ambling makes me very unhappy. Much of this is due to my being poor and reasonable about it. I know I'm poor, but I have future plans/hopes to not be poor, so I work towards that reasonably. Fortunately, I'm not driven to blow money on pointless things like clothing and DVDs and new cars, and I don't really care about money that much,

So I don't gamble, and I don't find casinos much fun to be in, and as a result, when I visit one it's an eye-opener. Things that regular casino-goers don't blink at are amazing to me, as a casino newbie -- as you'll see in the following blog entries.  I don't recall ever blogging about gambling or casinos in the news, but if I ever do I'll probably add those entries in on this page, and then split them off to a new Gambling in the News page, if there are ever enough such entries to make it worthwhile.

More recent updates are added on top, aside from the August 15-17 blogs, which were all about the same visit to Thunder Valley.

August 15, 2003

On Wednesday I drove Malaya and her mom up to Thunder Valley, a casino in northern California, near Sacramento. As you'll note from the URL and the website pictures, it's purported to be a "resort", but as of now, it's a really big single-story building with a lot of video poker and slot machines inside, and a bunch of card tables in the middle of the building.  There are also several restaurants, a fast food court, a cheesy gift shop, and a very large restaurant for the buffet, which was fabulous.

As with all casinos, there were no windows anywhere, no skylights, and no clocks. There was however, smoking indoors, which is no longer the case in any restaurant or club or business in California.  However since this casino (like the hundreds of others around California and most other US states) was on Indian land, the state laws designed to spare people from the dangers of second hand smoke do not apply.  Obviously enough, since the whole point of the casino is to do things that are illegal in the rest of California.  However it's still odd to suffer the stinking whiffs of cigarette smoke, after living for years with no smoking almost anywhere I go.

They did at least have very good ventilation in the casino, so the smoke was gone quickly.  In fact the ventilation was too good, and I always felt a slight breeze on my face, which caused my eyes to feel dried out and sore after a couple of hours there.

Also in typical casino fashion, once you are inside, you are in another world.  The lighting is dim, but not too dark to see by, and it's constant; you never go into a very light or dark area, though the club/bar in the center of the building was sort of darker than the rest of the place.  But being in there is like being in some sort of frozen time world, where the sun never rises or sets, and the temperature never changes.  I was reminded somewhat of the town of Tristram in Diablo 1, since it had no passage of time in the game, and always looked like about 10am, on a cloudy morning, due to the flat, gray light.

Thunder Valley is brand new, and has been open less than a year, which is probably related to the lack of anything other than a casino there, despite their "resort" claims.  Even the road to it is cheesy; very back country and just two lanes through a semi-desert, over a rail road track, past lots of bulldozers and other road-building equipment.  There were construction workers galore hard at it, I assume widening the road and improving the drive there, since there is now a ton of traffic where prior to the casino there was probably about 3 pick up trucks a day.

I had not been inside of a casino since I was old enough to gamble.  I went to Las Vegas several times in my teen years, twice with a friend and two or three times with my dad or mom, but since I wasn't 21 yet and therefore not allowed on the gaming floor or near any of the machines, it was sort of pointless.  I had a good time there since I was very into video games and most Vegas casinos have an arcade of some size, as well as all of the restaurants around the casino floors, most of which boast the ability to play Keno from your table.  Circus Circus is fun with the entire top floor dedicated to carnival type games, a huge arcade, and all that happy shit.  There's also a big water park in Vegas and that was my main attraction back in the day, plus casinos always have pretty good food for good prices.

I've been over 21 for almost a decade, and haven't gone to Vegas at any time since then, nor ever gone to any of the San Diego area Indian casinos, so obviously it's not something I'm all that interested in.  I do like to play poker, and am pretty good at it since I used to play constantly with my granny when I was a kid, and I usually won most of the money at poker games when I'd play with friends in high school. Not that that means anything when you're in with the sharks in a real casino, but my point is that I like to play cards, so you'd think that the option to potentially win real money doing so would entice me.

It doesn't.

