Dostoyevsky had a roulette system. Fine-tuning his method in Baden-Baden, he wrote to his brother in 1863 confidently laying down the fundamentals of his infallible method, which, once you weed out the giddiness and guff, amounts to this: bet more, and if you lose, bet even more. Pile on more money, eventually you’ll hit a winning streak. Of course, as might’ve been expected, Dostoyevsky never retired on his roulette winnings, instead finding himself broke and forced to write his sketchy novella The Gambler in a few days to get out of debt. The Gambler is Dostoyevsky’s casino hangover, but the Russian giant’s ego being what it was, even so soon after his losing bouts at the tables in those European spa towns, he still glorified a little in the casino world that’d almost destroyed him.
