Gambling and the I Ching

[Taomeow]

So today was a big day at the race track in my neck of woods, and my daughter talked me into checking it out and placing some bets on some horses and getting rich fast, or poor faster, whichever happens. I checked the auspiciousness of the day first -- found out it was inauspicious. Then I asked the I Ching.

 

The I Ching gave me five (sic) changing lines, something I've never encountered before (and I talk to her almost every day). So it meant I had to take into consideration nearly two hexagrams (minus just one line out of twelve). As always is the case when there's too many lines to interpret, you get a conflicting reading with parts of it saying yes, go for it while other parts say don't even think about it. In ancient times, in such cases, they used the fourfold oracle -- the I Ching AND the tortoise shells AND "ask your people" AND "ask your heart." Then if three out of four said yes, it was a yes, and if three out of four said no, it was a no. (I shudder when I envision situations where two said yes and two said no...) Anyway, I've no tortoise shell divination tools, so I had to go with two out of three. I "asked my people." My son said no, don't go there. My daughter said, c'mon, let's go, let's go! So I asked my heart. My heart took the fifth. So I went.

 

To be continued...

Edited August 20, 2007 by Taomeow

[witch]

You didn't check planetary transits?

[宁]

You didn't check planetary transits?

 

 

you really seem to have taken a liking to her

[Yoda]

I did an online i ching and it said that you'll come out even and have fun.

[Pietro]

you really seem to have taken a liking to her

 

you must understand her.

Taomeow is so yin and receptive that witch extra yang finds an easy grip.

 

*Pietro runs away two times faster*

Edited August 20, 2007 by Pietro

[Taomeow]

Thanks for being receptive to my yin, Pietro!

 

Little1, it's not Witch's fault -- I owed her. I called her "tame" in another thread. Totally my bad.

 

and, Yoda, I did have fun... but the financial outcome is a separate story.

 

Witch,

 

Western astrology is divination on the zodiac; zodiac is the Greek for "circle of animals"; "circle of animals" is the Arabic for "Chinese astrology." So I just leave out all the middlemen and go straight to the source... when I said the day was "inauspicious," I meant Chinese Astrology assigns a "san niang affliction" to this day, which should have been enough to stop me without getting into any further details -- but didn't. So, here's the rest of the story.

 

I am clueless about horse races, so I decided to follow those of the I Ching clues that seemed helpful, amidst all the warnings of all the dangers. "Hold on firmly to the yellow ox hide," the I Ching suggested. I know the metaphorical meaning of "yellow" in her context -- "middle of the road," "balanced," "the golden in-between course." "Yellow" of the I Ching is like Buddha's "Middle Way." But since all her meanings are layered and some layers are metaphorical while others are directly literal, it could also mean the color yellow, it could mean gold, it could mean "bet on horses with yellow or gold colors or markings in the outfits of the jockeys or the horses." It could mean "gold begets gold." I envisioned something yellow and gold and decided that if I find a horse and/or rider wearing such an outfit, I'll bet all the money I was prepared to lose without getting into all the more dangerous possibilities and potentials of a "san niang" day, which I designated to be $40, on this one horse. So I was going to have to choose between "mid-range odds" and "actual yellow color." So far so good. My heart said, OK, I'm going to give you a tip now, since you're up and at it anyway.

 

Now the first hexagram I had to consider when doing the divination was the Double Lake. The first thing I saw at the race track was that it actually has two lakes behind it! This reinforced my heart's desire to go with the literal rather than symbolic reading. Yellow and gold. I opened the program, and my eyes fell on an outfit description that matched this requirement. I told my daughter, this is it, I'll bet on this one, and only on this one.

 

To be continued...

[Wayfarer64]

Now I'm curious (yellow)...

AND THEY"RE OFFF...!!!

[Neijia]

I'm curious too.

 

The suspense is killing me

[Flynn]

Geez you can't leave us hanging like that!

[Yoda]

It sounds like the Taoist community is $40 poorer...

[Taomeow]

Geez you can't leave us hanging like that!

 

 

Now you know how I felt.

 

My daughter used to have a part-time job at the race track walking the horses (that's how they "exercise" -- being walked in a circle for a few hours every day). So obviously she knows a lot more about the whole deal than I do. She read up on the horse I picked and said, oh no, this is a sure loser. Look at the odds! It has never won anything. The odds against this horse were forty to one. She said, go with something else, look at the horses' and jockeys' records, in general but also, especially, their performance this week. Look at the odds. Don't bet on the "sure winner," that's how all the suckers lose their money, pick a horse with odds in the 3-5 range. Make sure the horse is not too old, and not too young. The ones bred in Brazil and Italy do a bit better on average than the ones bred in Kentucky, all other things being equal. And don't bet on just one horse to win, pick another to "place" and another to "show," maximize your chances. And so on.

