The Gambler's Goal is Not to Win but Simply to Continue

The killer feature of slot machines isn't that they promise jackpots, but that they make players stop caring about winning entirely. How does this apply to options, sports betting, and memecoins?

When I started examining financial speculation, I thought it was bad that mainstream products dangled unrealistic lottery-like jackpots at users. But I’ve realized that they’re doing something more devious: engineering a condition where the jackpot becomes irrelevant and players gamble for its own sake, a trance-like state researchers call “the machine zone”.

“The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win,” said Mollie, a Vegas gambler quoted in the excellent book Addiction by Design.

Why, then, does she play?

“To keep playing, to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”

Gambling products aren’t designed for players to make “something from nothing”, they are after nothingness itself. The machine zone suspends time, space, monetary value, social roles, and one’s sense of their own existence.

Characteristics of Machine Zone Products

The concept of the machine zone was first applied to slot machines.

Continuous play with minimal friction between decisions. On a slot machine, the moment one spin ends, you can start another. There’s no waiting for a dealer, shuffling cards, or finding new opponents.

Rapid, repetitive action. Slot machines complete a full gambling loop in three to six seconds: bet, outcome, opportunity to bet again.

Variable ratio reinforcement. You don’t know when you’ll win, only that you might win. Near-misses are more arousing than losses, and “almost winning” triggers a bigger urge to play than winning itself. Slot machines deliver wins just frequently enough to sustain hope, but unpredictably enough to maximize that anticipatory dopamine spike.

Elimination of natural stopping cues. Traditional gambling had built-in stopping points: your poker game ends, the racetrack’s last race finishes, you run out of chips and have to go to an ATM. Slot machines eliminate these cues.

Absorption that narrows attention to the game interface. On a slot machine, your awareness contracts until only the screen exists. Bodily sensations fade: you don’t notice you’re hungry, thirsty, or need the bathroom. Time distorts and hours feel like minutes. The casino floor’s noise and movement blur into background static. Your entire perceptual field shrinks to the spinning reels, the flashing symbols, the next outcome.

Smartphones: Acceleration Toward Machine Zone

A study commissioned by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission found that residents living within fifty miles of a casino had twice the rate of problem gambling than residents who lived further away.

Now, what happens when the casino is five inches away from you?

Since smartphones became mainstream in the 2010s, we’ve been running an unprecedented experiment: a casino in every pocket.

Products have relentlessly trended towards the machine zone, each step removing friction and compressing time between the bet and outcome. This section explores how the machine zone manifests in options, sports betting, and memecoins.

Options

Traditional options trading in the 2000s involved contracts that expired on a monthly basis, on the third Friday of every month. Traders chose a strike price, selected an expiry, and waited for a month for the contracts to settle. Every trade was a deliberate commitment with a defined time horizon. The CBOE introduced weekly options in 2005 that expired every Friday, which meant that these options were effectively zero day options if bought on Friday. It was only in 2022 that expiry expanded to all five trading days, which created daily zero day options and unleashed the retail options trading boom. Zero day options rose from 5% of total options volume in 2016 to 61% by May 2025.

The median option purchased by a retail trader in 2020 had 4 days to expiry; by 2022, that collapsed to less than one day. The median holding period for an options trade is absurdly short: 30 minutes. This compression shows the trend towards machine zone: shrinking the gap between the bet and the outcome to minutes, eliminating waiting periods that once served as stopping cues, and creating an all-consuming loop of rapid-fire bets.

Sports Betting

Following the Supreme Court’s repeal of the sports betting ban in 2018, legal sportsbooks initially offered traditional pre-game betting: you place a bet on Saturday’s football game, then wait hours or days for the bet to resolve. You can’t bet again on the same game, can’t speed up the outcome, and are forced to stop. You leave the app and you’re out of the zone.

By 2020, FanDuel introduced same game parlays, which combine multiple bets across a single game into one wager. You can bet that the Nuggets win by over 10 points, Jokic gets a triple-double, and Jamal Murray scores over 20 points. You’re tracking just one game, so your attention is constrained and the temporal window is narrowed. But it’s still just one decision without a repetitive loop.

However, sports betting progressed towards machine zone territory by 2023 with the spread of live in-game betting and micro-betting, which converted football games into three hours of continuous financial decisions: the outcome of the coin toss, the first player to commit a foul, the next player to score, whether the next kick is made or missed, among hundreds of other options.

Football in particular is suited for live betting, which is why it has the biggest market share of sports bets wagered. There are only 17 regular season football games per team versus 82 per team in the NBA, so each football game is more consequential. Scoring events in football are meaningful because they wildly swing the probability of winning. Every new play creates a new state of the world with opportunities to place bets on the next play’s outcome, the drive result, live spreads and totals, player props, touchdown odds, yardage milestones, and dozens of correlated markets that refresh every twenty seconds. There are also hundreds of natural breaks that allow sportsbooks to update live odds.

Football is the ideal second screen sport: engaging enough to keep you interested, but offering plenty of dead time for you continuously place bets and scroll on your phone.

Memecoins

Machine zone taken to its logical conclusion is memecoin trading on a platform like Pump.fun.

Prior to Pump.fun’s launch in 2024, there were occasionally successful memecoins like Dogecoin in 2013 and Shiba Inu in 2020. But Pump.fun has dozens of new coins created every minute for users to trade. Unlike stocks (which have earnings) or sports (which have physical limits), memecoins are tethered to nothing but sentiment, allowing for unbounded possibility.

Borrowing the aesthetic of 4Chan, Pump.fun presents a constant stream of new coins. This creates a flow state where the user is locked in a perpetual present, scanning for the next 100x dopamine hit. The loop is near-instant: a user sees a new coin, apes in with a single click, and watches the chart update tick-by-tick. Because thousands of coins are created every day, there are no natural stopping cues: when one coin rug pulls or goes to zero, the interface instantly serves up a dozen fresh opportunities, keeping the user suspended in a state of continuous, hypnotic anticipation.

Conclusion

Trading options, betting on sports, and buying memecoins overwhelmingly loses money. 93% of traders lose money trading options and 95% of bettors lose money on sports betting. 98.6% of Pump.fun tokens are worthless and 97% of Pump.fun traders have made less than $1,000 trading memecoins.

But people continue to gamble because it keeps them in the machine zone, where time, space, and monetary value is suspended and nothing else matters but continuing to play.

Design patterns from slot machines are used not just in financial products but also in social media: an infinite scroll that eliminates natural stopping points, autoplay in short form videos that removes your need to make a decision about whether to continue, and notifications designed to heighten surprise like variable rewards on slot machines.

Machine zone was a warning about the effects of slot machines, but it’s been used as an instruction manual for designing smartphone apps.