So, this one time, the dealer was a nice middle-aged lady who had the neighborhood mom vibe going, and my buddy and I were being charming, tipsy-on-white-Russians-by-midmorning morons, and we had her laughing with us (or probably at us) and during one of the long pauses to reshuffle the shoe, she said, “I like you boys, so I’m going to give you some advice. Important advice. This is probably the biggest secret to being a winner in Vegas, which means it’s not in my employer’s best interest to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway, because I like you.”
We weren’t going anywhere anyway, and would have listened if she had just wanted to talk about the weather, but we were intrigued enough by the set-up. Not for a second did I actually believe I was about to get some insider insight on how to get rich off the casino’s largesse, but I’m always curious to hear people’s personal philosophies on gambling, the Vegas experience, and suchlike.
The dealer spelled hers out like this: “Most people who come in here sit down at a table and say to themselves, ‘I’ll play until I lose a certain amount of money’, right? ‘I’ll keep playing as long as I’m winning, but once I lose a hundred’ – or whatever – ‘I’m done.’ That’s what they say.”
My buddy and I agreed this was an accurate assessment of most casual gamblers’ attitudes.
“That is the wrong way to think about it,” the dealer told us. “That’s the opposite of what they should be saying. You boys should always say to yourself, ‘I am going to play until I win a certain amount of money.’ And then stick to that, and when you win that much, walk away. Because that way you stay a winner.”
I seem to recall lauding the dealer’s sagacity at the time and promising that I would henceforward live by her wise words, even though I couldn’t quite parse out the flaws in her logic in the moment. It’s really Pseudo-Profundity 101 to take a commonly accepted premise and invert it and claim that the counter-intuitive opposite is actually true. Usually that just means that both sides have some truth to them and, surprise, there’s no blanket statement that covers all possible scenarios.
Obviously the inherent danger of that well-meaning dealer’s approach is that not only do casino games of chance offer you the gambler very little control over whether or not you win or lose, but in fact you are slightly (or sometimes very much) more likely to lose than to win. Mathematically unlikely scenarios play out all the time – once I sat down at a blackjack table with $100 and won another $400 and I attribute that entirely to sheer dumb luck – which is part of the allure, but you can’t count on those. So every gambler needs an operational guideline for what to do when you buy in at a table and steadily bleed away every last chip. Do you walk at that point, or do you pull out more cash and buy in again? I’ve been known to do both, but most of the time I stick with the former. Neighborhood Mom would seem to advocate for the latter, but that way lies madness, really. I think what Neighborhood Mom was assuming was that everyone who gambles wins some and loses some, and walking away when you’re winning is more virtuous than complacently allowing yourself to lose the winnings and then proceed to lose your original stake and only then walking away. There’s some sense to that, but it doesn’t always go down so serendipitously. Sometimes you sit down and lose ten hands in a row right off the bat, and you never have a chance to walk away while you’re winning, in which case you’d damn well better have a sense of how much you’re willing to lose, not just how much you’re hoping to win.
All of which leads inevitably (at least amongst me and my degenerate friends) to more elaborate systems where we play until we win X amount OR until we win Y amount OR until Z units of time elapse to allow for the possibility of merely treading water BUT reserving the right to walk away before any of those conditions are met if the general luck of that particular table seems to spell doom for us, in the form of losing three to five hands in a row, and so on. Vegas, for its part, does everything in its power to make it hard for you to think at all, what with the free drinks and the lack of clocks and windows and the use of chips that look like candy-colored play money instead of real, reality-reinforcing cash and the general overstimulation in all directions, so trying to maintain a highly codified system in the face of that is … dare I say, dicey? If you’re an overthinker who enjoys a challenge, though, it’s pretty sweet.
Thankfully there are other gambling outlets with more fixed parameters than Sin City’s bottomless gullet, such as the friendly football pick’em pool. I managed to go the entire regular season (with the exception of Moving/Blizzard Weekend) picking winners against the spread without ever having the best weekly record. But fortunately this was a pay-up-front game and losing sixteen or so times in a row never begged to be interpreted as a sign to cut my losses. Once the playoffs started, the object of the pool became to pick not only the winners, but also the over-under for each game, though my results remained typically middling.
Finally, we arrived at Championships weekend, the last hurrah of the pick’em pool. Because there were only two games, and enough bettors to guarantee some multi-way ties if there were only four bets to make, several new categories were added. So for each game we were to pick the winner, the over-under, which team would be first to score, which would kick the first field goal, which would put the last points up on the board, and which would get the most penalties. I had tried during the early weeks of the season to put some honest mental effort into evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of various teams to make predictions, but by the final weekend I was happy to make some gleeful, gut-check guesses and see how things fell out.
I picked the Colts and the Vikes, and although I was only half-right as to the eventual Super Bowl match-up, I got credit for the Vikings covering the spread. I though both games would be low-scoring, but both went over their respective lines, so I was unlucky there. Other than that, I incorrectly predicted the Jets would kick the first field goal in their contest, and that the Vikings would score last (and if not for a stunningly fitting final interception thrown by Favre, they might have), but got the rest of the bets (or wild, random shots-in-the-dark) correct. The whole pick’em pool had been split in half as of Wildcard weekend, with those who did well in the regular season (including my super-keen wife) in an overachiever bracket – I, of course, was in the underachieving bottom-half bracket. 8-and-4 was good enough to win the Championships weekend for the basement-dwellers, so I’m ending the pick’em season on a high note, and walking away with my winnings. Not that I have any choice, but I’d still like to think a certain matronly Vegas blackjack dealer would be proud of me.
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