Emotional hedging is the way to go. But I typically stay away from UT games, I'm already emotionally invested in those. But putting $10 on the over on a Tuesday night MAC game? That's my jam right there.
There’s a whole system to it - I just don’t know it. The UFC’s Dana White is so good he’s been banned from playing at casino’s.
Don't like casinos all that much, but I keep my wife away from them. It's not that she is a compulsive gambler, but it's often best not to tempt fate. Rewind about 20 years or so to when my wife and I had only been married a year or two, and we found ourselves in New Orleans. I was there for a conference. My wife flew down mid-week, and we stayed the following weekend to bask in the sauna-like weather occasional sewer smell as we explored the French Quarter and took in some other sites. On a particularly oppressive weather day, one that made it feel like my head and hair was melting down my back, along my crack, and pooling in my shoes while we walked, I suggested we pop in to the casino there for some AC. I believe it was a Harrahs. I don't know if it still is. Earlier in the week, I had met some friends there before we went out that night, but I hadn't had the opportunity to gamble much if any then. I had wanted to go back and do something casino-y. Casino-y is a term I use here because, in my naive hillbilly mind at the time (and if I'm honest, in the present), I didn't know that much about gambling and even less about casinos. Looking back and knowing more about the me back then than I did in the moment, my head was probably filled with self-inflicted delusions of being a proficient gambler, maybe even great, all based on a mastery of late night penny-ante poker played against equally ignorant hillbillies over six-packs of light beer and shots of cheap whiskey. Being fair to myself, I had also outplayed folks in college in card games regularly and rarely had truly bad nights in games that had decently higher stakes than penny-ante, but thinking I was some casino wizard was still akin to thinking my awesome driving skills at the NASCAR Speedpark in Sevierville somehow would translate to my being a contender at Bristol, Darlington, or Talladega. My wife had zero interest in going to a casino: zero, zilch, nada, but weather was definitely on my side as well as the variety of adult beverages we had downed the night before. Looking back, I am pretty sure she was afraid of having to threaten our marriage to get me to leave because even though I had played it relatively cool on this trip, I had pushed pretty hard to take a gambling weekend in the past. As I reminisce, I think she might have even said as much. Regardless of all the details surrounding how we got there, we went. Once we were inside, my wife's veiled disgust was only somewhat apparent, and I'm pretty sure I had an expression similar to that worn in Vegas Vacation by Chevy Chase at various times. We stuck together for a while. The wife insisted we register for some guaranteed winnings thing designed to get your contact details in exchange for paying you back some part of your losses for some short period of time. I'm sure it was some kind of scam, but whatever. It came with some sort of little fob and a bucket. We wandered around. My wife had no interest in any table games (not that there was much to choose from at that time of day in that particular casino), and I was less than less than interested in the slots which kept attracting her attention. We split up. I won't go into my losses here mainly because I don't remember. I'll just say they were not that bad overall. It just struck me how quick it all was, and cold. As I mentioned, I was quite good around a table back home with other people of my ilk. It wasn't losing that was terrible, per se. There was just no consolation prize. The house wasn't your buddies or roommates or even acquaintances you met through mutual friends. It might as well have been a machine. When laid bare, my infatuation with gambling had more to do with an excuse to drink and carry on than winning or losing. Winning obviously felt much better than losing, but even it didn't inspire much want to continue. I played a few hands of blackjack, lost a few bucks, decided that after about 30 minutes or so I had had my fill, and moved on to find my wife. The wife was over in the small sea of slot machines. Even though the casino seemed rather small, it took me a good while to locate her. When I did, I was a touch shocked to find her actually enjoying herself. She was ahead a bit on the slots that neither I, nor her really understood how to play. The only slots I had ever played was at a local gas station, and all I knew was to load it up and push certain buttons to make it go. To my knowledge, she had never played at all. After watching her play for a few minutes, she told me she wasn't quite ready to go but would be in about 10 minutes, so I decided to check out the bar. About 45 minutes later, I had managed to feed the built in video poker enough at the bar to not only recoup a tiny bit of my losses but also score three of those cute beers they serve in such places. My luck had changed a bit, but I was still eager to leave and wondering where the heck my wife was. I returned to the slots to find her on another machine. She had gotten ahead on the first machine and moved to another, higher stakes machine. She had gotten behind again and was trying to get back to even. It was weird really. My wife had gone from wanting no part of something to being a bit obsessive about staying. I don't recall how long I was there before she hit something to get back ahead, but I wasn't going to leave her again. Maybe it was my extremely pathetic image or maybe she decided she needed to quit on her own, but she played one more round afterward and got up from her stool to leave. I choose to believe the reason she decided she was done was the latter, but it's most likely the former. To this day, I think she would have stayed the entire day and evening and night there if I hadn't intervened. As we left, she brought up returning. We didn't work a return trip into the weekend, and over the next several years, she returned to not wanting to have anything to do with going to a casino. I went back to the same casino a few years ago, again during a business trip, to lose $100 playing Texas hold em. I had a coworker who wanted to go, or I would have passed. I have never liked Texas hold em, and I'm not sure why I played other than my coworker wanted to. Other than that, I went to a couple of casinos in Deadwood, SD a few years ago on my birthday while there for work and just wasn't that into it. Fast forward to yesterday and not casino related, but I was watching some generic YouTube channel college football preview of Tennessee for this season when my wife declared that I needed to put $100 on Tennessee "to win it" this year. Those were the words. I asked what "it" was, and she replied, "All of it." I explained to her why that was not a good idea, and that, while I didn't agree with how the guy broke down the percentages to win each game, we both thought that 8 wins was a pretty good final win total for the regular season. She shot back that the odds make for a good payout (you think?). The chances of me putting $100 on the Vols to win it all in a season we still don't know that we'll have are pretty much nil, but after writing this about our dissimilar gambling experiences, I'm wondering if maybe I should.
