Vegas Gambling (Part One)

I’ve been to Vegas about 15 or 16 times and have developed two favorite games. My favorite table game is blackjack and of course I love to play a little poker. Blackjack intimidates Pretty Bird because even on a $5 table a bad run can put you down $100 in 10 minutes. She doesn’t play poker at all. This meant I had to find another game so we could play some games together. I taught Pretty Bird to play Pai Gow because that is a simple game and we both could get plenty of drinks losing very little money. After a day or so of Pai Gow we decided to try our hand at craps and eventually we even played roulette.

Pai Gow was pretty uneventful but I guess that is to be expected since it is Pai Gow. We actually only played Pai Gow together for long periods the first two days we were there. After that we’d either play for less than an hour or Pretty Bird would play it while I was playing poker, which wasn’t that often.

I had a vague understanding about how to play craps before and we took one of the free lessons. All the lesson did was make me more confused so I just watched betting, asked a friend, and asked one of the dealers on a live game to learn. My favorite thing about craps is that when the table is going well everyone is having a great time. Plus we can both play off the same amount of chips and both have a great time. Our first session wasn’t good at all, we lost $100 pretty quickly. We played about four or five more times over the week and ended up about $50 up in craps, give or take. We never got a really hot streak but we also never had more than three numbers bet. Hanging out at a craps table it is amazing how bad people are with probability. When any random bet didn’t hit for a few hands you’d almost always get some genius explain how the odds were that it would hit this hand. Nope, you get the same odds every roll.

You want to talk about people who don’t understand odds then play roulette. We went to Vegas with the intention of putting ten $10 bets on 10 to mark our anniversary. It will be ten years on 10/10 so it seemed appropriate. We actually did quite a few hard 10 bets on craps which worked out better than the bets on roulette. None of the 10s hit but after about seven of them we decided to actually play roulette for a few hands instead of just make one single bet. We played twice and I can see the appeal of roulette. We were up close to $100 on the two sessions making our ten other bets even. There is no skill or thought process in roulette. Its just playing a bunch of mini-lotteries. It is even more fun to make fun of the other people though. The ones that swear 0 or 00 are coming this hand or the odds say this will happen. I guess that is why Vegas is still in business.

I’ll update by blackjack later and then poker deserves its own post, poker was good.