You know what, I'm not much of a gambler. My brother lives in the Vegas area and he bets the NFL every weekend. I go up there from time to time and once in a great while I'll put a little money on a game for the hell of it but usually not. I'm not all that smart but I am smart enough to know that I can't be dispassionate about sports gambling, and that's a terrible handicap in that particular activity.
Craps is my casino game. I don't play it very much anymore but if I were to play a casino game I would play craps. I've done very, very well at some craps tables over the years. There are some locals casinos in Vegas that give the odds I need to play. There's one decent place on the Strip that gives good odds. I can't remember the name, it's newish and over by the Linq. There are a million casinos here but they give shit odds and I know from experience that they get their panties in a twist if you set the dice so whenever I go to casinos here, which is less frequently than I go to Vegas, really, I tend to eschew the tables and spend my time drinking beer and chatting with the Colombian hookers of which there typically is no lack.
I was in Vegas a number of years ago when my national team was playing a futbol game against hated Mexico. I just had to bet on that, you know. I was out with my poor wife and my poor mother and I dragged them over to the Hilton. They call it something different now I think, but the sports book over there will take action on any damn thing and I knew they'd have odds on the futbol. And they did, of course. There was no one in the sports book at the time and really only a couple of windows open. I wandered up to one and had a couple of questions about how the futbol odds work. As I mentioned, I'm not a tremendously experienced sports bettor and while I understand football gambling just fine the futbol with its draws and whatnot was a little unfamiliar to me. So I clarify things with the fine fellow there and I place my modest wager and I get my slip (and my drink tickets, of course) and I turn around to see that my wife and my mother are staring at me in horror. At first I have no idea what their problem is. I walk over to them and their expression does not change, just mouth wide open amazement. I turn back to look at the window and I see that without realizing it I'd wandered up to the $1,000 minimum window. The guy at the window didn't say a word to me about my bullshit bet, of course. It was kind of like the few times I've ever gone into a gay bar by mistake. The dude knew I was an idiot and rather than raise a fuss he'd just take my bet and assume I'd quickly get the hell out of there and not bother him anymore. Which is what happened, of course.
But my wife and my mother didn't know this. So once I figured out what they were so shocked by I slowly turned back around and gave my best Barney Fife style deep sniff and said, Yeah, well, sometimes you've got to go big, and walked off.
We lost that game, needless to say. 2-1 if I recall correctly.
But you know what, nu? I'm going to be in Vegas next month and maybe, just for you, I'll throw a couple of sawbucks at the Texans as Super Bowl champs. Say, now that I think about it, I'm surprised you're not boycotting the NFL.
|