I also like computer games, and the prospect of winning money doing so seems fun.  This was the source of my greatest disappointment at Thunder Valley.  The gaming machines.

First of all, technology sucks.  My vision of Vegas or a casino is the constant clanking of quarters or silver dollars dropping into the metal tray at the bottom of the machine.  Visions of those just filling and filling until they're spilling onto the floor and some little old lady is down on her knees trying to catch them in her dress and big plastic quarter cup are what fill my head when I think of success at the slots.  So you can imagine my disappointment when I saw that there were zero quarters in use anywhere at Thunder Valley.  And no, they didn't have some sort of $1 minimum bet/payout, they had quarter and nickel slots galore.  And the machines had the traditional metal trays at knee height.  They just don't have actual coins in them anymore.

I blame technology.

Instead of actual cash money (which you can put into the machines, but never get out) you just get a credit slip that prints out when you cash out (assuming you actually do so before you've gambled away every last penny credit.  You can put the print out into any other machine, or get it cashed out by a cashier, but what's the fun in that?  I want a machine spitting out cold hard cash at me, damnit.  I want the clank and clatter of coins dropping into the tray.  I want to fill a cup with quarters and walk around with it clutched to my chest.

And all I need to get those things is a time machine, apparently.

The most popular way to play there is to get a credit card.  These are just what they sound like, plastic cards with some sort of individual account information.  You buy credit on them with your credit card of plastic, and you have an account that's kept track of on some central computer, and you get deductions from it every time you play a given machine.  I suppose that's all convenient and you don't get back strain reaching down and actually sticking coins into a slot, but it's no fun at all.

I also assume that it's far more profitable for the casino, since even though some people (like me, for instance) are turned off by the non-tangible nature of it, most players probably end up spending more since it doesn't feel like real money.  Plus you can gamble faster and more times in a row with no delays for inserting money, and you don't get a tired arm.  The slots don't even have pull arms anymore; you just push a button and make it roll the wheels again.  Hell, half the people there were just playing computer game screen slot machines, and watching silly cartoon figures spin around.  And they were paying handsomely for the privilege.  The machines aren't even any fun; you don't get any sort of amazing sight or sounds or whistles when you win, just a few tame beeps as you watch your credits build back up.  They don't even have good enough software for the numbers to flash brightly or 10x normal size or anything, when you win a hand or a roll.  Just a dry display of credits going down, or occasionally up.  I found it very uninspired.

The games themselves were pretty much universally shitty as well.

I had never really thought about it in the past, but slot machines are just so stupid.  You pull a lever push a button and three numbers spin past, and once in a while you win a 2 or 3 or 5x your bet, and the rest of the time you lose your bet.  There is no skill of any kind, ever.  There isn't any variety either, or much of a presentation.  It's just a long roll of numbers going by, and if you happen to get 3 of them matching, you win something.  Plus it's all computerized, with micro chips driving it and making a good combination appear some infinitesimal percentage of the time, and nothing at all the rest of the time.

In the old mechanical machine days, you could hope to find one that was "due" to pay out, or a lucky machine, or at least hear moving parts grinding away.  Now it's just soundless and soulless.  Worse than the slots are various video machines that simulate slots with cartoon characters.  They had at least a dozen varieties of these, all with different themes.  Dragon's Treasure and Fisherman and Tabasco Sauce and 49er Gold Rush, and so on.  They had themes; the Dragon one had dragons and a knight and a princess and other such appropriate medieval icons.  All of them worked identically though; there were three rows of icons, five across on each, and you hoped to get three of the same icons in a row, or possibly two of some wild card type icon.  What annoyed me about them was the total lack of any sort of skill.  They were just slot machines with different graphics.  It's not like you have to pick out the matches, or try to build several of the same thing in a row, or figure out what's going to appear next based on what you got last time; no, it's just total luck.

And to add to the insult, there was no way to figure your odds.  None of the games told you how many total figures there were, and since it's a computer program you have no idea at all if it's playing fair.  The thing is set to give some % payout, probably like 50% judging by how few winners I saw all day, and it does that with lots of small pay outs and an occasional big one.

