I was at a race in Ruidoso once where the horse threw its jockey at the the gate and still came in 5th. Now that's a horse with a heart for racing.
No, I'm not a gambler. Dollars were too hard to come by. I have bn to Vegas and to Reno and have spent a few nights at the Inn of the Mountain Gods in New Mexico but not much money changed hands and it was enterctaintent. The only thing I ever won at was Keno. But I'm not a gambler. An night's entertainment is one thing, losing hard earned money is quite another; I would cry real tears.
I figure, based on my past luck with casino gambling, that I should just hand my money to the first casino employee I see when I come through the door and just get it over with. It would really save time and effort. I did win $100 once at a penny slot in Vegas on a 25-penny pull. I promptly trotted upstairs to the shopping mall and bought myself the necklace i had my eye on earlier. The Riviera used to have a fun deal. You paid $20 and got to sit in a special area of slots and you played until you had either won more than $20 (never happened) or when your $20 ran out you went to a redemption area and picked a prize. Some of the prizes weren't bad at all. I still have a nice chambray shirt and one of the watches almost 30 years later. It was sort of like a Chucky Cheese for adults except no one was singing.....
No one has mentioned BINGO. I love BINGO. Especially at the fire station. I still have (and use) my BernzCutter I won well over 50 years ago. My favorite part is watching the people who play 20 cards at a pop. If anxiety = fun, then they're having a blast.
What is thought of the stories, fictitious or true, of various folks who have WON gigantic lottery pay-offs successive times? Or, of the consequences arising when a common, hard-working individual suddenly wins a million bucks? Frank
Here's a link to brief stories of 12 people that hit multiple lotteries, some of them hitting multiple lotteries in the millions of dollars each. Some hit a few lotteries in the tens of thousands of dollars each. One guy (#11 on the list) hit 7 drawings for a little less than $1Million total, so published a book on his "winning methods." Pretty smart, huh? He might make more off the book than he did playing the lottery. There is a story on another site of an Australian guy who won a car, and when the media wanted a photo-op in the store where he bought the winning ticket, he bought another one to scratch off to "recreate the moment." BOOM! AU$250,000!!! Right there on camera. I don't see stories of multiple winners of tens of millions of dollars per game. The click-bait stories refer to multiple wins of "The Lottery," implying something like PowerBall, where there are actually a bunch of different games in each state. It think most of the "Rags to Riches to Rags" stories are the folks who won the ten$ of million$ lotterie$, but I'm sure there are others who have ruined their lives with less. Most of those stories don't really dig into who those people were before they got the money. I'm sure they have histories. Their bad habits got magnified.
After I won the $500 on a slot at an Indian Casino, we left right away and the very next day we found, and bought, a very nice digital camera. There have also been a few times that my wife has lost all of the money we allotted each other for gambling, but I won enough to make up for what she lost. I can get very good at playing a $1 slot with $20. While some folks bet the max amount all of the time, I definitely don't.
If gambling requires going to a smoke-filled building and coming away with less money than I go in with, it's not an exciting past time for me. My aunt used to go regularly to some casino in St Louis, always hopeful of winning a jackpot, lucky to leave with an extra 4 bucks or so. But losing $100 or more to win $4 didn't seem like fun to me. I feel nearly the same way about buying lottery tickets which I've done only twice -- once as a kind of joke for a stocking stuffer, and once because I was persuaded that the ticket proceeds went to a state education fund, or something else relatively worthwhile. But, once while TDY to an air base in Denmark on a joint forces exercise, I did spend time plugging Danish coins into a slot machine in the O Club bar. It was the last night there, and I had a ton of coins, and thought it a good way to get rid of them while looking uninterested in being hit on by the fly boys. LOL