“Players aren’t buying an investment; they’re buying permission to fantasize for a couple of days.” — Jack Murtagh, Scientific American, April 2025
Neurologists recently figured out what gamblers have known ever since a savvy Sumerian grifter invented the shell game: You don’t have to win to be a happy punter. You just have to bet for your sneaky brain to go into “joy” mode, aka dopamine release. It’s the anticipation of winning that triggers the brain’s reward system.
Our reward system links those parts of the brain involved with pleasure, motivation, memory and movement. Whatever helped our ancestors survive way long ago, the reward system reinforced it. It’s simple. You eat, you get to survive another day, so brains evolved to make eating pleasurable. And it wasn’t just the act of eating, but the anticipation of eating. (I can relate: After 50 years of not eating meat, I still salivate when passing a steakhouse.)
Same with alcohol, drugs, sex … and gambling. We buy a lottery ticket and, so long as we might win millions (even knowing the insane odds — see below — of that happening), the fantasy of owning that Caribbean island or driving a Bugatti la Voiture is enough to keep some of us coming back, every week, for our fix. According to Yale Medicine, “gambling disorder” affects about 1 percent of Americans, making them unable stop, despite the consequences. Why this only affects some people is an ongoing area of research, but genetics is certainly a factor.
I’m not recommending finding pleasure through gambling, of course. It’s a mug’s game, as everyone knows. For instance, the odds of winning the Powerball lottery jackpot are about same as tossing a coin and having heads come up 28 times in a row, 1 in 292,201,338 to be precise. But wait, you say. If I spend $2 on a Powerball ticket and I could win $1.7 billion (as happened in October of 2023), maybe the odds are in my favor? That is, maybe the “expected value” of my $2 bet is positive. (Expected value weighs the chances of winning or losing against the payoffs involved, so a positive value means that over the long run, statistically, you’ll come out ahead.) To date, that’s never happened with the Powerball lottery; the expected value has always been negative.
Plus, so much else is working against you, including: the possibility of sharing the jackpot with other players; the certainty of paying hefty taxes on your winnings (37 percent federal + 12.3 percent California state tax); inflation reducing the value of your winnings if you elect to be paid in installments; and diminished returns, the universal phenomenon whereby your second million won’t bring as much happiness as the first. Not to mention that many big lottery winners complain that happiness still eludes them.
Problem is, while your frontal cortex is absorbing all this data, your reward system — if you’re a regular punter — overrides what the math says, and you buy the damn ticket anyway. Even if, quoting Scientific American‘s Jack Murtagh, “You’d get more value out of those two bucks if you traded them for a dime.” Pro tip: If, despite all this, you do buy a ticket, pick even numbers and multiples of 10 (which most players avoid) to reduce the chances of sharing the jackpot.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com, planethumboldt.substack.com) once won $200 in a casino on the roulette wheel, which scared him so much he’s never gone back.
This article appears in ‘Come Back Young Again’.