R7 Vegas Travelogue: I! LOVE! GAMBLING!

As much as we all think that we know ourselves, there are those moments when we have some visceral reaction to something that makes us realize that maybe we’re not as in control of our emotions as we thought we were. I’ve had more than my fair share of those moments this year, which is part of the reason that Of Montreal lyric “I’m in a crisis” keeps running through my head lately. But the most recent moment of hidden emotion realization is this: somewhere inside of me is the craving of a compulsive gambler.

After the unstated events of the night before, and at the end of the conference on Wednesday afternoon, I was looking to distract myself by touring the hotels and casinos that I hadn’t seen. I marveled at the retchingly cheesy façade at the Excalibur, was both offended and amazed by the cultural re-enactments of New York, New York, Paris and the Venetian, and was wowed by those two hotels that managed to tread that line between themed and genuine: the Mandalay Bay and the Bellagio, the latter of which seems clearly the crown jewel of Vegas to me.

As impressive (in one way or another) as they all were, they couldn’t keep The Thoughts from running through my head. I knew I needed to do some gambling before I left, and I'd been given strict instructions on a roulette bet to place, so I stopped into New York, New York, thinking I'd just do a few bets on the roulette table and then go back to my hotel and play some blackjack, just to say I did.

It probably seems strange that I couldn't quite get up the nerve to gamble, but it just seemed like something that required a certain amount of savvy to do. Being a beginner gambler is like being, say, a beginner mercenary. Everyone has to start somewhere, but you don't want to be that guy at the mercenary meeting that has to ask, "So are we supposed to dump the body in a lake or do we deliver it to the person commissioning the killing or what?" And then all the other mercenaries laugh at you and you never live it down.

I managed to find a roulette table that didn't have anyone at it, so I asked the woman running the table all my dumb questions, but what I found out in my time at that table is that very few people knew what they were doing. Every now and then, some haggard gambling veteran would come up and make a bunch of money and then lose it all in about ten minutes, but for the most part, it was people like me who needed the whole thing explained and re-explained and get a frustrated "Not yet" or "has to be at least $10 inside" when they broke the rules.

I sat at that table for three hours. And I loved it. I loved the randomness of picking the numbers, loved watching the ball spin around, deciding your fate, loved watching my pile of chips grow and grow and then just as suddenly start to shrink again. I loved the companionship of some fun folks in their 20's who were there for a conference and giving the gambling thing a try. I loved how it threw out all the worries that I had in my head.

And it worried me that I loved it all so much. This morning, when my office-mate/hotel roommate and I realized we had some time to kill before needing to leave for the airport, I convinced him to go down to our hotel's casino and play roulette with me. He promptly lost the $20 he had put down, and so did I, and yet I found myself reaching for my wallet to put down another $20. This wasn't the guy I thought I would be. I thought I'd be a responsible gambler; someone who decides beforehand just how much money to put down and never goes past that. But there I was, desperate to at least make my money back.

I did, in fact, make my $40 back and stopped there, though mostly because we'd run out of time. As I made my way to the cashier, I realized my stomach was turning loops and my palms were sweating. The concerned, rational part of my brain was saying, "Thank God we're getting out of here, because this could have gotten very bad very fast."

All parts of my brain were pretty happy with the outcome, though. I made a profit of $60 last night, which I know is small time for anyone but beginner gamblers, but hell...I've played plenty of Tetris for three hours or more and no one gave me $60 at the end of that.