The Spotted Ball, a True Story by Larry Cohen c 2025
Chapter 19
“I don’t remember my wins.”
Years ago, a 12-year-old tennis player from Grand Island, NY, just outside of Buffalo, came to town to play in a tennis tournament in my city in Central New York State. However, this player, Jimmy Arias, was not here to play in the Boys’ Division as most of us expected, but rather to play in the Men’s Division. This 12-year-old tennis prodigy was about to play our area’s top-ranked men’s tennis player in the Men’s Finals. Our local player was only one level beneath the touring professionals at that time.
Imagine this, a 12-year-old kid playing a top area tennis player in the finals of the major regional tennis tournament!
In a “two out of three set match” little Jimmy lost…..but not until three sets had been played. It took three sets for our top player to beat the kid from Grand Island.
Fast forward to when this same top player was playing a Senior’s Event in Long Island, NY. He ran into Jimmy Arias, who by then had retired from major tennis and was only playing smaller regional events. Our local player approached Jimmy and asked him if he remembered playing him when he was only 12 years of age. Jimmy responded, “I do remember playing you and losing,” continuing with “I don’t remember all of my wins, but I remember all of my losses.”
With gamblers, it is the polar opposite. Gamblers tend to forget their losses and only remember their wins.
I introduced this chapter by recounting this tennis story for that very reason. Gamblers are not very good at remembering their losses. For those who play the state-sponsored games of chance, it would be hard, if not impossible, to find a player who can recount his losses. The State knows how much they have won, but the players have no idea how much they have lost.
Moving on to high prize lotteries, my readers who are well-versed in history will recall that lotteries played a large part in financing the first attempt by the French in building a canal through Panama. But even with the lotteries (and there were several, each one offering larger and larger prizes), the French were unable to complete the project. It took the Americans under Presidents Taft and Wilson to complete the Panama Canal. Then there was the famous Louisiana Lottery that began after the U.S. Civil War, which failed because of corruption within the lottery itself to the point where the U.S. Congress banned the Louisiana Lottery, forcing the principals to re-open in Central America.
Under the guise of aiding education (The NYS Lottery funds only 2% of the Education Budget), our own New York State introduced high-prize lottery games in the early 1980s. I used what I termed “the stickiness of numbers” to win almost $900 in 1984. The theory was simple. Going back to the theory that numbers would repeat more often than not, I could see that the winning numbers in the lottery were never evenly spaced apart. With that in mind, I took a group of very tightly grouped numbers and played them on one ticket. Call it what you may, the theory worked. Once and only once. As was said above, a gambler seldom remembers his losses, only his wins.
To be continued….