The Norm Chronicles (19 page)

Of course, all sorts of things can go wrong that don’t lead to the death of the mother but can nonetheless have a deep impact. The most common is post-natal depression, which affects around 10 to 15 per cent of new mothers. It’s another risk that runs back into the problem of how hard it can be to see past the benefits to the risks, especially when the benefits are large, or to take seriously the chance that our own feelings are a poor guide to how we will feel in future. ‘I know that I want a baby, that I want it very much, that I feel happy at the thought of it, that the thought of not having a baby makes me unhappy and that therefore having a baby will make me happy.’ Who is to tell you that you are wrong? But the risk of depression is not small. We can try to persuade people to take this risk more seriously, and perhaps we should, not least by offering proper help after the birth if problems arise. But we should not expect it to change people’s hopes and behaviour.

12
GAMBLING

N
ORM’S GAMBLING PHASE
began after an unprecedented streak of rollovers left the National Lottery Jackpot on £14 million – and he calculated that £14 million would buy every possible lotto combination. So if he shelled out £14 million in advance on tickets, winning would be a cert.

Plus that all the lower prizes he’d also clean up would yield a hefty profit. At which his eyes had an unusual – for Norm – Rambo look.

‘Gosh,’ he said.

Though when he asked at breakfast how to raise £14 million, his wife didn’t seem to hear.

‘I said …’

‘I know …’

‘But I’ve done the calculations,’ said Norm, ‘it’s a rational strategy.’

‘I think you may have missed the point of gambling,’ she said.

‘It’s a sure thing.’

‘As I said, I think you …’

‘Winning?’

Of course, there was the small practical problem of how to buy 14 million tickets. At about 30 seconds per, that was still nearly 7,000 days at the machine even full-time in Mr Singh’s. But what finally put a spanner in the plan was when he realised he had overlooked something.
*
Which is when his interest ended. No rational point, given the odds.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN
, years previously, at a slot machine at a family wedding reception for the lad who was now trying to sell his corn flakes to Kelvin outside Ladbrokes:

‘Oh, my lad! What a lad!’

‘Play one for me will ya, sunshine?’

‘He has the luck!’

‘He’s the knack!’

‘Blond hair and blue eyes, it’s angel luck!’

‘Here, here’s another, little fella, go on, son, go on.’

And the gorgeous lights flashed, and the coins pumped and cheered.

How it ended:

‘For 50p then? Cost a pound, mate, come on. More than that, look: £1.23, it’s on the box, come on, 50p!’

‘I don’t like corn flakes.’

‘What then? The milk? The lot – a fiver the lot? Come on. Please. A fiver. Lend us. I’ll win it back. I’m due. Just a fiver, mate!’

And then, because the fare he’d kept safe in his back pocket hadn’t been safe at all and eventually went the same way as the shopping, and there was the long walk home to find the note saying that she’d left after too many lies, and because it was a grand, more, blown in two days, a grand in her name they didn’t have; and because he’d tried, God he’d tried, he’d even bought half the weekly shop first to be safe and then sold it for F-all because the perfect moment to stop never came, there never was a win big enough; and because now his plastic is no good and he’s crying again, and he sleeps in his clothes; and because his dad has already bailed him out but he blew the bail-out and just the thought of that carves another hole in his soul, so back comes the sickness and self-loathing as he curses at the loser in the mirror thinking everything he has is nothing and he is 24; because he is, in the end, lost; because of all this, but still somehow holding on to the wreckage of a daydream, he calls the Gamblers Anonymous free helpline sobbing in a piss-stinking phone box. Which was sad, because this was what he lived for.

