Satire: The Innumerable Benefits of Gambling

Elbert L. Anderson is a male and self-proclaimed wellness guru who claims on his blog to have found enlightenment through the online gambling platform Kalshi. Below is his explanation of this journey.

I’ve found out a great many things in my life, many by chance, as we call it in the “biz,” although equally as many through what I now understand to be fate. It was clearly my destiny to be born into a sports-loving family, for example. To be only five feet six inches. And to be a “chud.” I used to spend days running my hands over the dust-trapping lacquer of the gymnasium floor, or sitting on the couch in front of the TV. I’d count from the first to the fourth down until the football game finally relieved me with ad breaks, and watch futilely as the lengths of my peers’ femurs initially, and then continually, surpassed my own. And I clung onto this idea that my life had not yet begun, that in the fertilized soil of higher-education I could — no, would — blossom into the man whom I was always meant to be. Even if I didn’t know then who that was. It was kinder than the reality that I was being left behind.

It’s hard when your gifts aren’t … traditional.

I first discovered the app Kalshi on Instagram Reels, in that sor-bet-ty, summery slog of middle-August after graduation: I could make thousands of dollars a month by betting on the weather, an attractive, but casual blonde woman with outgrown roots told me. Every single day of our human lives we harness this intangible, generational, canon of wisdom and logic called “our gut.” We tell our friends Bad Bunny will headline the Superbowl, that the Patriots suck, and we are right. “What’s wrong with monetizing that right-ness?” the woman asked me. The advertisement looped five more times, and I just let it. 

Given the aforementioned interests of my family, the world of sports betting was far from foreign to me, though I admit it was an act which I had previously condemned. Money on the line can turn a happy past time into an evil endeavor, turning prideful men into, do forgive the cliche, monsters. During our tailgates my uncles’ faces would flush with burst red blood cells, and the skin on their bones would be reduced to a sheen over their swollen, squirming veins. I would be quickly ushered out of the path of the storm with some TOSTITOS® SCOOPS!® and a kiss from my mother. She told me they were just excited. And I would lie awake while my parents whispered about Uncle Tim.

“The whole college fund?”

“All of it.”

“Bill, this is getting out of hand! You have to talk to him. He’s your brother for Pete’s sake!”

“Who. Is. Pete.”

It wasn’t a life that I should aspire to. 

But you learn over time that luck is a force much like fire. She can be tamed, but never controlled. And to many, she may appear callous. In bars, she is cruel. In casinos, she costs you everything. However, Kalshi, I believe, is the gateway to transcending our current weakness. Kalshi is not physical, Kalshi is an app that allows us to retain or sanity even when the numbers stray from our favor. Repeated bets turn our flesh into metal. And luck spreads over us much like heat over a griddle.

To many of my masculine counterparts, my aversion to sports betting is a personal failing. I could not appreciate this sacred art, this one in which many men across time zones and generations and sports have found kinship, community, and even prosperity. See, manhood is something forged. Something earned. The pain is seen as a necessity, and the ability to bear it as proof of one’s transcendence. Sports betting encapsulates this. My unworthiness showed in every overactive nerve and tear duct on my body. But Kalshi showed me that I could have control without suffering. And now all of my boulders roll over the hilltops. 

I have embraced the internet as the new vessel through which we can communicate with the universe, and match our soul frequencies to it once again. On the Kalshi app, having relinquished my credit card information, I find that my body, mind, and all seven layers of my essence are aligned with the novas from which we all came. Suddenly life, death, marriages, divorces, breakups, engagements, temperature, turns of phrase, tariffs, inches of snow, idioms, snow plow frequency, new top songs, chances of snow turning into ice, new top brands, “who! will be where! doing what!,” the amount of cloud coverage on the moon, the amount of snow on the moon, Elon Musk, everything under and beyond and concerning the sun can be bet on with a tap on a screen. Why would I waste my time following athlete statistics, win percentage, and injury reserve lists when I could bet on everything else? I understand infinity not as an unknowable concept but as an endless array of things, all of which are brimming with potential. I take a sip every time I place a bet.

Will the sky still be blue tomorrow? Will buildings still point to the heavens? Will the moon still control the tides? There is always the chance that our world could unravel at any moment. There is always the feeling that it already has. Order slips away like hair from the vertex of one’s head, yet it never is truly beyond a phone’s reach away. Bet you didn’t consider that.