Take My Money, Please

Posted by Cynical Sarah on March 24, 2006

I don’t like to gamble. I’ve got plenty of other ways to use my money and have a lot more fun with it. Not to promote the stereotype about girls, but I’d much rather go shopping with any extra money I might have instead of watching a machine eat it.

I think the main problem is that slot machines and poker machines are basically like video games. Casinos are like arcades for adults. I’m not into video games, so the kind that take my money are even less appealing.
With that in mind, I was still willing to go to a couple casinos this past weekend with family that was in town. We checked out a fairly new “casino resort” in town that was fully designed to suck the money right out of your wallet.

It’s built like a small slice of Vegas really. It’s a hotel/casino/restaurants/lounge/theatre/ whatever other thing you might possibly need so you never have to leave the building. The difference is that I’ve always heard that the buffets in Vegas are super cheap so they can draw you in with food and then you’ll spend your money gambling. At this place nothing was cheap. We spent more to eat lunch than we dropped in the casino.

But that wasn’t enough. They’ve managed to find another way to take more of your money even faster. You don’t even have to play with real money in the machines anymore. You put your money in, $1 or $10 or whatever, and when you’re done playing that machine you get a “ticket” to use at the other machines.

The funny thing is, the machine still makes the sound affects like coins hitting the metal holder like it would if it really cashed out your money.

If you thought it was easy to lose money fast before, you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve played with a ticket. There is no sense of reality with a ticket. At that point, your brain stops thinking of it as money and instead it’s just a piece of paper with a dollar amount on it.

We put $10 in a nickel machine. Those 200 credits show up and you’d think we’d be playing for quite a while with that. That’s just step one to brainwashing you into forgetting you’re playing with real money. After maybe 10 minutes (if you’re lucky), you’re down to 100 credits and taking your ticket to another machine hoping to have better luck.

It’s easy to see how gambling can become addictive. Once you forget that ticket actually represents real money, it’s easy to have it become just like any other video game and not a money eating demon.

The big gamblers of course play the real games instead of the slot machines. You have to sit down and play the card games or craps or something if you want a real chance at maybe winning something or even coming out even.
I’m not brave enough for that. I’ve seen plenty of poker playing before. There aren’t many family events with my Dad’s side of the family that don’t involve the poker chips coming out at some point and one brother or another taking the others’ money.

But the poker I liked playing was the fake kind where we all got chips to play with without having to pay in any money for them. The best kind was when we played with M&Ms. Chocolatey goodness is way better than money any day. I don’t think the casino dealers were going to let me play with green M&Ms though.

You never know though. They’ve reduced real money to tickets so you don’t even get the joy of carrying around your bucket of change anymore. They’d make even more money if you could play the machines or the tables with M&Ms for money. Most people would end up eating most of their profits before they could cash them out for real money anyway.

- Sarah L. Polson

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