But Kelvin didn’t want the guy’s corn flakes. He wanted Cheese Rind
at 4–1 to get its snout in front on the big screen in the 7.30 Platinum Stakes at Reading, and as the money rode the track and the dogs strained, he was beside himself with exhilaration. Norm said he was a fool, given the probabilities. Only the next day, after Snow Queen topped the evening at an unlikely 7–1 over the 660-metre hurdles with fine late speed on the stretch, he won £81,281.52 on an accumulator. It was getting on for enough to buy a Maserati – if only he hadn’t broken all his rules come the weekend and poured 40 grand down a women’s tennis match on a Russian he’d never heard of because someone said Russians were good but this was a donkey in a tutu. So? He’d won it first, which meant he lost nothing, and decided to go instead for either a Porsche or BMW 335i convertible. Naturally, he flipped for it, bought the Porsche, put it in a canal, pissed that night having gambled on third-party insurance.

‘
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what
they do. And they parted his clothing, and cast lots.
’ Luke 23:34
¹

We can’t know when people first started harnessing unpredictability as a fair means of making tricky decisions. But what went for Christ’s clothing continues with some school admissions, selection of juries or deciding which survivor to eat in the lifeboat,
*
or sometimes buying a car.

Young men sent to Vietnam were chosen by drawing from a box of capsules containing birthdays. Unfortunately in 1969 they put the capsules in the box in order of month but didn’t mix them well, with the result that it was bad luck to be born later in the year: 26 out of 31 birthdays in December ended up drafted.
³

The idea of a lottery should be to give everyone an equal chance. This randomness allows the intervention of whatever belief one has in God, fate, luck or fortune, a process still seen in the bizarre rituals and mascots used in casinos and competitions. Norm, by trying to beat the lottery, is
up to his old tricks again of trying not just to tame chance but to make it irrelevant. Now that would be power. But would it be fun? Would it even be interesting? Maybe that’s what Mrs N is getting at. If you deny life’s lottery, do you stifle life?

Devices that embody randomness have been used for leisure for at least 5,000 years. The ancient Egyptians, of a long winter’s evening presumably, sat around and played board games in which moves were decided by throwing an ‘astragalus’, a bone in the heel that can fall on one of four sides. If you buy a leg of lamb you can, with a little effort and mess, extract your own astragalus and use it for games or divination, just as the Greeks and Romans also did. Then people started putting money on the outcomes of the throws, and the move from game-playing to gaming began,
⁴
using either astragali or dice: indeed modern versions of the Bible now assert that ‘the soldiers gambled for his clothes by throwing dice’.
⁵

Gambling became so popular that the Romans tried to restrict it to Saturdays, but even the Emperor Claudius played obsessively and wrote a book:
How to Win at Dice
. People continued to make bets and quote odds: in Paris in 1588 you could get 5 to 1 against the Spanish Armada sailing to invade England, although this was probably a ruse by the Spanish.
⁶
But what is remarkable is that in all this time, right until the Renaissance in the 1500s, nobody analysed gambles mathematically. Maybe they thought the outcomes were decided by some external force of fate, but it’s now thought that the gap between theory and practice was too great, and the idea of putting a number on chance – the probability – just did not occur.
⁷

The first book that started to work out odds was written in 1525 by an Italian, Girolamo Cardano, another obsessive gambler with no time for superstition.
⁸
He came up with the idea of counting the favourable outcomes – say the six ways of throwing 7 with two dice – and dividing it by the total of 36 possible outcomes, to find a chance of one in six of throwing a 7 with two dice. This seems obvious now, but it was a remarkable achievement. Although he got a lot wrong too. He seemed to think that, just because an astragalus can land on one of four sides, each side is equally likely; but a brief experiment shows this is not the
case (try it – astragali are uneven). He also thought that three throws of a die would be sufficient to give a 50:50 chance of a particular face, say a 6, a mistake that could have lost him a lot of money. You can try this as well. (The odds would be 50:50 only if there were no repeats.)

