Short Stories: Gambling

Lucky Bob’s Story:

Bob was a 75 year old retiree; he lived in a luxury apartment of the Boulevard St Michael in Paris but decided to sell up and more to the USA, Arizona to be more precise.  

 

From his home in Arizona he often takes his car out for a Sunday drive, but usually ends up in Las Vegas, and he usually ends up outside his car in one of the many casinos. It takes him roughly an hour to get to Las Vegas from his home in Arizona, but Bob likes to drive so he doesn’t mind.  

 

In 1999, just before the 7^th week of the 1999 National Football League season, he decided that he wouldn’t go to Nevada that week; the drive to Las Vegas would mean that he’d miss some vital playtime; he just stayed at home that week, lounging around his new house.

      

While lounging around he saw that his local paper was running a weekly football handicapping competition. This was set up so that everyone who wanted to participate would pick 20 games, either from the college leagues or the professional leagues. It was a really straightforward competition that was run by the newspaper for the age-old reason that they wanted to increase their circulation figures. The competition did not require participants to pay an entrance fee. Whoever out of everyone who participated managed to choose the most teams out of the eventual winners won the competition and the prize of $150.

 

One day during the 7^th week of the NFL 1999, Bob marked of the teams that he thought were going to win and then entered the competition. Although it would be normal to assume he was after the $150 winnings, this was not his main motivation. On his regular trips to Las Vegas he often played wagers that were at least triple the amount, this was peanuts to him. If the same competition was being run in Las Vegas he would have wagered at least $1000 on the outcome, which if all his teams had come in would give him a massive return. This competition run in the newspaper was just a way of passing the time until the football started.

     

On the list of teams that the newspaper had provided, Bob had picked the numbers in order from 1-20, when there were a total of 60 teams to pick from. The odds of him picking correctly were more than a million to one.

 

They all came in! If Bob had played the game in a casino he would now have been a multi millionaire, now he had to be content with being a hundredaire (there isn’t even a word for them they’re so rare!).

 

Bob must surely have had the most unlucky lucky-streak known to man.        

 

And The Score Is.....

     

One thing that stands out about my brother, TP, is his amazing ability to focus his concentration. And as a professional sports bettor, the outlook was good, but just like the mad-professor from Tin-Tin, his abilities made for a great many funny family stories.

 

TP and I were both sat in our local casino watching the final seconds of a National Football League (NFL) game that was being played between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Diego Chargers. The winners of the match had already been decided and bizarrely, it was the underdog leading by 32-16, they had the game won easily. But TP and I were still interested in the rest of the game because we had both placed the ‘under’ bet. On this particular game the over/under bet line was 48 1/2 points.  My brother and I were still interested, however, because we were both on the 'under' bet. The over/under line on the game was 48 1/2 points.

But, with the score as it was, time was swiftly passing and we seemed in good shape to win as we’d bet ‘under’ 48 1/2.  However, we hit a problem; the super quarter back of the Kansas City Chiefs had the ball and was driving against the defence of the San Diego Chargers. The thus far winning team were already beginning to celebrate their unexpected win, a scene that is very familiar to anyone who makes regular over/under bets.

 

As we were sat watching the game, a man approached us from the casino and started to watch the game too, noticing our interest in a game that appeared to be almost over he seemed a little perplexed. After watching with us for a while he then asked what the score was, TP answered forty two, without even looking at the screen. You have to understand sports bets to get what he meant, but this is definitely going down in history as a mad-professor moment.

        

 

Strange? I always thought of myself as unlucky

        

Hardened gamblers have a different mindset than less risk-taking, or non-gambling, people. They step to a different beat. So, if you’re not a frequent gambler, you might not understand the meaning of this tale, but as a hardened gambler the story will be all too common.

 

Again, I was with my brother TP and we were watching an NFL game in Las Vegas when TP decided to go visit another casino to play a round of blackjack. Well, I had a lot riding on this game and my team was not faring well, there was no way I was going to follow him to the blackjack tables. As you know, if you place a bet on a game, you always fare better if you watch it on the Tele right until the end, or you always win a little bit of cash when you watch a lottery live- as any hardened gambler would tell you, that’s just the way it is.

         

Anyway, TP and I arranged to meet for dinner later while I stayed on at the casino and he went to another one to play blackjack. As luck would have it, it wasn’t on my side, I had one of the worst betting beats I’d ever had on the NFL, and I definitely wasn’t in the mood for a fancy dinner. I lost a lot of money and in a terrible mood I decided to drive home in a huff instead of going to the restaurant to meet TP.

 

When TP rolled home a few hours later I was a little bit calmer and apologised for not coming to dinner, I blamed him a little for leaving me to watch the games alone, he was suppose to be the lucky mascot! TP told me I was lucky, the food he’d eaten was one of the worst dinners he’d ever had. Turned out I was lucky after all and he spent all night in the bathroom and all of the next day an odd shade of green. The toilet didn’t fare too well either!

      

 

I have no idea, what do you think?

In London one day I met a stockbroker who was having dinner in a really fancy restaurant, after that he was going to one of the local casinos and he wanted me to come along. You see, George had a problem, gifted as he was in choosing the winning bets, he could never place them without getting somebody else’s opinion- call it OCD if you must, but he was plagued with doubts, always second guessing his choices and had massive misgivings about every bet he placed- no matter of his track record, which any gambler would sell a left bo@@!*ck for, he still never trusted his own choices. It seemed out of place that a stockbroker by trade would be so indecisive when it came to placing bets; both activities are effectively the same.

 

Now George could be easily swayed by other people’s opinions, if you wanted to be really mean you could ask him what his best betting tip was for the next gamble, place the bet and then talk him out of placing the same bet, you’d walk away with the winnings and he’d have nothing- obviously the only time this would pay off for you would be if the winnings are spread amongst winners. I’d never have done something like this to him, or indeed anyone, but I saw him played like this on several occasions.

 

I met George for coffee one day in a large London casino; we began to discuss his inability to make decisions without the help of an outsider. For the past two weeks he’d been using me as his sounding board, but I’d misjudged a couple of bets. He was ready to replace me with someone else, and tried his luck with a technique that he’d read on the internet- the internet for him counted as another person when it came to making decisions, he’d take the word of the web as gospel.  

        

I knew that my period of losing was normal and that it would pass by as swiftly as it arrived and George’s trust would be restored in me once more. You would have thought that George understood the trends of ups and downs in the gambling industry, as a stockbroker short-term fluctuations are part of the job. But George did not see it this way, for a start he denied that he needed anyone else to make his decisions, and the fact I had made some mistakes had led to him suggesting that I find my very own sounding board, obsessed as I was with the matter of decision making- denial is a funny thing, now I was the one with the problem according to George.

 

We were hungry in the coffee bar and George suggests we try a mushroom burger, now mushrooms are my worst food ever, so I told him so. He said to me that I could have a bite of his, I would surely change my mind once I ate somebody else’s burger, he went off to buy the burger but returned with a shish-kebab, it turned out that someone at the bar had told him to try the shish-kebab and the mushroom burger fell out of favour. Yep, and I was the one with the problem!        

 

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