Beginner's Luck

I won RM1700 at the one-arm bandit up at the summit of our one and only casino play land last weekend. It was unexpected – I am not a gambler and have never taken to throwing my money away needlessly. But the pull of the blinking, flickering lights of the slot machines proved too strong to resist. Call it curiosity but I think it’s a conspiracy - casino owners build their casinos to block out all thought of ever going out into the daylight; they make you forget the passage of time and keep you zoned out enough and so addicted to your game, you just keep on putting more and more money into the machine or onto the table. All you want to do is continue playing and gambling.

Call it beginner’s luck. I was on a winning streak with every button I touched. My golden fingers kept drawing out the three pyramids. We earned free games like churning out water from the water dispenser: 18 free games, 21 free games, 24 free games, one after another. My sales guy, hubby and I were on a roll, although it was mainly hubby and I that were pressing the buttons while my sales guy leaned back and watched. And then, as my luck peaked, I hit the jackpot: over RM400 in total! It would have been nice to have hit the RM20,000 jackpot, but hey, RM400 out of thin air is good enough.

There’s a system to the points and the pictures that show up on the screen, but I could not for the life of me keep up with the point tallying and the pictures. So it was basically just picking an amount that I preferred to bet and pressing the button. It was fun. It was mindless. And I was on the verge of getting zoned out.

From a low of RM1 or so, we watched the figures go up, up and up until we were targeting RM2300. At one point of other, there were spectators witnessing our good fortune. We reached a high of RM2200. We must have been sitting there for about two hours mindlessly pushing buttons when the luck started to dwindle. Instead of winning points every other time we punched the buttons, we started losing points, and we saw the figures going down from RM2200 to RM1900, hovering at about RM1800 before we decided to call it quits at RM1700.

The capital was RM100. We walked away RM1600 richer. It’s a pity though that it wasn’t my money. We’d stumbled across my sales guy solitarily playing the slot machines so we decided to keep him company. He was on the way out until he let both hubby and me try our hands at pushing the buttons. That’s when our beginner’s luck began to override his own dwindling fortune.

It would have been nice if the money was my own. I’d have been able to keep the winnings. Although, as hubby said, it is nice to gamble with other people’s money. There’s a sense of abandon: if we lose it it’s not ours anyway so we tend to go for broke. You take more risks and you win bigger.

It was an interesting night. I’d been to the casino many times before, but only for work and I’d always walked past the table games and the slot machines straight into the counting room. Now I know why the aunties and uncles and gamblers of the world are so tempted to try their luck. You never know when or how much you’d win if you don’t try.