Entering the casino, one is beset at every side by invitation -- invitations such as that it would take a man of stone, heartless, mindless, and curiously devoid of avarice, to decline them. Listen: a machine-gun rattle of silver coins as they rumble and spurt down into a slot machine try and overflow by the monogrammed carpets is replaced by the siren clanger of the slots, the jangling, blippeting chorus swallowed by the huge room, muted to a comforting background chatter by the time one reaches the card tables, the distant sounds only loud enough to keep the adrenaline flowing through the gambler's veins.
There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of there mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, and claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors.
The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the money in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It's a sacrifice, of sorts.
-- Neil Gaiman, American Gods p281-282
Showing that these people are obviously insane for not just giving it back like they should.
