This is the story of Fyodor (his real name). He was a gambler. His life was wrecked by it. Between his destructive bouts of gambling, he was a creative man. He wrote the finest description of the gambling affliction that has ever been written. No amount of new journalism in the vein of “”John (not his real name)”, can ever hope to capture better the euphoric agony of the compulsive gambler. It is best, therefore, that his words tell his story.
It started with watching his grandmother playing roulette.
“”Grandmother could barely sit still. He blazing eyes were simply devouring the little ball as it bounced along the notches of the spinning wheel. Grandmother was losing control, she couldn’t keep still in her seat.
“”Grandmother said, “Upon my life I will stay here until it lands on zero.”
Then the zero came up three times in a row, giving Grandmother a huge win.
“” “What!!!’ Grandmother turned to me in a frenzy of triumph.
“”I myself was a gambler; I felt it at that very moment. I was trembling from head to foot, my head was throbbing.
“”It is a strange thing, I have not won yet, but I am acting, feeling, and thinking like a rich man, and I cannot envisage anything else.
“”But I, with strange perversity, deliberately went on staking on red after noticing that it had turned up seven times running. I am sure vanity was half responsible for this. I wanted to astonish the spectators by taking senseless chances and _ a strange sensation _ I clearly remember that even without any promptings of vanity I really was suddenly overwhelmed by a terrible craving for risk. Perhaps the soul passing through such a wide range of sensations is not satisfied, but only exacerbated by them, and demands more and more of them, growing more and more powerful until it reaches final exhaustion. And I am not lying when I say that is the rules of the game had allowed me to stake 50,000 at one throw I certainly would have done so. The bystanders exclaimed that this was madness and that red had already won fourteen times.
“”Oh how my heart pounded!! No, it was not the money that was precious to me! At that time the only thing I wanted was for all those Hintzes, all those head waiters, all those splendid women in Baden, to be talking about me the next day, telling my story, marvelling at me, praising me and admiring my new winnings. These were childish dreams and concerns, but who knows.”
Eventually, like his grandmother, he lost. She could not “”leave the table out of stubbornness and anger”. Fyodor had noticed before her loss how his grandmother “”was inattentive to everything else and was generally distracted”.
Fyodor was no fool. The affliction of compulsive gambling is not restricted to the under-class. It attacks the literate and the illiterate; the wealthy and the poor; the male and the female; the sensitive and insensitive.
Fyodor tells his story powerfully. As he tells it, you want to scream at him. Stop. Stop. Take your winnings now. Don’t go on; you will end in degradation and despair.
He borrowed from friends and gambled it away, mainly at roulette. He was convinced he had an infallible system. His marriage broke up. His wife died. He was jailed.
He wrote in desperation, “”I am continually worried by creditors who are threatening to put me in the debtors’ jail. You can imagine what state I am in . It simple undermines my spirit and upsets me for days. Sometimes I find it quite impossible . . . everything will go to rack and ruin. . . . my fits have begun again.”
His manic world of the compulsive gambler, however, produced works of genius. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler in 1866 in just three weeks.
He had been forced by an unscrupulous creditor and publisher to take time from writing his masterpiece Crime and Punishment. He had to met a deadline to produce a novelette of forfeit the royalties on all his work.
Dostoyevsky was afflicted for eight years. He was convinced he had an infallible system for winning at roulette. He and his wife lost everything. They borrowed. They begged from friends and pawned their clothing.
There is a system for winning at roulette, of course. It is obvious, and a mathematical certainty. It is the casino’s system. The system stacks the odds in its favour. The casino pays only 35 times for an event that happens once in 37 times. The longer you play the more likely the system will enable the casino to win. And your luck cannot change in the morning: the odds stay precisely the same as they were the day before.
It is as well that Dostoyevsky, an otherwise intelligent man, did not realise this, or he would never have written The Gambler, a singular insight into the psychology of compulsion.