The game gives the option to bet on up to 9 lines, and it does that with 3 going across, and then 6 more going diagonally or zigging and zagging up and down across the 15 icons.  It didn't make any sense to me; Malaya blew $10 on one quarter machine in about 3 minutes, and she'd often have 3 of the same thing on a row, which I thought would be a winner, but she'd lose anyway.  And then half the time she won we'd not even see it until it lit and glowed, since it was some janky-ass diagonal thing with a wild treasure chest icon at one end.

And as I said, there isn't any form of skill at all. You press a button to tell it how many of the 9 lines you are wagering on, and it semi-randomly generates the icons in their positions, and you lose money almost every time, with your few wins seldom even offsetting the amount you bet that time.  For instance if you bet all 9, that's 9 credits gone forever (a credit can be 5 cents, 25 cents, 1 dollar, etc, depending on the rules of that particular machine) and you might win back 4 or 6 credits with a particular roll. So even when you win, you're usually losing overall.

So you are guaranteed to lose, and to lose repeatedly, with perhaps an occasional win to keep your hopes up.   And even when you win there's little fun in it, since it's just small numbers in the corner of the screen clicking upwards, for a change. And when you lose, as you almost always do, there are small numbers in the corner of the screen clicking downwards.

I suppose the lack of bright bold colorful icons for victory is not an accident, since they probably tested it and found that it's better if people don't notice their current credits at all.  Better people don't realize how fast they are losing money than notice when they win, and therefore pay more attention to how much they are losing.

It later occurred to me that slot machines and the other random chance machines satisfy the desires of a certain type of gambler, a type that I'll call the lottery player.  You are betting a relatively small amount each time, with the almost certainty of losing, but with a very small chance of winning thousands of times what you actually bet.  Other games such as Blackjack, with a real live dealer and other players, have more skill involved, but offer very small payouts, proportionally.  Most of the time in Blackjack you win back double what you bet.  You bet $10, you beat the dealer, you get back your $10 and $10 more.  By that logic you need to win 50% of the time to break even (ignoring bonuses for BlackJack and the complications of insurance).  On slots or other similar machines, you win far far less than 50% of the time.  But while you will almost never win, it's possible to hit one big one and win thousands of dollars on a $1 bet, or even more in big casinos where lots of the machines are building cumulative pots. And there is zero skill involved in the game, on the winning or losing side.

The other popular type of machine there, and one that I blew about $20 on, is video poker.

Video poker does involve skill, but not that much of it.  Mostly it's luck as well, since lots of the time it's possible to win, but you have to know which cards to hold, or guess which cards to hold.  You might get dealt 2 spades, 2 diamonds, and a heart, and the next three cards coming up are diamonds.  So in theory you could hold the 2 diamonds you got dealt and turn that into a flush and a nice payout.  However there's no way on earth you would guess that.  Or you'll get dealt a 2, a 4, two 10's, and a queen, with the next four cards being 2, 5, 7, 2. If you held your dealt 2 and drew 4, you'd get 2 more 2's and a three of a kind.  But again, who would know that?  You'd almost certainly hold the pair of 10's, and see no improvement for it at all.

Generally video poker offers very small pay outs for jacks or better, just 2 back for your 1 bet, and then 3 back on 3 of a kind or 2 pairs, and it goes up from there, but never that high.  Even something like a royal flush, which you'll get about once in your life time, only pays like 2000 back.  House rules will vary on pay outs, of course.

The machines at Thunder Valley had different rules, and they were even worse.  They had deuces wild, which would be cool, except that the pay out hands started much higher.  You got nothing for one pair of any type, nor for two pair.  You had to get at least three of a kind to get 2 back, and the pay outs for straights and flushes and even full houses were pretty crappy.  They even cheesed you on the higher hands you never get, paying more for natural four of a kind than four of a kind with a wild card, and the same for straight flushes and royal flushes.