I’ve never been slightly interested in going to Vegas or casinos in general. Thought we might be stuck there on the way home from Oregon in 2013 and we were like, well, we’ll get a hotel and try it out but our flight came through. Just not really interested. I might could be interested in sports betting but my usual dismal performance in things like Bowl pick ‘ems and the ncaa tournament brackets keeps me from ever risking my money on it
Litle golf then pool cabana then some blackjack then hit sportsbook during a fight or big event or even football weekend is worth going at least once. The energy and swings with huge plays late in games are fun to be around
One major issue I don't go is because I am too competitive and have too much of an addictive personality. I would get myself in lots and lots of trouble in a hurry.
I've been in a casino three times in my life. One was a bachelor party, one of the groomsmen took 100 bucks in nickles to the slots and won 10,000 with 97 bucks left in his pocket. We lost our asses and left pretty quickly. The 2nd time was my honeymoon, we won 40 bucks and paid for our gas to get there and back. 3rd time, in West Virginia, I won 200 on black jack and my wife won 300 on penny slots. I don't care to go to another one
The slots are the worst odds in the building. A friendly guy was beside me while playing craps one night with some friends and gave me some good advice for the craps table, and casinos in general - the flashier and more space the casino gives (the 6/8 bet on craps tables, the floor space given to slots, etc.), the better their odds and the worse for you. If the casino will let you do something (like take down a Don’t Pass bet), it’s because it lowers your odds of winning, and if they don’t (you can’t remove placed bets), it’s because it lowers theirs.
A weekend in Vegas during football season has always intrigued me for this reason. I'd have to be careful not to lose my shirt, but I think it would be a good trip with some friends.
I have a buddy who went to Vegas with $2500 and within 3 hours of playing roulette was up $16k. Two hours later, while still playing roulette - he didn’t have $.50 to his name - and had to get a friend to buy him an Uber to the airport.
I have a friend whose mother in law won a huge payout out on a progressive slot machine way back when. I don't really know how big it was, but it was enough that they wound up paying off the land/farm and buying a round of new/nice used cars for each family member before the structured annual payments began. Neither parent quit their jobs right away, and the mother is still working. Pa took an offered early retirement package several years later. Story was she had $5 left of her budgeted gambling money for the weekend and dropped all of it in for one pull on a progressive machine. She pulled, alarms started sounding, and she was terrified and looking for a place to hide when someone approached to talk to her about the machine.
I’ve played craps at Cherokee 3x in the past year, won $900 first time, won $1600 the second time and lost $1100 the third time. Though ultimately up $1400, I don’t remember the feeling of winning on the first two trips, but I damned sure remember leaving down $1100 on the third. It still stings, I haven’t wanted to go back since. I’m sure that I will (casinos are a winter activity for me), but the feeling of losing sure tempered my enthusiasm. My first time in a casino was when my ship went on a liberty cruise to St. Maarten. On my first day, I saw a Tennessee basketball jersey hanging in some little shop and they wanted $50-60 for it. As I only had $200 or so for the whole trip, I didn’t get it (Nega-Vol). Later, I went into a casino with some friends. It was mid-morning on a random weekday, so the place was dead. I determined that if I could turn $20 into $60, that I’d go back and get that jersey. I went up to the first thing I saw, a roulette table. The bored lady explained how to buy in and gave me 4 chips at $5 each, telling me that betting red or black was easiest and paid 1:1. I was the only one at that or any table in the casino, and didn’t feel pressured by my own ignorance. So I bet it all on red and won, moved it to black and won, kept it on black, moved it to red, whatever - win, win, win. By now, the pit boss has come over and several of my friends were urging me on. I wasn’t even picking up my chips or my winnings from the table, I just kept sliding them back and forth, or tapping to bet the same again. I won about 5 times in a row, and had a stack of chips for $600 or so - ten times more than I needed for that jersey and more than a month’s pay at the time. And then I lost, and she raked all of my chips away. I stood there confused that I didn’t get any of that back, and I literally asked her why, considering that I’d won 5 times and only lost once. She gently smiled and almost whispered that it only takes one loss to lose, and gave me the friendly advice that I should take up my winnings as they are won, to prevent exactly this. And with rare exception, I’ve heeded here advice ever since. It still makes me a little sick to think about that even now, some 25 years later.
He had been drinking, and was enjoying roaming from one roulette table to the next, betting $10 on every number on 1/3 of the board. He went to a third or fourth table up $16k and lost his first bet, but felt that the “smartass” dealer was “talking shit”. So to make a point, he kept doubling his bet and losing, losing, losing and losing. And now you know why casinos offer free drinks. He’s a character - I’ll start a thread one day on his antics. He’s an entertaining but wild cat, from your neck of the woods, up in Maynardville.
