Last Wednesday, Karen and I went to a casino for a show of one of our favorite comedians. Because of the distance, we left with plenty of time to spare, since we would have to fight through rush hour traffic and the weather. We arrived at the casino about two hours before the scheduled start of the show, and Karen, as only Karen can do, giggled about playing the penny slots.
At this point, it should be noted that I have absolutely no experience whatsoever with slot machines. I've never tried my hand at one. I thought I understood the general concept, but that was before we entered the casino last Wednesday night.
This being but the second time I've visited a casino, the first being the time we bought the tickets for this show, I must admit that the general appearance of the fellow gamblers in the casino was somewhat improved over the first time. That's not to say that they were of the same model quality that appear typically in the commercials seen on television, but they were a cut above what I saw the first time. To be kind, most of the gamblers didn't need walkers or oxygen bottles this time. Still, no one was getting a call from Sports Illustrated or GQ for a cover shoot.
Karen and I wandered aimlessly -- more like cluelessly -- through the rows of machines with blinking lights and obnoxious beeping until we found one that caught Karen's eye. For me, one was as good, or as poor, as the next. But Karen found one that she liked and sat down to try her hand at it. I sat in the chair next to her, with a longtime gambler on the other side of me. She paused for a nanosecond, sized me up with a sneer and went back to gambling. Ah, society.
For a few seconds, Karen looked at the machine trying to determine how to play the game. There were directions, but she might as well have been reading the launch codes for an intercontinental missile. There was no rhyme or reason to them. This is a rough approximate of what we were looking at:
I suppose we could have blown the whole two hours before the show trying to decipher the vagueries of the machine, but we decided to wing it. We were only playing penny slots, and we only had five dollars to blow on it, so why not?
Karen put in her money and pulled the bandit's one arm. The discs rotated and came to a stop not in a line, but with three lines unevenly displayed in the window. For example, sometimes it would read across the main line: 7, Wild Card, Bonus, 7 and a 7 with a flame underneath it and we'd lose. Our tab would be subtracted by some weird amount, say .18 cents, and we'd look at each other and ask what just happened. Karen would pull the lever again and roughly the same line would appear, but now we added back in .6 cents. There was absolutely no logic, no consistency to the outcomes Karen was getting.
Sometimes, items in different rows would light up, signifying that we had won something by getting three or four of a kind, diagonally. I didn't even know you could do that. Again, the Humpty-Dumpty directions provided no guidance. Karen pulled the arm or pushed the oversized button and she either won a few cents or lost more than a few cents. Largely, it was like watching the stock market ticker during the Great Depression. Still today I have no idea what was going on. Were a Martian to ask me to explain how the machine worked, I'd have better luck explaining the nuances of Sanskrit.
The more this went on, the more I thought of the Germans' Enigma machine from World War II:
At least that machine had a purpose: Type in a G, and the rotors, electrically manipulated, would spit out a P from one of the four rotors contained in the box. Had the Allies not had the Poles to help them with the initial bombes, the masterful minds at Bletchley Park, the brave Royal Navy men who sacrificed their lives to get one of the machines out of a U-boat sinking in the Atlantic and the IBM computer sorting machines, we might never have won the war. The Enigma machine was designed to encipher messages and keep the enemy in the dark. The Royal Navy men lost their lives getting the machine out of that sub, but they helped win the war with their sacrifice. I wasn't about to risk my life to help us beat a penny slot machine.
We switched machines trying to figure out less complicated schemes, but it got progressively worse: Bet five, bet seven, bet twenty-five. It didn't matter. Karen lost money algebraically, offset by incremental wins, which she sardonically noted with every five or eight cent increase. I sat there bemused, noting the elderly couple behind Karen, where the wife was seated gambling at another one-armed bandit while her dutiful husband stood vigil behind her, hand resting on the backrest. That's me in twenty years, I thought to myself.
Karen lost her five dollars and got another five dollar credit on a different machine, although her results never changed. It was beginning to seem as if only Stephen Hawking or the NSA super computer was going to defeat the machine. The losses kept mounting, the slight wins only delayed the inevitable. There would be no jackpot for us tonight.
We decided to seek guidance on the machines from an employee of the casino, not so much to increase our odds but to eliminate us as the only fools in the place who didn't know how to gamble. The television ads now made sense to me: The people in the ads were neophytes who were attracted by the bright lights and jingly bells. The people we saw now in the casino were those same people who had stayed in the casino for months if not years learning how to play the machines. The dour, expressionless faces silently told us Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
As Karen sought directions from the helpful casino employee, I waited until she'd shown Karen some of the basics to using the machines to ask where the comedian's show was being held.
The show's been cancelled, she told us. The comedian had been bedridden with pulmonary embolisms for the last three weeks. Somehow we, and other patrons, never got an email telling us the show'd been cancelled.
And that pretty much sums up our trip to the casino.
Ironically, however, we left the casino with more money than we entered, since we were able to get a refund for the show tickets.
It's probably the only time I'll leave a casino with more money than I enter it.
(c) 2014 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
No comments:
Post a Comment