“Part of the $10 million I spent on gambling, part on booze and part on women. The rest I spent foolishly.” George Raft
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an unapologetic gambler. That’s why when my friends and I meetup, like we did all this past week in Tunica, MS, we try to pick locations that are near casinos. That’s mostly Tempest’s, Dr. Bill’s and my choice because we plan the meetups, we’re pretty experienced in casinos and we know if you’re playing the right games, you can cut your liquor bill for the trip by at least 90%. Between drinking all we could while playing in the casino and all the abusable drugs we brought, let’s just say it was a really good time. It was way better than our trip to New Orleans and Matt Forney didn’t get injured which was a major goal accomplished.
Good times.
But that’s not the purpose of this article. I’m going to make the observation that I’ve learned over the years is that you can discern the way a person lives their life by how they behave in a casino.
“There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having fun and being smart.” Hunter S. Thompson
There are only two types of gamblers; ones who are having fun and those that get emotionally attached to their bets, especially if they lose. The huge majority of people who visit casinos are of the latter category because if they lose, it will affect them financially. And, they always do because they don’t know the games, make stupid bets and think if they can get lucky, “just this one time”, their problems will be solved. I’ve seen it so many times it’s almost become a cliche, some poor schlub will come to the roulette or craps table with his/her last couple hundred bucks and lose it in five minutes. Those are the types of people who should never visit a casino but they are the same people who irritate me to no end in front of me in the liquor store buying lottery tickets. Let me put it another way, if you can’t afford to lose, DON’T GAMBLE. Because if you can’t afford to lose, you will nearly 100% of the time.
Then there’s people like Tempest, Bill and myself. We gamble for the fun and the perks of knowing how to game the casinos like all the drinks you can quaff down and free meals. The main thing we do is before we walk into the place is we’ve already set a “lose budget”. What a lose budget is the amount of money that you absolutely don’t give a shit about losing whether it’s during the first night or throughout the week. Mine during this past week was a measly 300 dollars. I don’t know why I picked that number; I could have gone much higher, but in the end it worked out well especially as the casino we were staying in has, I guess you could say, a lower expense ratio unlike Vegas.
If you have a lose budget, you literally can’t lose or not too much. If you still have money left in your lose budget when you leave but you’ve drank more drinks than you can count and ate for free throughout the entire trip, You’ve won. I’ve proved it many times in my experiences and nearly fifty percent of the time, I’ve paid for my entire trips just by having a lose budget.
Just as example, at the end of this last trip, everyone but one of our participants and myself left on Friday but this gentleman and myself decided to stay just because we both were driving and didn’t want to deal with Friday metropolitan traffic on our way home. Our first roulette session started about 1 p.m. and I was winning my ass off. He was losing and was visibly perturbed. I got ahead up 60% from my buy in and seeing his discomfort, I said, “Let’s get out of here before you lose any more”. We went to get a drink and I did something that proved a point to him that I don’t think anyone has ever done before.
Like I said, I was way up. I even won a $150 drawing for reward card holders Friday evening. It was a good trip. We went to my hotel room for a couple shots of Beam and I pulled a $100 bill out of my pocket, threw it at him and said, “I want you to lose all of this.” He goes. “What???”, and I said, “I’m going to be pissed if you don’t lose it all before the end of the evening.
Of course he couldn’t lose it. As a matter of fact, he came out pretty well ahead. It’s a lesson most people never learn but it’s important one.
And it works in all areas of your life.
