Enabling

About a week ago, I got a call from a buddy who was a year older than me in my fraternity. He had just graduated Harvard Law and was swinging through Vegas on his way to a clerkship in Phoenix. For anonymity’s sake, lets call him Good Will Dicegame. Will set his lineup for places to stop on his way out, and he made it into Vegas yesterday around noon. We had run in somewhat different circles, so I had never realized that he was a slave to the odds like I was. We had run poker games, blackjack nights, and done significant sports betting in college, and he never seemed to be any more addicted than any other drunk guy doubling down when the shit was in his favor.

So he pulled in to my apartment complex, and we shot the shit for an hour or so. It came up that Mr. Dicegame had applied to different clerkships around the country including one in Las Vegas. He had been advised by his family that he probably shouldn’t go to Vegas because they had a history of gambling problems. I had to work for the tutoring business for three hours, so I asked him where he wanted to hang out in the meantime. He looked like a small boy might if you asked whether he wanted to shoot his sister with a paintball gun. Very quietly, almost afraid to ask, he said “Well, maybe I could go get on a craps table, if that’s alright with you”, and waited wide-eyed for a response.

I decided to take him to the craps Mecca that is Casino Royale, the dicegame to end all dicegames. Shits two-dollar minimum with 100 times odds, unreasonable by any standards of the gaming industry. The house edge is at most 50.001% if you were utilizing all your odds. Beyond that, the dealers are all brand new and hate their job, so they often mispay. Usually the mispay is in the house’s favor, but so long as you know your math, you can catch those and call them out. The times when the mispay is your favor, maybe you forget how to do your figures that time. Its a positive expectation game at that point, and given how much fun it is to roll dice even if you are giving the house the edge, there is no reason not to camp out at the Casino Royale.

So I take Goodwill through the bat cave to the Casino Royale’s rear parking lot, and we walk into the cacophony of action. Once we work our way in to spots at the craps table, Billy realized that I wasn’t fucking round about either the odds or the mispays. Within 3 shooters, the guy to our right got paid ten bucks on a two dollar pass line bet because the dealer thought he was paying singles when he was armed with fives. We had a couple good rolls and a couple bad rolls as will continued to up his bets. He was working with a two hundred dollar bankroll, and was throwing down a pass line with two come bets, backing them up with a growing number of five dollar chips each time, even sometimes sneaking a green in there.

When William was handed the dice, he started with a strong point that he took down quick. But despite his wins, he started to get more and more agitated with the stickman who was taking his sweet ass time getting the dice back in his grasp. He started screaming, “You trying to freeze me up? You can’t freeze me.” At one point he started doing toe touches and turning towards the stickman, “I’m gonna keep warm over here, you pass me the dice whenever”. The only response he ever got was an angry sneer from the stickman who said “I work for minimum wage plus tips buddy”. In general, the crew was surly to a fault, as if they had put up their own money to back the game. Normally, you would think that would be bad luck at a table, but it inspired the sort of us against them camaraderie that is essential in team sports.

I was up a little bit, until my roll when I bet big and crapped all the way back down to even. I had been playing for about an hour, so I was happy to cash out even and head to work, leaving Will to his devices. After a couple hours of building assessment tests, I left work to pick him back up at the Royale. He had switched tables and befriended a middle-aged man named Bobby. He had probably had about 10 crown and ginger ales, and was flying high on a few recent big wins. He cashed out up 260, pretty good days take. After playing three and half hours of dice, he was sad when forced to leave his vocation, but relented to come with me to buy supplies for a barbeque. On the ride to Albertsons, he got a call from his girlfriend and was heard to say some version of the following lies. “No baby, I haven’t been in a casino, I’ve just been hanging out with my friend Ed.” “We might go by a craps table later, ed knows this place where you can just put a dollar on the pass line, I’m just gonna bet what I have in my wallet, like sixty dollars.” “If I win more than 500 hundred, I’m gonna buy you a nice piece of jewelry, baby.” Shit was dominant, and after he hung up he started rationalizing it saying, “I really like that she tries to limit me, it would be a bad thing if she encouraged my gambling, I would never do anything else.”