 

I go, no, I can't make a good decision this way, this is a good balancing approach for someone who has pondered the whole scope of information for a while and got a feel for the whole deal, but I didn't, so it tells nothing to my instincts. I'll go with my yellow idea. But maybe I'll pick another horse. A few other horses. Look, the numbers under which they run are color-coded, and one of the colors is yellow, for number four. So I'll bet on four horses in four races, the ones that are each number four in its own group.

 

And I did.

 

That I lost on all of them is not the heartbreaking part. Nor that one of them, a most unremarkable one, picked up in the last thirty seconds and, with me jumping and screaming and trying to give it a push with my own qi, came second, losing to the winner by the length of the nose. The really educational lesson was that the horse of my initial I-Ching-inspired choice, the one with yellow and gold, the one my heart voted for, came first, just as the odds against him jumped to almost 50 --

 

which meant that my first choice, the one I didn't go with, was to make about two thousand in about two minutes. Since I didn't go with it, it felt, for all purposes, as though I actually had this money and threw it away. It felt as though it was rightfully mine and the "san niang affliction" that caused me to second-guess my own instincts and the exact way they resonated with what the I Ching was telling me snatched it from my purse. Ah well. In some Tibetan monasteries, they build a magnificent sand mandala for three years, spending countless monk-hours on the task, and then take a broom and sweep it off the face of the earth in three minutes, in order to learn to look the mighty goddess of futility and loss in the face -- and smile.

 

So I smiled, and as the sand of time was being swept off the mandala of the race track, people, horses, the two lakes, the two grand, everything --

 

I recognized the goddess's face. It was yellow, with golden eyes.

Edited August 21, 2007 by Taomeow

[witch]

Interesting. She chastizes those she loves.

 

Western astrology has transits--not just what the heavens are doing on a particular day, but how the current planetary positions interact with one's natal chart. Does Chinese astrology have that? It is particularly handy with gambling, because while everyone has the same current planetary influence and therefore equal chances at winning, transits give an individual edge, for example Venus trine Jupiter.

[Spectrum]

Are you using the 49 Yarrow Stick method?

[Taomeow]

Western astrology has transits--not just what the heavens are doing on a particular day, but how the current planetary positions interact with one's natal chart. Does Chinese astrology have that? It is particularly handy with gambling, because while everyone has the same current planetary influence and therefore equal chances at winning, transits give an individual edge, for example Venus trine Jupiter.

 

I have no command of Western astrological terminology, so I've no idea what a transit or a trine are about, but if what you mean is whether Chinese astrology can account for fluctuations of patterns of planetary qi on an hourly basis, then, yes, of course, it can and it does. The system I use, Zi Wei Tu Su, takes into account the position of fifty stars altogether, is very complex, and I really haven't had the time to do it properly in the past four years or so, but there's almanacs available that have already done much of the dirty work for you, so you can find out which hour of which day will indeed give you a gambling edge. If I were gambling on a regular basis, I'd make sure I know, and wouldn't use a commercial almanac either -- even the more precise ones are not precise enough to turn gambling into a steady paying job. There's days, months, years, or even twenty- or sixty-year cycles when the best that can happen to you is that you might cut your losses. A fluctuation occurring within a paricular lucky hour won't ultimately make a difference.

 

In general, the influence of larger cycles is greater at all times than that of the smaller ones, and Chinese Sexagenary cycle (of sixty years) is going to call the shots vis a vis a year's qi, and the year will bow to that rather than to a particular lunar month, and an hour in a day, to a lunar month, and so on. Smaller and more generalized cycles (like the popular "Twelve Animals" thingie for astrological amusement of the masses, or like Western "natal charts" and "horoscopes") are useless to take into account in the grand scheme of things unless the grand scheme of things is understood.

 

Western astrology is a jigsaw puzzle with many, many key pieces missing, while Chinese astrology is a jigsaw puzzle with way too many pieces (nothing is missing)... so one has to have the time and patience to use it for a very detailed, very accurate picture. But knowing there's a "hand" that, on a given day, scrambles them all no matter what you do might be enough information for that particular day -- you don't need to gather the picture to be scrambled, just know it WILL be scrambled no matter what it looks like.

[witch]

Don't discount Western astrology. It only uses the sun, moon, planets, dwarf planets and asteroids, no stars, but there are way more than fifty; it is quite complex if you know what you are doing.

 

Transits have to do with how the current state of the heavens relates to one's own natal chart, where the planets were at the moment of birth. In that it gives the edge over Chinese astrology in gambling because it addresses personal luck, not general cosmic weather.