The wild card made it slightly more fun, since you could usually win something if you got dealt one, but as I realized quickly, needing to get at least 3 of a kind to win made the vast majority of hands a loser.  You simply didn't have any chance to win, no matter what you held, most hands. Often even if you got a wild card, you'd get a mess of other cards and never any chance at a straight or a flush or even a pair of other cards to go with the wild card. At least half the deals I'd just pick five new cards, since I had five dealt to me to start with and nothing matched up in any way.  Plus with no card values of any importance (3 threes paid as much as 3 aces) there was never any point in being happy about a pair of face cards, or any reason to save one with a deuce.

I thought it was a really poorly designed game, but probably again they've done market research and found that people play more when there's a wild card to give them hope than they do with straight cards.  Or perhaps people get annoyed at seeing two 4's come up when they just discarded a 4 along with other junk to hold their single King.

Anyway, the rules of video poker there allowed for you to win more than you lost, but no one ever would.  Well you could, but only if you got really lucky.  The way to win consistently was to bet lucky.  Bet 1 on hands you were going to lose, and bet the max 5 credits (credits were either a quarter or a dollar on those machines) on hands you were going to win.  Of course the problem with this strategy is that there was no way to have any idea what cards you were going to get.  You didn't see some face up and then get to raise your bet or fold or anything like that, it was purely a guessing game.

My first session on a video poker game was fun for that reason.  I put in $5 on a quarter machine and won some and lost some and figured out the rules and odds and saw how doomed I was.  I was usually betting 1 credit at a time just to make my game last a bit longer, but when I got down to 4 left, I decided to go out with a bang and put all 4 on it.  And I got dealt 2 kings, kept them, and drew another king and a deuce, for my best hand of the day, and a 4x pay out, bringing me back to 16 credits.  I cashed out then and got my print out for $4... and found the entire "I won a piece of computer printer paper?" experience entirely unsatisfactory.

Yesterday I talked about the Thunder Valley casino, and the whole casino experience in general terms, with a particular focus on the jankiness of all of the slot machines and other electronic money vacuums.  Today I'll talk more about the human element of the casino, and the food, which was delicious.

But first, some feedback, courtesy of site reader and D2 player, Snowy.

You wrote: "Plus it's all computerized, with micro chips driving it and making a good combination appear some infinitesimal percentage of the time, and nothing at all the rest of the time."

Hmm... sounds like running Pindleskin doesn't it? ;-)

As I replied to him, yeah, this sounds like Pindleskin.  At least Pindleskin in v1.09. In v1.10 Pindleskin (and most everything else) has been modified to rule out the possibility of that infinitesimal percentage ever clicking.  But that's just part of what makes the new patch such fun!

Returning to the Thunder Valley discussion, I found the people in the casino of some interest as well.  It's pretty much a given that you'll see weird people when you're gambling.  There are characters and freaks and nuts galore in Vegas, even in the modern day sanitized, family-friendly, nearly-whore-free Vegas.  Crazy old guys in gold lamé, Elvis impersonators in black latex, would-be hustlers dressed like they just fell out of a Playboy fashion issue circa 1973, trashy women in short skirts with new implants that move their cup size well below a failing grade, and so on.

Unfortunately, there weren't any people at Thunder Valley in that category, at least not intentionally.  The only thing close to the above types were the cocktail waitresses who were constantly moving through the casino, and spending no more than half their time fending off lame pick up lines from guys who were invariably about 1/10th as with it as they thought they were.  They (the waitresses) wore all black; hot pants and bustiers, though a few of the more adventurous had on semi-bikini tops.  The shorts were very short and tight around the hips, but flared out at the edge of the cheeks.  I didn't much like them, personally.  I don't like loose shorts on women, and these girls had shorts that promised to be tight, and then suddenly weren't, just when you started to get your hopes up.