We bought a bunch of tritip, burgers, and associated condiments. We got together with a bunch of my friends from Vegas and grilled out by a pool, shooting the shit. I had gotten pretty high beforehand, so I dominated some shits and got into a heated debate with my buddy Jason which ended in me offering to let him choke me out if he was designated driver for the rest of the night. Initially, he was all for the exchange, then when he started to hear about the required chauffeur’s uniform and hat, he relented. Excited by my bluff, I decided to teach a lesson in relention and systematically got anyone within earshot to relent for various reasons. The entire time, Good Will Dicegame tried to make pleasant conversation, but had that far away look in his eyes. Not the look of a man pondering the world’s problems, but rather pondering whether he would have been up another couple hundo if he could have just hit that hard four.

We drank some beers and talked about where we could get in on the cheap with our connections. We went back and forth with a couple options, and the only time Will entered the fray was when I mentioned that we could drink for cheap at the casino royale. He seconded my motion, saying that sounded like more fun and didn’t want to spend a bunch of money at the clubs anyway. We knew from there we could swing over to a couple other bars on the strip, so we decided to let Billy back on the felt.

On the drive over he mentioned “You know its kind of a shame that you showed this place to me, because now I’m never going to want to gamble anywhere else.” We got there at like 9 PM and there were lines to get table spots, which angered Will immensely. He made us agree to a pact whereby the first of us who squeezed our way tableside agreed to let everyone else in on their odds. He made his way in when some people left and a couple shooters later, Russell and I were able to do the same.

We started with a hot shooter, and we made a couple points and numbers right from the get go. I made one dominant move where the guy had hit the point of nine when I had a come bet out. Its takes a trained eye to recognize, and I don’t recommend this to the novice dice player, but I saw the look in this kids eye. I turned to the dealer and told him to work the nine on the come out. Sure enough, that nine-rollin son of a bitch came true to my cheers of “nininininina niiiiiiiiiine”. From there shit went downhill, with a bunch of cold rollers culminating in my own inability to hit a point. I ducked out to grab some cheap drinks and hang out with some of my other buddies at the penny slots. I tore through about 10 dollars and 6 shots of jager while those reels kept landing the wrong way. Eventually, we decided it was time to move along and pulled the guys off the craps table. Will claimed to be down 60 on that sitting, but still up two hunny on the trip.

We made the walk over to the familiar confines of Harrah’s piano bar and muscled our way into a table. We were rolling about 8 dudes deep with an ultimate fighter and a few other gym bound juiceheads, so I had my dander up. We agreed on the walk that the song we wanted to hear was “Proclaimers- 500 miles”, so the chants began, but I was still hoarse from a previous nights revelry and didn’t have the proximity to the ivory ticklers to tell their fruity shits to play a man’s song. As they belted out a terrible “Living on a Prayer” rendition, some douche bag got on stage and started dancing. Then he started running around the bar trying to raise the roof and high fiving anyone who would reciprocate. Taking interest in something that wasn’t rolled on felt for the first time of the trip, a drunk will leaned over to me and said “I hate that guy more than anyone I have ever hated.”

After watching his mark for all of thirty seconds, I realized that I shared his opinion and something had to be done. After some discussion with my counterparts, I decided to pull out a classic bar move that I had perfected in a DC sports bar when some fucking redskins fan was destroying everyone’s enjoyment of their games with outcomes that may actually effect the playoff picture. I called the waitress over and asked her if they had any non-alcoholic brews on the list. When she responded with O’Doul’s, I informed her that I wanted her to hand an O’Doul’s to that guy and point over to our table to say it was from us.

We waited patiently for the drink to be dug from the depths of some emergency fridge and then placed on the platter of humiliation. To our dismay, the bottle was given to the wrong guy, but still part of his crew. We had already decided we disliked the spike haired boychild who ended up with the O’Doul’s, but he wasn’t drunk or enigmatic enough to confront us like the giant dancing douche would have been. He kind of looked over, realized he would have no chance in a dispute, and let the shit go. We grew tired of the scene and ducked out into the Las Vegas night. After a couple pop ins to various casinos, we decided to head back to the Casino Royale around 1AM.

I told Will that I was going to go play poker at a different casino but that I would swing back through the casino royale to pick him up before heading home. In reality, I headed directly home to smoke bowls and maybe eat a hot pocket or two. I lied to him because I am an enabler. It is company policy to encourage my clients to pursue their vices. The pothead who is trying to scale back for fear of drug tests “I guess you can’t handle the lightening no more can you, rook? Rookie, Rookie, Rooooooooookie.” To the overeater, “Dude, you have to fucking try this shit dude. Its like they somehow created a matter displacement system which resulted in the chocolate being inside the marshmallow, I can every really accurately describe the taste sensation in a non-Elvin dialect.” To the obsessive compulsive cell phone video game player, “Don’t worry, winkle, I’m sure you will be able to beat your girlfriend’s high score someday. You will, of course, have to save the life of a member of the fallen Russian regime that can secure you some sort of gymnasium with sophisticated 80s style computer output systems and sensors attached to your frontal lobe to maximize the very pattern recognition cognition which limits your current play beneath that of your better half. You woman, you pathetic little woman. What happened to you, she’s got you by three hundred points dude. Take a look in the mirror winkle, you might as well get a fucking makeup artist to put on your foundation in the morning. You disgust me.”

