Stung The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony

While Molony was becoming legendary at Caesars, he was becoming more elusive to family, friends, and colleagues. Everyone had a different idea of where he was on a given night and how he spent weekends. He misled without actually lying. He told Brenda he was driving down to see Doug, letting her conclude he'd be in Sarnia for the weekend. "You're kidding, Brian. You drove all that way just for dinner? And now you're going to turn around and drive back?" There was something he had to be back for, Molony said, leaving Doug to imagine a wedding or family dinner. He could not tell anyone the truth. What if somebody asked the question he, in idle moments, came perilously close to asking himself: why return to the casino again and again when logic says the house advantage is insurmountable? One part of the answer grew out of Molony's emotional need for optimism. Once he had begun dipping into the bank, he could not admit the possibility of failure without risking the collapse of self-image. Staying psychologically intact meant deluding himself, holding to the belief that success was inevitable. In one sense each loss, each fraud, had the salutary effect of bringing the happy day closer. As the months passed, however, as he became more deeply mired in debt and deception, he felt another looming inevitability. A branch was typically audited every twelve months or so, and Bay and Richmond was overdue. Molony didn't know when the audit was coming, but each day he failed to win back the money brought it closer. The audit had the boding weight of doomsday. When it came, he was finished. He had to keep going back to Atlantic City, he told himself, because he had to win before the audit ruined him. Another, less evident explanation of why he kept returning and losing has to do with the nature of the casino itself. As a drain on pockets and bank accounts, it is a formidable and underrated mechanism. No institution is more deeply rooted in human frailty, and none more richly nourishes itself on selfdeception. One way we calculate the probability of a future event is by recalling its incidence in the past. We remember things that happen frequently more easily than things that happen infrequently. Why, then, do casino gamblers assuming they want to win, and given that they usually lose keep coming back? Partly because other variables skew the equation. Ease of recall, for example, is just as important as frequency in shaping our judgement about the probability of future events. As evidence, take the psychological study in which people were asked to judge whether "k" was more likely to appear as the first letter of an English word or the third letter do you happen to know? The preceding sentence contains three words with "k" as the third letter, only one that begins with "k," and that's the ratio for the language as a whole. Since "know" comes more quickly to mind than "likely" or "asked" or "take," however, most people guessed incorrectly that "k" is found more often at the beginning of a word. The easier it is to recall instances of an event even an infrequent event the more probable we consider the event to be. This principle is exploited by every casino. A slot-machine payoff flashing lights, sirens, and a prolonged spewing of coins does more than obscure the fact that hundreds of other machines are not paying off at that moment. It makes the player's winning pull far more memorable than his losing ones, impairing his judgement of future probability. Our ability to envision a future event also affects our calculation of its true probability. The sandlot quarterback whRoss, Gary is the author of 'Stung The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony', published 2002 under ISBN 9780771075322 and ISBN 0771075324.