Monday, March 25, 2013

An Ex-Gambler Weighs the Cost of Addiction

New York Times
Sure he knows when he made his last wager, Stephen M. Block said. It was on May 10, 1975, “a lifetime ago.” He had just come from Belmont Park, where he had endured a losing day. Yet another losing day. Now he was sitting at the bar of a social club in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, watching a rerun of Groucho Marx’s old TV game show, “You Bet Your Life.” It featured a wheel, with numbers that determined how much money was at stake for each of the contestants.