A Serious Gamble

By Alex Zubatov

I never understood why some people wanted to close
down the casinos. As a matter of fact, my friends and I planned our first pilgrimage to Atlantic City when we all turned 21, over this past break. Playing cards amongst ourselves had been the virtual centerpiece of our formative years. And this--this was the culmination of it all, the promised land, the great, grand playground of middle America.

The three-hour drive went by quickly, and before we knew it, we were navigating the famous Monopoly(TM) streets of Atlantic City. They seemed run-down, a bit reminiscent of the all-too-familiar scenery of New Haven. And then, just like the gothic towers of Yale that unexpectedly confront you as you are driving through the inner city, we were suddenly in view of the fabled boardwalk. We slowed down to get a good glimpse and felt a brief adrenaline surge.

By four o'clock, we had dropped off our bags in our hotel rooms. The casino signs led us through a smattering of restaurants and cash machines and placed us, before long, at the gates of paradise. We observed a moment of silence and entered. It was late afternoon. Business was booming.

Every demographic group was well represented. I saw everyone from men in fur to average, working-class citizens visiting for the day. All were intently focused on their particular games, while waitresses circled around taking orders for drinks -- free for those playing. The casino makes it all back when drunk and desperate customers bet their last hundred on black.

Most of my friends immediately set to work, maneuvering themselves into niches at the tables. I took stock of everything first, making my way around slowly, studying the casino-specific rules of each game. By the time we went to eat dinner at six, one of my friends was already $90 in
the red.

I started playing around eight. I sat down at a $5 minimum blackjack table, obeyed the probabilities, pulled some great hands and made $30 in five minutes. Then I spent a few hours wandering around the various casinos, returned at 1 a.m., and went straight to the poker tables for seven-
card stud.

Seven-card stud, unlike everything else in the casino, is not played against the house. You play against other visitors, and the casino merely provides a dealer who takes 10 percent of each pot. If you are a good poker player, the odds are in your favor. I played for two hours, and won $140. I stopped because I was too depressed to continue. The people I was playing against were largely in their forties, working-class, the kind of people you would find around Dan's poker table on Roseanne. I couldn't help feeling sorry for them in my inevitably condescending way. They played on emotion and energy, driven by gut feelings and superstitions, ignoring probability and making obvious bluffs, venting their feelings openly, throwing cards down in disgust or exploding with glee when they won. I felt wrong taking their money.

So I got up and took a walk around the casino. It was different at 3 a.m. Many tables were empty. The remaining faces seemed haggard, sleepless, melancholy. I walked over to the slot machines. The people there appeared even more hollow and fanatical. They sat with buckets of coins, pulling levers in an eerily automatic way. At least half of them looked like addicted gamblers, playing without any enjoyment, just waiting for the big jackpot that never came. Some of them were squeezing lucky objects and praying inwardly that some attentive divinity was listening.

I didn't sleep much that night. I had seen addiction up close, there, in front of me, real and frightening, and I understood, for the first time, why so many people wanted to close down the casinos. These plastic palaces along the boardwalk, these mini-kingdoms in the middle of a ramshackle town, were built upon taking advantage of human weakness: emotion, superstition, intuition, faith, greed, habit. In our capitalist society, we cannot call such enterprises unlawful, but we can go so far as to say that they are morally repulsive. And so, although I still do not believe in closing down the casinos, it will be a while before I go back.

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