The Chevalier de Méré, a more perceptive gambler, in Paris in the 1650s, reckoned from his gaming that if he bet that he could throw a 6 in four throws, then the odds were slightly in his favour. Whereas if he threw two dice and bet he could land a double 6 in 24 throws, then the odds were slightly against him. By chance (or fate) he brought the problem to the attention of two of the smartest mathematicians at that or any other time, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat (he of the Last Theorem), who confirmed that he had a 52 per cent chance of winning the first bet, and a 49 forty-nine chance of winning the second,
⁹
so the Chevalier had actually got it right, from what must have been extensive and expensive experience. The Chevalier also presented the mathematicians with the ‘problem of points’ – if a game has to stop before the end, in what proportions should the stake be divided up? A modern counterpart is the Duckworth-Lewis method for allocating runs when a cricket match is stopped, this time designed by statisticians – and so suitably incomprehensible.

The scientific assessment of odds then disappears for a few centuries, as the 1700s became a golden age of betting on the basis of gut feeling rather than calculation. It was the time of ‘eccentric wagers’, such as a large sum won by the Count de Buckeburg in 1735 for riding a horse from London to York seated backwards.
¹⁰
There were also huge bets on cricket matches, and a predictable consequence was the match-fixing scandals that erupted in the early 1800s, with spectators at Lord’s bewildered at the sight of two nobbled teams both desperately trying to lose.
¹¹

As a result, bookmakers were banned from Lord’s in 1817, lotteries banned in 1826, and the Gaming Act of 1845 made gambling debts unenforceable by law. Cricket was turned into the archetypal gentlemen’s game.

That is, until recently, when heavy gambling led to match-fixing and, owing to the ability to bet on every detail of the match, players were bribed to mess up specific balls – an example of spot-fixing.
¹²

Victorian morality abhorred gambling, and only with the liberalisation of the 1960s did it begin to become a respectable pastime. Now, according to Gamble Aware,
¹³
73 per cent of adults in Britain gamble each year. Even excluding the lottery, the figure is still almost half the adult population. The Gambling Commission estimates that they lost around £6 billion in 2009/10 – not counting the lottery – that’s an average of £100 per man, woman and child, or around £200 per gambler. And that’s the average. Most people don’t lose anything like that, so some must be pouring it away.

Two statisticians once wrote a dense textbook on probability theory that they called
How to Gamble if You Must
, which led to many disappointed purchasers and a subsequent change in title to the more accurate
Inequalities for Stochastic Processes
.
¹⁴
But what would be a good gamble now, if you must? We are not talking about corporate gambling on the financial markets, or games of skill such as poker, or the sports-betting organisations employing PhD mathematicians and using sophisticated statistical models. We mean gambles for the fairly naive punter.

Lotteries prefer not to think of themselves as gambling, and the UK National Lottery does not even come under the Gambling Commission, but nevertheless takes in nearly £600 million each year. The jackpot in the main draw is won by matching 6 numbers drawn from 49, and as there are around 14 million possible combinations that’s a 1-in-14-million chance of winning from a single ticket. That’s also about the chance of a 50-year-old woman dying from any cause in 15 minutes, or about the chance of being knocked off your bicycle and killed during a 1-mile journey, or DS’s chance of having a heart attack or stroke in the next 7 minutes. – a bit more than the time it takes to buy a ticket. But with around 30 million ticket sales for each Saturday draw, on average 2 people should win each time. And the same number will die within a few minutes of buying their ticket. But nobody blames the lottery – though they would if it had been a vaccine.

If nobody wins, the big prize is rolled over. If this carries on, the jackpot could grow so big as to be more than the cost of buying every combination possible, say if the UK jackpot ever reached more than £14 million. It would then become an interesting business proposition – as
Norm realises – to buy all possible tickets, and although this strategy would be difficult to organise, it would win all the subsidiary prizes as well.

This has happened. In 1992 the jackpot in the Irish lottery stood at £1.7 million in spite of it costing only £973,896 to buy all the tickets and so be sure of winning. A Dublin syndicate managed to buy 80 per cent of the tickets despite the efforts of the Lottery organisers to stop them. The flaw in Norm’s plan is that, although they won the jackpot, they had to share it with two other punters, and so would have made a loss, but with all the lesser prizes managed to make a small profit. Norm knows that winning is a cert – but not who else might win too. That’s still a lottery.