I guess they were sexy, by the clinical definition of the word.  They were all leggy and thin and relatively pretty and had a lot of visible cleavage above their push up tops, and all were well stacked out in miracle bras.  But at the same time it was such a uniform that I didn't get into it.  If I saw a woman in a club or restaurant or something like that, in that type of outfit, I'd think it was hella-hot.  But seeing the same woman when she's wearing that as her work uniform, and all the other women doing her job are wearing the same thing, just makes it asexual to me.  And on top of that, I would feel like such a loser if I tried to chat up or hit on a woman wearing that outfit at work that the entire possibility vanishes from my mind.

Obviously I'm not looking for a girlfriend at this time since I've got a great one already, so I'm just thinking hypothetically, and I was observing most of these waitresses while standing with my arm around Malaya, so any possibility of chatting one up is entirely hypothetical, but I think I can safely say that I had no interest in doing it. The whole "let me hit on the hot cocktail waitress in her tiny outfit since she's being paid to be nice to me" just reeks of douche bag guy-ness, and I would never go there, even if I really really wanted to.  It's like I wouldn't allow myself to take a really long look or get interested in a cocktail waitress, even if I were single, just since it's like what idiot guys are supposed to do, and I take such a pathological pride in not being a typical idiot guy.

And that pride is what will keep me from every nailing a hot cocktail waitress who wears a tiny black latex outfit at work.  Well, that pride and my lack of 1) bling bling jewelry to get her attention, 2) a tolerance for idiotic small talk with a small-minded tart, 3) the desire to ever need to wear a condom again, since 4) cocktail tarts at casinos have more crabs than a seafood platter.

So there were no characters at Thunder Valley, at least none that I saw.  Who was there?

Lots of old people.  The joke about them being out spending their Social Security came true at every turn in Thunder Valley, for the place was fricking crawling with octogenarians. And as you'd expect, 99.9% of them were hitting the slots or other no-skill machines.  Yes, old people are easily-entertained, but I still can't see how you sit there and push a button to watch wheels turn for hours on end, while steadily losing money, and call it enjoyment.  Get your grandparents some video poker games, or just a random number generator, and tape them to their recliner.  They'll thank you for it later. Be sure to leave some Alpo in reach.

There were old people on walkers.  There were old people with oxygen tanks.  There were old people in wheelchairs.  There were even old people in wheelchairs with oxygen tanks.

Perhaps the best we saw was a man/woman team. The man was walking, the woman was in a wheelchair.  Well, the man was actually sitting, when we saw him. Sitting at a slot machine, punching buttons eagerly, while the woman was in her chair behind him, facing to the side, down the aisle.  The interesting part was that a long medical-looking tube extended from her chair to the man, right across the aisle, right where anyone careless would walk into it, since the wheelchair with the slumped woman was several feet behind the chair her ancient husband/nurse/jailer was sitting in.  And I wouldn't have ruled out a medical semi-disaster, since casinos are pretty much the home of careless, totally-distracted people.

I believe the husband was in the chair, and the tube was for an oxygen tank that he was sniffing from as he worked the slots, while his corpulent and very elderly wife remained wheelchair bound, slumped over in the chair like a stroke victim.  It was just a pathetic sight.

In addition to the old people, there were heaps of red neck looking guys, like guys so fresh from the job site that the sawdust was still filling the cuffs of their well-worn jeans, just above their brown workboots.  And there's nothing wrong with working construction or farming or whatever, but I find it pretty funny that apparently hard-working blue-collar guys were at a casino on a Wednesday afternoon, busily losing money.  They probably go home after work and tell the wife about how hard work was that day, and then give her more excuses why they can't afford a nice vacation to visit her sister next month, since money is just too tight.

Those were the type of people on the slots and other machines.  Mostly old, mostly alone, mostly looking very bored. The real gamblers, the ones on the card tables, were very different.

The Blackjack players weren't from a demographic that was too much different than the slot players. There were a lot of older people, mostly guys, and lots of them looked like they'd just come from the Elks' Lodge.  Very old white male with a buzz cut and an anchor tattoo somewhere on their body.  At the higher minimum bet Blackjack tables the crowd was younger and more cosmopolitan, and in fact they grew younger and better-dressed as the betting limits went up.  The Blackjack players were mostly white, and the average age was probably around 50, though we saw a number of guys and a few girls in their 20's and 30's.

