JHV
<a href="http://www.casinomeister.com/meister_awar
- Joined
- Jun 2, 2005
- Location
- Perennial Traveler
Welcome back Scooter. I do hope you continue to contribute on the forum. Yours have been my fav. thread to date. That chat is a classic. Even if you chose not to post about your misadventures with "iffy" casino practices, please post. Since you once worked in a casino I'm sure you have some good stories about your dealing days, and what goes on behind closed doors of the casinos. Spin those yarns. You can change the names to protect the innocent![]()
Honestly, the 20 months I worked at a land based casino were the most horrific of my life. And I still probably have some lingering 'scars' from the experience, though it seems a lifetime ago.
Any stories that I'd find interesting to share would be morbidly depressing, as anyone who's worked in a gritty* land based casino can probably imagine. Casinos attract a certain brand of helpless / damaged souls to their jingling lights and sounds and false promises of easy winnings and 'entertainment' - it's 'entertainment' all right, in a far closer way to how amphetamines are 'entertainment', according to the studies I've read on the subject - and the chemicals the RISK / DANGER of the gamble force-release in your brain - it's some twisted, complicated shit where winning has negligible neurological effect (paraphrasing, hopefully correctly)...but the risk of losing, the risk of disaster, that's where the addiction comes from - any 'pleasure' from gambling apparently comes not from the thrill of winning, but the panic of losing.
That's actually not so depressing in itself, but when you see first-hand the damage genuine addiction can inflict on (otherwise) good families and the horrible positions gambling addiction can (occasionally) put people in, it has the potential to shake you to your core to the point where you're questioning life-long beliefs about Politics 101 issues like definition of individual liberty, the role of the state in legislating morality, at what point should government organisations intervene when a parent (or even an individual) appears to be or is clearly spinning out of control, etc.
I realise I'm unintentionally being cryptic, so I'll give one example. A lady who I'm 100% certain was, and would have continued to be a brilliant mother to her kids (were it not for her roulette addiction) just self-destructed in front of my eyes over a period of a few months. Listening to exhausted and frustrated teachers call her every day saying they have to get home to their own kids and would she PLEASE come pick up her kids as school was let out 3 hrs ago - and she'd be stricken with guilt and frantic, but always saying: "Just one more spin, just one more". Ridiculous cliche I know, but when 8 hours after the phone call from the kids' teacher saying he's leaving them in as safe a place as he can at the school alone, she's still saying "just one more spin"....and the kids are sitting alone and unprotected that entire time (probably) every day waiting for her...seeing that firsthand; watching the degeneration from loving mother to horrible sick selfish (this might be unfair - I genuinely believe she had little to no control over her addiction) person so rapidly every day like a horrible soap opera...that was pretty traumatic for me to witness.
Social services ended up taking the kids, I think. As they should. She was an unfit mother due to her sickness. She triple mortgaged the family home and one of the banks inevitably foreclosed not long after. Without her kids, homeless, undoubtedly racked to hell with guilt but unable to request self-exclusion from the premises, I watched her sink into dark depression - she started using drugs, mixing with people no sane person would ever want to mix with - and well, I'll leave the rest to your imagination and say that the worst you can imagine, is probably pretty close to what happened.
Credit to the casino I worked for, to be honest - at their core, they were greedy money-grabbing crafty connected businessmen taking advantage of peoples' stupidity, ignorance (it's stunning how many people don't even understand the concept of house advantage, let alone know the % for the games they're playing - as high as 16% for some games in Australia, just sick) and mental illness (if you call addiction a mental illness, which I think is probably accurate) - but they did try to step in and intervene in this particular case with the mother. But the gambling legislation is complex and complicated when it comes to stuff like this. I think it came down to ONLY she could request exclusion, the casino couldn't just ban her from premises for her own good - I might not have the full details on why she couldn't be excluded, but there were some complexities anyway, and we just had to watch the horror unfold in front of our eyes.
I spoke to her often in the early days trying to really subtly flick the switch in her brain about the choices she was making as they affected her children, but she was just blind to it all. Not out of an 'evil' place, I don't think. She was just blind to everything. Living in a fantasy world, in some respects. Pure, clinical addiction. My sympathy for her reached non-existent levels when she would yell at me for not reminding her to pick up her kids when I'd been reminding her (using VERY strong language at times) for the better part of 6-8 hours. The mentally ill have a remarkable talent for alienating those that would seek to help them - I have the utmost respect for anyone able to put up with the insanity whilst assisting or treating someone suffering from mental illness. I don't have the patience. Once I'd decided she was beyond help, and I was sick of her insane attempts at transferring blame onto me and others for "not reminding her" - I would just coldly crush her if she came to my table (if she was frantically gambling whilst her young kids were sitting alone cold somewhere as night fell - justified abuse on my part, imo - her behaviour had reached despicable levels [this was *just* before social services took the kids, I think]). She disgusted me and probably everyone else - and she became a pretty easy / soft target for those who prey upon such types I guess. They used her up and spat her out - circle of (the dark side of) life.
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Heh, I rambled on a bit in the end. But yep, the vast majority of my stories would be morbidly depressing like this one. The culture there was...I can't describe it. We were just kids, excited when we got the job, thinking it would be fun, etc. Within months, most of my training group had quit - some were on depression meds, I wanted to quit more than anything in the world but couldn't afford to - so stuck it out for almost two years and tried in vain to block out the depravity and sadness. The back room atmosphere and staff culture was just morbid. Seeing grown men cry uncontrollably after losing I guess their mortgage payments or even more, seeing young girls with hopeless gambling addictions doing things flippantly for cash - things that probably would have horrified them only months earlier.
Working there that long changed me, not in uniquely positive ways. I grew up a lot, saw a lot of things I perhaps wish I hadn't - learned a LOT about the gritty underbelly of society; learned a lot about people and what motivates them and how easily the weak and sick are manipulated; I became a great deal more cynical and a great deal less chirpy and upbeat, etc. I guess a lot of that would be deemed "valuable life experience" by some people - but give me back my naive irrational positivity imo - I didn't need to know what happens to people when they fall ALL the way down. And I definitely didn't need to see it up close, to people I'd formed semi-friendships with through seeing and talking to them every day.
I'm a libertarian. I think Prohibition is just about the most retarded way to deal with a problem. But gambling is tricky. When families are getting torn apart - and one parent's gambling addiction is ruining the lives of those around them (especially if children are involved), I learned with some horror that things have to get PRETTY bad before the state even contemplates intervening. To the best of my knowledge, there are no effective "cures" for addiction - I guess therapy helps, etc - but when someone is that sick, they're not going to get anything out of therapy, even if dragged kicking and screaming to the doctor (which would probably be the only way you'd get most of them there). I'm pretty opinionated and like to think I have answers for almost everything, but on this issue, I'm stumped. You can't ban it - but hell, I saw what happens when it's legalised, and I came very close to getting sold on Prohibition - just WAY too many negatives, so few, if any positives (except for shareholders or point owners - and I guess employment/industry).
But what I saw - when I try to extrapolate that to what surely goes on at the homes of these sad victims. The thoughts make me shiver. I'd see people who were suicidal in public after losing xxx - and knowing they were on their way home to their kids and family...I'm talking about really sick people here. Sick and (at times) violent people.
I have no answers for this issue.