"Gamble" comes from an Anglo-Saxon word "gamenian" which means "to play". Gambling is common to almost all cultures AND historical time periods. All the great civilizations gambled--Egypt, China, India, Rome and American Indians all had some form of gambling common to their lifestyles. People then (and now) gamble for fun and for money. Gambling games were often even used to settle disputes. (Rock, scissors, paper anyone?) Witch doctors and cavemen used to "roll bones" and use the way they landed to foretell the future. It was a short trip from there to betting on the outcome of the way the bones landed.
Today you can gamble on literally ANYTHING. People bet on political elections, sports games, horse and dog races, which celebrities will die this year--you name it, and someone's wagering on it. Anyone who listens to talk radio, especially to Howard Stern or Russ Martin, is familiar with people betting on anything. Howard's crew wager on whether or not homeless people and topless dancers will know the answers to simple questions. The Russ Martin show runs a dead pool each year where you get a number of points for each person whose death you correctly pick equal to 100 - the celebrity's age.
Most people think of gambling in terms of casino gambling. Sports gambling is big too, but it goes on all the time at casinos, so I'll lump it into the same category. Casinos offer a vast array of table games and video games to play. And you're not limited to just Vegas and Atlantic City anymore; Indian casinos are springing up all over the place. And there are a multitude of offshore online casinos to choose from now too.
If you like to play poker, there are underground cardrooms in every major city in America. I read somewhere that Dallas (where I live) has over 35 illicit cardrooms. I've only been to two of these cardrooms, but I hope to visit more.
You can play any casino game online that you can play in a land-based casino, and you can usually get a better payout percentage from the online casino. Online casinos can afford the higher payout percentage because they don't have the overheard of a landbased casino. It's much less expensive to lease some casino game software and some servers than it is to cater to high rollers demanding 15,000 square foot suites at the Las Vegas Hilton. (To say nothing about the limo costs, the airfare costs, and the room service, event tickets, and women.)
If you want to do even more to support our government than just pay your taxes, you can buy lottery or lotto tickets. The payback percentage is awful, but the money is supposed to fund our kids' educations.
There are all kinds of gamblers too. There are fools who bet on anything and lose constantly. There are geniuses who can count cards at blackjack and win a good percentage of the time. There are professional gamblers, but Mason Malmuth, a noted gambling expert and poker player, estimates that there are fewer than 200 professional gamblers in the USA making over $100k per year.
You can decide what kind of gambler you want to be--whether you want to understand the rules, the odds, and the costs of being a gambler. Or you can be like the other rubes and just pour your money into the pockets of the folks running the gambling operations. Not everyone can be a card counting genius making a bundle at the casinos' expense, but everyone can be well educated and get the best odds and make the most of their bankrolls.
Education is the key. Education, logic, and a firm understanding that luck only exists as short-term deviation from the statistical averages you'll see over time.
