Gambling with neither greed nor selfishness.

Many have at one time or another indulged in gambling. Sometimes, it is just purely fun and to while away time.

I am one of those people who just like to understand people. Gamblers are interesting people. They are good pretenders. Many gamble in order to profit. Look into the mind of a gambler and you see someone hoping to have better cards than his friends, someone watching the faces of the others to see their reaction to the card he had been handed. Most of them reveal their luck in their eyes and their facial expressions. Very few are professionals and can neither hide their excitement nor their disappointment. In gambling, there is only ‘I’, the selfish me who has to emerge the winner, for what is at stake is money, especially so when the stakes are high.

When I was a bachelor living with five other guys, many were the times when we found ourselves with nothing much to do. Gambling was one of the ways to pass time.

However, we knew that gambling itself might remove the joy of it being a game. It might also affect friendship. So, we thought of a way to turn gambling into a fun thing.

We decided to play it in such a way that the overall winner could turn out to be the loser and the loser could possibly be the winner. The others could either be winners or losers depending on the amount won or lost. Thus nobody was too eager to be the winner and the loser not worried about being one. How is that possible?

Well, we limit the sum of money to be placed for each round, a small amount. Then we informed all players that the overall winner would have to pay for everyone’s supper. Thus, if the winner won only a small sum, that might not be enough to pay for the group’s supper; resulting in him being the loser eventually. If the losers lost only a little; less than the price of his supper, he would enjoy his supper with the small amount that he lost. With that, he turns out to be a winner.

In the above manner, only the very small winners won, the rest contributed towards the supper with variable sums of money after a game each evening.

The way it ended with uncertain probabilities created much excitement for us. Of course, we had to be honest about the amount we had won. The biggest winner who pays for everyone’s supper will only know if he wound up the real winner or loser after he had paid the bills.

In this manner, we played happily, never anxious about winning or losing, always ending the day happily at the supper table.

For us, such a game brought us closer, the comradeship was great among us and everyone had a good time. We were all winners.