Thread by @banglani

When I was 18, I lost my entire month's income in 10 minutes of gambling. It was totally worth it. <story>

In 1996, I spent a year in France on a college exchange program. As a poor Indian student, I was entirely dependent on my scholarship: 1200 francs a month.

That relative poverty meant that I made most of my (modest) purchases at the Sunday weekly market. It was a tent-and-caravan affair at the edge of town, and my friend and I would cycle there every Sunday morning to buy fruit, chips, juice, CDs and old comics.

It wasn't exactly a well-regulated place, and might even have been entirely illegal. You could buy food that was past the expiry date, stereo equipment that was almost definitely stolen, and all manner of bootleg merchandise.

The sellers and most of the clientele were immigrants, mostly from the Maghreb and West Africa, and the market had a very "bazaar" vibe: there was music and singing everywhere, all prices were negotiable (and negotiated),and you had to be on your toes to avoid getting ripped off.

After my purchases were done, I liked to hang around and take in the atmosphere. Listen to the music, maybe get an unfamiliar hot drink from a stall and walk around admiring the merchandise.

I was doing precisely this one cold winter morning when I saw a small crowd outside one of the stalls. Two men in jillabas and fez's had spread a small carpet on the ground and were taking bets on a card game. It screamed a scam, but I wasn't going to play, only watch.

The game was some variation of Three-card Monte, where you had to spot the Queen from the three cards the dealer shuffled on the carpet. It was mesmerising to watch the dealer's hands - how could the motion be simultaneously so fluid and so fast?

As I saw punter after punter lose money, my own view of the game changed from idle curiosity to mental challenge. I started paying close attention to the dealer's hands, to notice vertical, not only horizontal, switches. How,when he knew he had lost, he would flip the wrong card.

As I learnt the dealer's tricks, a voice inside me started saying, in a whisper at first but then increasingly louder, *you can beat this*.

Now even at 18, I was cautious and analytical, so I decided I will just stand there and count my success rate - how many times out of 10 can I spot the Queen correctly? If it's high enough, I will play.

For 20 games I watched and counted. I got 18 of them right. How could the punters keep losing when I was able to spot the Queen with such accuracy? Low IQ, probably. 45 minutes in, I decided to jump in.

My first bet was small, perhaps 50 francs. To my shock and horror, I lost. How could it be? I had got everything right before. Maybe this was the 10% case where I couldn't track the cards.

I bet again, this time 100 francs. I lost again. Now it was an assault to the ego. With my past "track record", this was a 1% probability event. I was not watching carefully enough - I shut out the noise and narrowed my focus on the dealer's hands, and bet another 100.

I kept losing money, and soon panic set in. I had lost a week's budget, then two weeks'. Suddenly it wasn't about beating the dealer any more; it was about recouping my losses. I wanted to get out, but I was 500 francs in the hole. I was sweating profusely inside my jacket.

In the early games, I had been sure where the Queen was, even if I was wrong. With the heart racing and the mind suddenly occupied with other thoughts - who will lend me money? how long will I take to repay them? - I wasn't sure anymore. Soon I was just blindly guessing.

The man in the fez cleaned me out. Every 100 franc note in my wallet was gone. My head was spinning as I staggered out of that place. The bike ride back seemed too long, my backpack too heavy, the weather too cold.

I was, of course, exaggerating the impact in my head. It wasn't the financial catastrophe I had imagined it to be - I borrowed some money, skimped on a few expenses and life continued as before. But the life lessons I learnt were invaluable.

I didn't develop any moral compulsions against gambling - by 18 I had already lost that easy distinction between vice and virtue. But I started to recognise what I dramatically called "the vortex of evil" - how when the base desires take over you lose your grip on rationality.

But by far the biggest lesson for me was the difference between thinking and doing, between testing and production. Till we are in the hot seat, we have a certain perception of our capabilities and our response to situations. We believe ourselves to be rational and analytical.

But that perception is not predictive of how we actually react to real-life events. When the squeeze is on, our lizard brains take over. We make choices that we will find downright irrational before and after the event. I *knew* I couldn't win at gambling, yet I did it anyway.

I now place far more trust in people's actual reactions to situations than their projections of how they will react.

How a founder deals with a departing employee tells you far more about their leadership style than their culture deck. Your partner's reaction to a missed flight tells you more about their ability to deal with life's curveballs than the promises they made in a hazy romantic mist.

This lesson alone was worth all the francs I lost that day, to the man in the fez.

<fin>