Quote:
Originally Posted by chillrob
That's just laziness.
There are guides on how to claim the lottery anonymously, and you can avoid the external negatives (people hitting you up for money).
You can set up a trust (and if you claim anonymously you do this anyway) and you can choose exactly how to disburse the funds, thereby avoiding the internal negatives (blowing through money).
I am not kidding when I say that if you feel money would change you, you should create a blind trust whose mission would be to buy up your favorite poker room so that you can keep the rake at 10% to $3. And then to avoid getting tainted you can stipulate you don't get any of the money directly so you can continue grinding 8/16 for the rest of your life.
Money only changes you if you let it. I admit there's probably no way to go from "broke as ****" to "literal billionaire" without crashing and burning a little. But that's one of the reasons taking a reasonable amount of risk when you're poor is good. If I hadn't known the rush of a $20 blackjack gamble paying off when my daily gambling budget was $100, I would have had way more difficulty handling the sudden wealth when my top set of kings turned into the overfull house and I won a 35 BB pot at 80/160.
It's fine, and even beneficial, to take reasonable long shots (gambling or otherwise). It's good to ask someone out who's out of your league - and learn how to deal with rejection and occasional long shot success. It's good to take a little money and put it into an individual, small cap stock that you really like - and learn the true variance of the stock market. I mean obviously if you spend your life writing love letters to celebrities hoping they'll somehow fall in love with you, that's unreasonable. Or put all of your money in Callipygian Erectile Dysfunction Solutions: Putting the Small Cap Back in Small Cap Stocks, that's terrible. But you need to learn how to deal with those +2/-2 sigma swings in life before you can handle the +3/-3 sigma swings.