There were some poker tables, with various types of the game.  Some basic five card draw, with others dealing in the more bet-friendly types like 3 and 4 card poker.  I'm not going into the rules here, since they vary from casino to casino anyway. There weren't very many poker tables though, and the demographic of the players was much the same racially, but they were generally younger than the Blackjackers, and there were more women.

While there weren't many poker tables, they did have a ton of Pai-Gow tables, and especially Baccarat tables. What was most interesting about those games were the players.  Almost exclusively Asian, and mostly wearing expensive clothing. Lots of gold and jade jewelry, which is a good luck thing in their cultures, as well as a form of bling bling.  Nice suits and dresses, well-groomed hair, and much younger than the other tables.  There were a lot of Asian men who looked to be in their 50's at those tables, but lots of very young players, male and female.  We saw one guy get carded right at the table (he passed) and while yes, many Asians look younger than they are, (it's the whole Oil of Olay smooth skinned thing, maybe) these kids looked young.  I'd have carded them for buying cigarettes (18+) much less gambling or buying a beer (21+). And yet there they were, gambling away with usually over $100 in chips down on every bet, and mostly on Baccarat.  The Pai-Gow players were a bit older.

Neither Malaya or I know how to play Pai-Gow or Baccarat, but the casino had helpful information cards on the tables, so we stood there, happily filling the "noob" role, and reading the tutorials while watching people play the game for hundreds of dollars per hand.  Baccarat seems pointless to me. The rules are complicated, but basically you bet on which hand is going to be better, the "player" or the "bank".  It's not really a person playing, the dealer deals out two cards to each of them and it's pretty random who wins.  The cards are added together, with values from 1-10 for the cards, and from there it gets weird. Read more about it here, if you care.

The hand that's closer to 9 wins, but there are all sorts of rules about when the bank or the player takes another card, and so on.  Essentially it's random who wins, and the best thing to get is a tie, since those pay all bets, at some sort of multiple.  I don't quite see how the house makes money, since you will in theory win 50% of the time, and then get a bonus on ties, but I guess they just get a percentage every hand.  Anyway, there wasn't any skill in it that I could see; you just guessed which would get a hand that would win, and all of the weird "take a third card" rules were just ways to spice the game up by making it take a bit longer and giving it esoteric rules.

Pai-Gow had more cards and the rules for it weren't very clear, so we just couldn't be bothered figuring it out.

So my take on the card games is that the only one with any real skill still is Blackjack, and that's the only one you can really hope to win at consistently, if you are good and somewhat lucky.  Along with some of the poker games, though in every case the games are set up so that the house wins overall, eventually.

August 18, 2003

Just to wrap up the casino discussion from the last two blogs, here's some talk about the buffet at Thunder Valley.

Vegas casinos are notorious and famous for their buffets.  Famous is probably a better term, since it's a good sort of fame.  Vegas is also famous for the whores and for sending people home on the bus, wearing the only clothing they didn't pawn, but that's a more notorious sort of fame.  The buffets are famous for being giant, tasty, and cheap.  The logic for the casino is that well-fed gamblers are happy gamblers, who will stay longer and spend more money and come back time and again.  And if they have to give pretty good deals on food, or even lose money on them, it's well worth it.

There were a bunch of fast food places at Thunder Valley, and even a Starbucks, and while I didn't price the novelty coffees there, since I never go to Starbucks and have no idea how much they cost in real life (too much), I could tell that the burgers and burritos and other stuff were very affordable.  Less than they were in most places, and a lot less than you'd expect at a theme park type destination. The drinks at the casino were very cheap also; with regular beers going for $2 and $2.50, when they're usually around $6 or $7 at something like a baseball game, or street fair.

