Have You Ever Hit It Big Gambling?

"In reading your novel, ALL OR NOTHING, I was really into the scenes in which P was playing the slots at the casino. Those were great!! My adrenaline was pumping when he hit it big. That was well written. You seem to know that feeling. Have you ever hit it big like that at a casino? A fan."

Thanks for the question, fan. Thanks for being a fan. We all need more fans!

I was at an Indian casino back in . . . 1992, yes, Hurricane Andrew. I was there with a serious gambler. I was bored watching him play poker. So I turned to the slot machine behind his table and put in a $5 I think, and I played it for a quarter because I am a cheapskate. Then I got brave and raised my bet to 50 cents and bang! The machine started pinging. Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping.

I tapped my companion (a kinsman who wants his identity withheld) on the shoulder and told him, "Look, I just won a hundred dollars!"

He twisted his neck to glance at the machine and frowned. "You did not win a hundred dollars, you knucklehead. You just won ten thousand dollars."

Holy sh . . . ten grand!!!

They weren't kidding either. They came around and asked me if I wanted it in cash or check. Check, I said, of course. I was not a gambler. I did not know what to do with a large sum of money like that. . . well, I did have a wedding coming up.

Later, after I had become a gambler and before GA, I hit other, larger sums--but mostly I learned to write scenes like that from watching other gamblers who won; and from wishing it were me.

I watched an older man, a Canadian tourist, a stranger to the Indian casino, fumbling around with the controls, grumbling, and muttering, "How do you get this dang thing off zero? Is zero the only number it plays?"

The guy had all zeroes on all four screens.

"And how do you lower the dang bet?"

The guy had the maximum $10 bet on all four screens. Forty bucks would be lost if he hit PLAY.

I was laughing to myself playing my own machine. I'm a nice guy. I was thinking that if no floor help came to them (his wife was there fumbling around, too) that I would show them how to work the controls on the machine.

The next thing I knew, their machine was singing, ping-ping-ping-ping-ping like crazy. The old man, or maybe his wife, had accidentally touched the PLAY button and the incredible number 0-0-0-0-0-0 had come tumbling out. They had just hit all zeroes on all four screens for the max bet on all four screens: i.e., $50,000 x 4= $200,000.

Holy sh . . .

Witnessing things like that helped me to write those casino scenes. Wishing things like that would happen to me helped me to write those casino scenes.

Thanks,

Preston