Living in the Scoot Utopia

Last night Ken dragged me to the Ameristar against my will. Parre went too.

I have a major expense coming up so didn't want to just throw my money away. "I'm only gonna play with $20," I said, "and that's really not enough to last on the Blackjack table, so I'm just gonna play slots."

So before he and Parre hit the tables, Ken set me up on the Triple Diamond machine that he had such good luck on during his last visit.

Mere moments later my twenty was gone.

While this was going on, Parre was sitting at a nearby bank of Double-Tens machines and winning. He cashed in his winnings and took them to the blackjack table. I followed them over and watched their first couple of hands. "I'm gonna go wander around a bit," I said.

I returned to the Double-Tens cluster and sat down at the machine to the left of the one that Parre had done well yet. I stuck in another twenty. Now this machine was somewhat defective, the "max spin" button was not working so I had to hit "bet one" 5 times before each spin. It was tedious, but before long my twenty had grown to $62. I was now officially up $22 for the night. I took my cash-out ticket and put it in my shirt pocket.

I went over to see how the fellas were doing, then did another lap around the casino. I ended up once again orbiting the Double-Tens cluster, this time landing at the machine two to the right of where Parre had played.

Rather than stick my ticket in, because I feared I'd get hooked and lose it all, I stuck my last $20 bill into the machine instead. Pretty quickly I had doubled it to $40 but stupidly did not cash out. I kept going, hitting "max bet", "max bet", over and over and watching the total keep dwindling down. I'd win small payouts, just enough to keep me in, but that was it. I wanted to cut my losses and walk away, but I figured that with that $62 ticket in my pocket I was technically playing with the house's money so might as well stick it out. $5.00..... $3.75... $2.50... and there it was, $1.25... just enough credits for one last "max bet" spin.

I hit something that gave me a payout and the machine started beeping.

And beeping.

And beeping.

It took me nearly a minute to realize what had happened...

10 x 10 x 10 = 1,000 ....... or $250. My best slot machine payout ever!

With that I officially considered myself done and after showing off to my buddies and getting a high-five from a pit boss I cashed my tickets in.

After subtracting my $60 investment I ended up leaving up $252 for the night, and Parre followed close behind at a little over $200. Ken? He lost a hundred. I feel a little badly for him, but not too much so considering the NUMEROUS times I've seen him win hundreds to thousands while I lost my ass and sat around broke and bored. :)

So, yeah... thanks, Ken, for pressuring me into doing something I didn't want to do!