Many gamblers of casinos have noticed a tendency – as soon as you start ‘rounding’ your balance to the next good-looking round figure, you start immediately lose and eventually lose all your money.
Why is it so – a player can’t stop after successful bonus game and winning big, and he or she surely must ‘make it round’?
There may be a few reasons:
Violation of balance homeostasis. The gambler feels that the balance equity is lost, he/she was underpaid/overpaid (if some huge amount went into his/her hands, for instance, x1.000 – which (s)he didn’t expect). For instance, a figure 11.032 doesn’t look pretty, and it must be rounded either to 10.000 or to 100.000. Our conscious starts whispering a gambler mockingly: “You deserve better, let’s play for a little while more, gotta take a risk to win another, to make the figure round so much that it wouldn’t be a shame to show it to the master of calligraphy.”
Striving for beautiful numbers. People love the round, even, beautiful, smooth numbers that are put symmetrically. The scattered numbers (including Pi) aren’t too esthetically good-looking to the eyesight. Indeed, the balance like 31,415,926 doesn’t look too good.
Unconscious desire to play more. It would seem to have a good figure for the withdrawal is a perfect chance to withdraw it. But that’s not so easy! Conscious of the gambler wants to play more and rationalizes this desire telling “Let’s round the balance, it doesn’t look so good!” As a result, the gambler is engaged in rounding the balance and the subconscious has fun playing more.
More often, people love to round the balance to the round figure, to have something more than a zero in front, and as more zeroes as possible after it, for instance, 5,000 or 7,770 and .so on.
The aspiration to zero resembles a Zen circle or an “Enso”.
Enso Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769)
Enso is a Zen calligraphy symbol shaped as a circle that is done by a single move of the brush. The masters paint it in a way to prevent a brush from returning to the same place where it has started. Enso represents many symbols: “Universe”, “The nature of Buddha”, “True Essence”, “The nature of Reality” and so on. A synonym to Enso is a symbol of the full moon.
The gambler is a master of financial calligraphy and Buddha’s emptiness.
Starting rounding the balance, he or she comes to one – a zero, a symbol of limitlessness that is analogical to Zen’s Enso. Fullness and Emptiness combine together and the player feels that his/her mission is complete, receiving relieve.