos across the land to make an astronomical win possible.

WHY DO WE PLAY SLOTS?

Our clergy and our parables tell us that religious faith and