On 11/11/11, Las Vegas received triple the average number of marriage applications. For 11:11, everyone had an epic 60-second plan in place. One New York woman planned to walk into Diane von Furstenberg and ask for a job. Less ambitious women just wanted to kiss their boyfriends.
The date was supposed to promise luck, and like everyone else under the spell of superstition, I wanted to reap the benefits.
It only took me a few seconds to figure out where I needed to be: Potowatomi.
My friend and fellow columnist, Ian — a self-described borderline gambling addict — agreed to show me the ropes. Having just turned 21 in July, and harboring a lifelong disinterest for poker prior to that, my experience with gambling has been limited to sliding crinkly singles into slot machines and never seeing them again. Help was needed — and appreciated.
The first order of business was an ATM withdrawal. Per casino trip, this transaction should happen once and only once and should cost no more than $40. Trust me.
Once on the casino floor, Ian rushed to a roulette table; apparently over the summer, he bet $100 in a game of roulette and doubled his money. That’s a pretty attractive outcome, especially when the only other possibility is a total loss. But the odds didn’t tempt me, so I just observed.
In roulette, you bet on either black or red. Ian swears by betting exclusively on black, because it narrows his focus on “when to bet, not what to bet.” But the table he played at was on a red streak, so the table attendant advised him, to no avail, “play by the streak.” Ian lost. Lesson learned: Take the house advice.
Next, I insisted on a round of slot machines. I picked the first machine that caught my eye, one named Kitty Glitter. I lost $8. End of that story.
Blackjack is the game I was most interested in learning, because it seemed to promise better than 50-50 odds like in roulette, and it requires more skill than pressing a button. We hovered over a $10 table long enough for a casino employee to notice and open up a $5 table for us, dealt by Roger, a middle-aged Filipino man.
It wasn’t long before every seat was taken. In a matter of minutes, Jean, an elderly woman, was setting her Pepsi down next to me and laying twenties on the table.
“Oh, Roger,” she sighed after losing a hand. “You’re so goddamn lucky.”
In blackjack, you’re essentially playing against the dealer. With each hand, you can bet however many chips you’d like to either double or lose, and whoever’s three cards add up to 21 first, wins. To no surprise, it’s usually the dealer.
I asked Jean how long she’s been gambling.
“Today, or altogether?” she asked.
“Altogether,” I laughed.
“For years,” she said. She’s been to Vegas 25 times.
“My friends play the slots, but I don’t,” she told me. “Blackjack is more social.”
I hadn’t thought about it, but Jean was right. There’s something sad about sitting alone at a slot machine and squinting at losing numbers flashing in front of you. There’s no human element or illusion of control. So if you must try the slot machines, sit at a nickel machine for no more than two minutes.
After I broke even at the blackjack table, Ian and I decided to call it a day, leaving the smoky sphere of ding-ding-dings and dice behind the automatic doors. I was pretty dispirited with my lack of luck, I
must admit.
“You’ve just got to have a philosophy in place,” Ian told me. “Mine is that everything is in my control, that my decisions determine the game. That may not be true, but it’s nice to think.”
You might be able to maintain that philosophy in ordinary places, but casinos are not ordinary places. They are worlds of their own where the only rule is to trust your gut and test your luck — a practice that, as suggested by the popularity of the Vegas wedding chapels on 11/11/11, might be valuable beyond your final fold at the blackjack table.