{"id":884,"date":"2010-11-20T05:43:39","date_gmt":"2010-11-20T09:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=884"},"modified":"2010-11-20T05:51:41","modified_gmt":"2010-11-20T09:51:41","slug":"beginners-luck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=884","title":{"rendered":"Beginner’s Luck"},"content":{"rendered":"

So there I was, reading this excellent post <\/a>about games of chance and winning the lottery over at Good Job Sucking<\/a>, when I realized:\u00a0 I know exactly what he means.\u00a0 Driving home from Chicago one year, young and impressionable, we stopped at a rest stop in Nowhere, which is in between Chicago and Omaha.\u00a0 There was a casual slot machine in some road-side lunch shack, which must have been a bar in the evenings, back in the 70’s when slot machines still roamed the Great Plains – I understand they’ve been hunted almost to extinction in those parts, outside of well-regulated areas.\u00a0 Having been given a fist-full (literally, you got to keep what you could hold in one hand) of change as we left Chicago, I asked my folks if I could try it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mom was very cheerful about this chance to provide an object lesson in Why Gambling Is Dumb, and I proceeded to hit a small jackpot with my first quarter – it was probably only around $10 bucks, but it was in quarters and it seemed like A LOT.\u00a0 Some of them were silver, which just opened my mind to all sorts of gambling vistas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beginner’s luck.\u00a0 Ain’t it a bitch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I got a second shot at being a professional gambler a number of years ago, the\u00a0first\u00a0time I went to Atlantic City.\u00a0 We were there on business, but since we had about\u00a02 hours to kill, we went over to a casino.\u00a0 No idea which one, it was dark and vaguely\u00a0Western themed,\u00a0which I’m tells you everything you need to know.\u00a0 My\u00a0friend walked me through How We Play Roulette, and\u00a0I gave the nice lady my\u00a02 dollars and put them on some number.\u00a0\u00a0She promptly\u00a0drew that number, handed me something like\u00a0$75 bucks, and we left for lunch – on me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Needless to say, it doesn’t happen like that very often,\u00a0by which I mean I lost the next time I was in Atlantic City.\u00a0\u00a0Since then,\u00a0the Human Tape Recorder asked, a few years ago, “Daddy, what’s the lottery?”\u00a0 I\u00a0explained very cheerfully that the lottery is a tax on people who are\u00a0bad at math.\u00a0<\/p>\n

HTR:\u00a0 “Oh.\u00a0 But I’m good at math!”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\nBUMD:\u00a0 “Right, so you won’t have to pay that tax.”
\nHTR:\u00a0 “But you buy lottery tickets sometimes!”
\nBUMD:\u00a0 “Yep.\u00a0 Daddy was never really too good at math.”<\/p>\n

Ah well.\u00a0 Any stories about beginner’s luck out there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[61,3,40,44],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":887,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions\/887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}