The Okie Gambler

So, yesterday evening was men’s night at the Shawnee Kickapoo casino, which means a genuine old-fashioned $10 match play opportunity. Pixie and I were driving by. She had a sore foot and no interest in hobbling on it, but she was willing to hang in the parking lot and make phone calls while I ran in to do $20 worth of quick wagers.

During a quick scout around, I noticed a Bank Heist machine that seemed like a fine place to play my initial $10 — just twenty fast spins at the base fifty-cent bet. Only trouble was, when I circled back to it, there was an older woman sitting sideways in the chair, watching a younger woman playing the adjacent machine. She had no money in the machine, no card in the machine, nothing. Just sitting and watching, not gambling at all.

So I asked her, polite as you could wish:

“Ma’am, are you planning to play that machine? Because if not, I’d sure like to.”

She said “No…” and got up and stepped aside. So I said “Thanks”, sat down and started to plug in my money.

Then she said: “I was going to, though!” in an angry tone. And the younger woman said in a vicious voice “I guess I’ll move then, too!” and punched for her cash-out ticket.

I felt like I’d fallen into the land of the crazy women. All she had to do was say “I’m about to play it” or “yes” and I’d have moved on. Instead, she gave me the machine, and now she and her friend are acting angry at me?

I just stared at my screen, pretended I didn’t notice the crazy people, and kept gambling.

About three spins later, the younger woman is suddenly in the left side of my face, holding onto the back of my chair and leaning in over my left shoulder, totally up in my personal space and reeking of beer. “Are you winning yet?” she asks in a belligerent tone.

I pretended she wasn’t there. No joy.

“Are you winning yet?”

I continued to pretend I hadn’t heard her.

“Are you winning yet?”

“I just sat down.”

That’s what she wanted. Loud angry voice:

“So had my mom!”

The conversation went downhill from there. Fortunately, I was almost done betting my $10. Basically, in the time it took me to finish, I told her about four times that all I did was ask. She kept loudly exclaiming “No you didn’t!” and drunkenly complaining that her mom had wanted to play the machine I was on. She was acting like she wanted some sort of fight, to be honest. Luckily, I was able to disengage, and she didn’t follow me.

There were two Kickapoo casino security guards at the door, just 10 or 12 feet away. They didn’t appear to notice, and they didn’t get involved. Frankly, I’d have appreciated it if they’d shown up to calm down the situation. But they showed no sign of noticing the loud belligerent drunk woman. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in an uncomfortable confrontation in an Oklahoma casino. I hope it’s also the last.

On Thursday I was running errands for old people and one of those errands took me to Holdenville. “Awesome!” was my thought, “They’ve got $10 match play today at the Holdenville casino.”

But by the time I got to the casino, I was very short on time. No worries; $20 in wagers doesn’t take long. So down I sat at an Invaders From The Planet Moolah game.

I’d played a couple of bucks when the screen went insane — the middle three columns were all (or mostly) wilds. The “Big Win” siren went off and the line pay was $32. Sweet!

And then it was time for the winning tiles to clear and the cascade to happen. All three middle columns came in wild AGAIN and the Big Win siren was wailing again too. This time it was a bit less than $30, but I wasn’t complaining.

Right then my phone rang with errands-related stuff. Now I was officially in a hurry to finish up and get out of there. So I doubled my bet.

And kept winning, in smaller ways. By the time I’d earned my promo play, I was up about $80 in total. $10 dollars in promo? Let’s do 11 spins at ninety cents a spin and get out of here.

A profitable choice. I got two more nice little hits in those 11 spins, and wound up cashing a ticket for almost $120. Total time in the casino: less than 15 minutes.

Some months back, we had our first experience of an Oklahoma casino advertising a promotion and then not honoring it. It was a $25 match play (worth driving for) and we’d driven about an hour out of our way to take advantage of it. When we arrived, it was still being advertised on the big electronic sign in the parking lot. We went in, played our $25, and WTF? The little grey stack of coins never turned blue. Right about then, the PA system went loud. Attention, attention, our advertised match play promotion has been replaced by these wonderful drawings…

We got screwed. It was the last weekend of the month, and they apparently had decided not to continue the month-long promotion to the end of the month. Instead, they wanted to start people working on earning entries for their newest drawings promotion. People who drove to play at their facility based on the advertised offer? Just out of luck.

The casinos make the rules, they are effectively unregulated (or self-regulated, which amounts to something very similar), and they all have “We reserve the right to change or alter promotions at any time” weasel words prominently posted somewhere. There isn’t a thing that we, the gambling consumers, can do about this. In legalese, there’s no available redress when we are wronged by a casino that chooses not to honor its advertised promotions.

However, it’s still sleazy and wrong and shameful. Oklahoma casinos are fundamentally rural. There is a lot of open space in Oklahoma, and people use promotions in deciding where to go and how far to drive. Gasoline is expensive and our time is valuable. If you advertise a promotion, you should honor that promotion.

Furthermore, in the event that a promotion is altered or eliminated, there should be substantial efforts made to alert the gambling public. Websites and recorded telephone messages advertising the promotion should be changed, and there should be prominent signage at the casino entrance alerting consumers to the change.

The only things we gamblers can do to “enforce” this standard is to take our gambling dollars to the casinos that play fair, honor their advertised promotions, and strive mightily to alert gamblers when an advertised promotion will not be honored for some good reason. And to do that, we need to have some way of knowing which casinos fall short of that standard. It’s our intention here at Okie Gamblers to document the shady promotional practices we experience, and we encourage our readers to email and comment regarding any such problems they have encountered.