Winning big at the casino, in my own way

Of all the things I’ve ever wanted to do in life, gambling has never been one of them. 

I know many kids who turned 18 and bought scratch-off lottery tickets at the gas station because now they could. When I turned 18, I went sky diving, and I’ve never bought a lottery ticket. 

 

Sometimes, when people turn 21, they want to go to a casino and gamble, experiencing the bright lights and energetic atmosphere. Or they like to go for someone’s birthday, for fun, or to win a bunch of money. 

 

I had never gone to a casino before last weekend. That is, I had never gone for the purpose of gambling, or spent more than a few seconds in the room. So when I was offered a chance to truly experience a casino and gambling for a night, I accepted. 

 

The nearest gambling spot to Denver is Black Hawk, near Idaho Springs. It’s a quaint little mountain town, built for casinos. As a person drives through the town, one passes cute historic buildings, which I realized half of are casinos. It’d be like, “Oh, that building’s really cool….oh, that building is a casino,” more than half the time. 

 

So it dawned on me early that the town was built for casinos, or casinos built the town. The bigger hotel casinos were on the outskirts, but you could still bounce around like pinballs to each different casino and hit most of them in a night. 

 

Anyway, Jack and I went to Black Hawk with his sister and brother-in-law and two of their friends for his brother-in-law’s birthday. They stayed in one of the casino hotels for the night, which is the way to go. It was nice to start in the room, go out gambling, and then have a place to come back to where you could hang out with friends and have conversations. 

 

The reason I’m bringing up this weekend is because I realized that I love going to casinos—and I didn’t even gamble. I spent $1.75 on the night: one dollar at the claw machine and 75 cents on the little crank candy machines. 

 

Maybe I’m just too tight with my money, or maybe I’ve lost any interest in gambling from watching patrons at the bar lose hundreds or thousands of dollars in a night, but I didn’t have a single urge to gamble at the casino. I did have a ton of fun watching Jack play blackjack, his brother-in-law winning big at roulette, and watching Jack’s sister go for the bonus on one of the colorful slot games that made no sense to me.

 

And don’t even get me started with the people watching. Casinos have anywhere from the young punks trying their hands at everything and enjoying time with friends, to older people hunched over and camped out at their slot machines. You have the serious people who are too far in to back out now, hunched over their chips protectively, and the people there smiling and laughing and throwing fate to the wind.

 

While it was a bit sad watching people ultimately lose quite a bit of money, and we swapped stories of people maxing out the ATM or losing thousands or millions of dollars, the vibe at the casino was fun. My favorite part was the free soda and coffee machine. I spent the entire night going from cups of Diet Pepsi, to Dr. Pepper, to iced coffee, to root beer and a suicide, to a hot coffee, and back to Diet Pepsi. I had a blast. 

 

All this to say, if anyone ever wants a casino buddy or a DD, let me know. 

 

My Determination: “Act as if you're a wealthy man, rich already, and then you'll surely become rich.” ― Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street