As for the buffet at Thunder Valley, it was amazing.  $11.50, $2 less for seniors, but the food went on for days.  One entire wall of the restaurant was the buffet serving, and everything once you're inside is free.  All the drinks you want (not including alcohol, I assume), and as many plates of food as you can gather. And the food is very good, restaurant quality, and they have like 40 kinds of pies, huge platters of cookies, salad bar, fruit, and on and on.  Chinese food with 4 or 5 entrees, steaks, pork chops, several kinds of pasta and sauce, pizza, french fries, fried shrimp and fish and chicken, potatoes au gratin, roasted turkey, and on and on, all being prepared constantly and served in huge trays, for the constant stream of hungry gamblers.

Malaya and her mom and I ate ourselves sick, and really asked for it.  Every time someone would start to say they were full, the other two people would heckle them with remarks about how they hadn't yet eaten their $11 worth.  "Get back up there, that stuffing and turkey is calling you!"  That sort of thing.  I had at least 5 or 6 plates of food, none of which was overflowing, and I didn't eat every bite of anything, but damn I ate a lot.

I think people there are gorging on the variety of food and enjoying the quality. Plus they want to get their money's worth from the buffet cover price.  Plus there is a streak of anger in most people there; a sort of, "I'm eating these fuckers into a hole for the $150 I just blew on video poker."  I felt that way and I was down a whole $1 by the time we stopped for lunch.  Malaya's mom was down over $200 on the slots, and though I don't know if that was going through her mind with every bite of pork fried rice, she did seem to be chewing a bit aggressively. 

Then to top it off, we stole like a dozen cookies and smuggled them out in napkins in Malaya's purse.  Good ones too, CCCs the size of your fist, and peanut butter cookies too.

One last gambling thought.

Something I noticed about myself.  As we were walking around the casino, and I was observing every sort of gambling contrivance you can imagine, I always found myself thinking, "I wonder how long it takes those people to lose their money playing that?"

I don't think I ever had any thoughts about anyone actually making money, at least not in the long term; it's all just a sort of race to go broke the slowest.  In theory people have fun while doing it, but I have trouble seeing how.  My aversion to the slots and other random chance games was well-documented (by me) the last couple of days, and I just don't see how it's fun for anyone to sit there and hit a button and hope some computer decides to pop up a winning number.  Card gambling seems a bit more potentially fun, but still, you're losing long term, almost every time.  And even if you happen to win overall one trip, you'll just get your hopes up for next time, when you'll likely go home two hours later and $500 lighter.

My point isn't to utterly discourage anyone from every trying their hand at gambling.  My point is to self-analyze and wonder why I automatically take such a negative view of the potential fun and earnings from such an endeavor.

I asked Malaya while we were there if she'd find slots fun, if she didn't care about the money. Say we were rich beyond our dreams, and could walk in there and get a gambling card with $20,000 in credit on it, just for the hell of it.  Drop in the bucket of the Malaya/Flux fortune.

Would we then enjoy sitting there for an hour, punching buttons on the $100 slot machine?  Betting all three lines every time and watching $300 vanish every 10 seconds?  See here I go, automatically thinking of it as lost money, when you can theoretically win at it.  Just not in the long run.  But anyway, I don't see how that would be fun.  Even if I did enjoy it, and get into the "maybe this time I'll roll a $25,000 winner!" mindset, I still can't think that afterwards I wouldn't think, "There were two hours I'll never see again, and $20,000 that I could have used to buy half of a nice new car, or to fill up half of a library, or to feed orphans, or anything."

Gambling on machines is such an empty experience, ultimately, where you don't gain anything other than maybe some money, while being almost sure to lose a lot instead.  There's no human interaction, you don't gain any skills or knowledge, you don't really have any fun since you're almost always losing, etc.  All of which does nothing to explain the smashing success of it across the US and world, where there are thousands of enormous casinos around the world, almost all of them wildly profitable and plowing most of the profits back into adding more space for more machines for more people to come and gamble on.

That being said, I wouldn't turn down another casino trip in the future, though I'll be sure to play some actual human games next time.  Which will probably give me the added thrill of having been cleaned out by humans, rather than just computers.

s

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