Suddenly I started to lose, couldn’t control myself and lost everything.
“And I believed in my system … within a quarter of an hour I won 600 francs. He writes to his brother on 8 September 1863. That’s all there is to it-you just can’t lose that way and are sure to win.” Within a single week, however, he had lost all of his winnings and more and was forced to beg his family for money. He writes to a relative, “I am showing off by saying that I possess the secret of how to win instead of losing, I really do know the secret-it is terribly silly and simple, merely a matter of keeping oneself under constant control and never getting excited, no matter how the game shifts.
Like a good many gamblers, he believed that he had found the secret to winning at the tables. The Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) had a serious gambling addiction.