Now these techniques, while revolutionary, yield the desired results. They don’t create any decision which was not already subconsciously made, but rather bring to the forefront these questionable priorities. It is for that reason not traditional peer pressure but rather a benign form of encouragement commonly frowned upon as enabling. Ill fucking enable who ever I please to do whatever I please, and they will be happier people for it. Will Dicegame wants to play dice damn it, and who am I to keep a professional from his profession. To the contrary, I would rather give him the means to practice his trade and feel confident that I had reinforced the proper path. Do not confuse these assertions as a defamation of peer pressure, a necessary institution which I actively encourage and participate in.

So I am half passed out, a few bowls and a few French bread pizzas deep, and I realize I have left Will at the dice table for about three hours now. I leave my place around 330 and get inside the royale around 345. When I spot Good Will, he is standing in the exact same spot I left him at 1 AM, hasn’t moved an inch. I come up and tap him on the shoulder, which generates a look that is more dismayed than relived. After telling him that it’s like four am, he tells me he’s up a little and just wants to play out this last roll. I took a spot across the table from him and got a good view of all the action, that way I could make sure he did actually get up when the roll ended.

The kid shooting was standing directly to the left of Will, and Will had already put out a bet of two dollars on the pass line and a two dollar come bet which had landed on six. He had backed them up with ten bucks each, but upon realizing that this would be his last go round, he bumped them each up ten bucks. The kid hit a six, netting Will 26 bucks. This prompted him to throw down another come bet, and up his odds on the pass line nine to thirty bucks. Sure enough, shooter throws a sixty-three, with will netting 45 on his odds. Something in his brain triggers, and will decides its time to go big before going home. He starts putting all of his loose five and one dollar chips in play as odds, making sure to leave an empty tray other than his twenty fives. He’s backing up fours with 43 bucks and nines with 38, whatever it is to have all his cash in play. The shooter is as hot as a god damn pistol, just keeps hitting points and numbers, never even coming near a dreaded seven. Will has upped his bets to the point where he is doubling up on 57 dollar odds on a ten or 52 odds on the four. The money keeps rolling in, and will is visibly disappointed whenever he gets paid in greens because he knows he cant throw them directly back into play. Each time that he is dragging a mound of chips toward him with a giant grin on his face, he looks shiftily from side to side then he looks up at me and winks. I’m not sure if he was winking to say he was getting away with something on the shy or that he recognized that me arriving when I did got him to up his bets at just the right time. He continued to garner chips as the shooter went through about 20-25 points and numbers before crapping out.

Will begrudgingly laid down his chips to be colored up per my request. All told, he made 550 on the night, about 450 of which was done in the 45 minutes I was watching this one dude throw down a dominant roll. As we made our way back to the cobblestone creek, I asked him if he was getting scared that I might have forgotten about him and passed out. “If I had played craps for another three hours, I wouldn’t have realized anything was wrong”. “Its 430 in the morning”. “I honestly wouldn’t have noticed.” I asked him what the first thing he was going to think about when he woke up tomorrow morning was going to be and he said, “Oh, its definitely craps. I’m gonna wonder what time is it appropriate to make moulton wake up and take me to the craps table.” When I did finally come to this morning, he was already awake and he told me “It was even worse than what we talked about. I woke up at like eight in the morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep because I was thinking about that roll.” He got a call from his dad, and though I could only hear one end, I think we could fill in the blanks. “I got a whole nother day here dad, what do you expect me to do, stick my thumb up my ass?”

If gambling is a disease, then it causes Good Will Dicegame to grow lesions which spit out solid gold, son. He has been disabled by a judgmental society which cannot sustain its constricting moral superiority. I am here to reverse that trend. I am here to drive every dice hound to their dice table, to let every pothead smoke a bowl and to say once and for all “Damnit, winkle, who the hell wears the pants in that relationship? I can’t believe you play that game like 4 hours a day and you still cant beat her score.” I am an enabler, and I am not afraid.

Enabling

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