349 



GAMBLING SUPERSTITIONS. 



IT might be supposed that those who are most familiar 

 with the actual results which present themselves in long 

 series of chance-games would form the most correct 

 views respecting the conditions on which such results 

 depend, would be, in fact, freest from all superstitious 

 ideas respecting chance or luck. The gambler who 

 sees every system his own infallible system included 

 foiled by the run of events, who witnesses the discom- 

 fiture of one gamester after another that for a time 

 had seemed irresistibly lucky, and who can number by 

 the hundred those who have been ruined by the love of 

 play, might be expected to recognise the futility of all 

 attempts to anticipate the results of chance combina- 

 tions. It is, however, but too well known that the 

 reverse is the case. The more familiar a man becomes 

 with the multitude of such combinations, the more 

 confidently he believes in the possibility of foretelling, 

 not, indeed, any special event, but the general run of 

 several approaching events. There has never been a 

 successful gambler who has not believed that his success 

 (temporary though such success ever is, where games of 

 pure chance are concerned) has been the result of 

 skilful conduct on his own part ; and there has never been 

 a ruined gambler (though ruined gamblers are to be 

 counted by thousands) who has not believed that when 

 ruin overtook him he was on the very point of mastering 

 the secret of success. It is this fatal confidence which 

 gives to gambling its power of fascinating the lucky as 



