Gambling on Alcohol Against All Odds

My hands trembled as I approached the betting window at the casino’s sports book. The man behind the glass wouldn’t accept my $600 bet. When he explained that it exceeded their limit for a single bet on an over/under, I hesitated momentarily. Reason and maturity tried to take control of the argument in my head, but rational thought was washed away by my elevated blood alcohol level. My pulse raced as I pushed the money back toward the man and asked him to place two identical $300 bets on the under.

I wasn’t being greedy. I just had to get back to even. I hadn’t showered or changed clothes or slept much, really, in over 40 hours. The thing I had done relentlessly for the past two days was drink alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol.

When the group I traveled with had arrived in Las Vegas for this bachelor party weekend the previous day, we found that the rest of our group started drinking and gambling without us. The groom’s brother-in-law-to-be was already down $500 as we rode the elevator to the one room we had booked for nine guys. Five hundred dollars! What an idiot, I thought. I wasn’t much of a gambler, and that seemed a ton of money wasted to me. It was the late 1990s, and we were all just starting our careers. I would have been devastated to lose that kind of money.