Craps is Life
and life is a game that's hard to win
Hello to new subscribers. And to old subscribers. And to the paying subscribers: I am so grateful to you, thank you so much—I am also not sure what to do about you, since nothing here is paywalled! (Honestly, do what you need to do, cash is tight and no offense will be taken... I will paywall work later on down the line.)
Thank you all for having me in your no-doubt overcrowded inboxes.
New subscribers probably already know this, but this week, I have a review-essay in The Metropolitan Review about the unjustly forgotten 1920s great-American-novelist from Asheville, Thomas Wolfe.
The piece focuses specifically on Wolfe's life-long self-exile from his Southern home and excavates his writings on loneliness—which I attempt to situate against our “pandemic of modern loneliness." Please give it a read and a share if you liked it—always good to try to pump the numbers when you're writing for someone else.
And below is something completely different—an essay about the Platonic ideal of gambling, the table game of craps, and Las Vegas.
My friend and I are in Vegas. Staying at Caesars. Comped room. Last time we stayed downtown, at the Nugget. I've only stayed on the Strip once before, with my family, so we've been exploring the Strip a little bit.
The room is fine, but the bathroom is spectacular. The tub is big enough for two or maybe even three people.
Our view faces out across the Roman-forum-towers to run-down old Treasure Island Casino, and the closed-down Mirage (sad, because I love the Mirage, aside from the stupid Beatles theme), and the Encore, and the Venetian, and then at the top of the Strip, slightly taller than all the other casinos, is Trump Hotel Vegas. There's no casino inside Trump Vegas. Kind of odd. I've heard great things about The Wynn and heard that the casino there is excellent. Steve Wynn and Trump are old friends, now political partners. I sometimes wonder why Trump didn't build a casino.
Other than the palatial bathroom, we don't particularly like Caesars. It's vast and cavernous and too glitzy and soulless. We've taken to calling it New Jersey. Lululemon/Yard House motherfuckers, people who want to appear a little rich and glitzy and buy Ray-Bans but lack any taste. Chi-chi upper-middle-class basic suburban people who are dressed to the nines because "we're in Vegas, baby."
It is insanely overpriced, everywhere, they trap you in the belly and make it hard to get out and get something to eat or buy normal-priced pharmacy stuff like chapstick or shaving cream. Late at night, the bro-dawgs descend on the casino floor and also the hookers. The hookers mostly seem like heavily tattooed punk chicks. I was behind two of them going into the casino from the parking garage last night and they held hands and I could swear they said "stay horny" to each other before splitting off.
All the hotels on the Strip are connected by staircases and escalators going over the giant uncrossable boulevards, like in Shanghai. It is easy to get lost. It is extremely unfriendly to walk around, I'm kind of amazed they haven't made it more pedestrian-friendly. Since the pandemic, it is insanely overpriced, everywhere, they trap you in the belly and make it hard to get out and get something to eat or buy normal-priced pharmacy stuff like Chapstick or shaving cream. The other day, I walked the ten minutes down Flamingo Road to check out the notorious Ellis Island Casino and it was an insane walk—just me, the blasting desert wind, and the shopping-cart-homeless.
***
My friend feels that Caesars is against him and moves downtown to stay at El Cortez. I want to join him, but I'm too settled and you can't beat free.
I take a bath every day. I ease down in the scalding hot water and say "Ahhhh” and read a couple of pages from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain before getting distracted thinking about my gambling “strategies.”
I'm here to play craps, not read.
Should I hedge or don't hedge, let it ride? How do you insure your bets? Isn't paying extra to "insure" bets just potential profits going out the door?
I've back tested my strategies and some do really good for a while, but they all eventually fail.
I watch an older Latino union guy who is always at the crapless $15 minimum table at the Horseshoe—he's always hedging his bets with a $400 lay three.
In craps, payouts are determined by the probability of a number being rolled. On a crapless table, you can bet for or against extra numbers. Two ("deuce") and twelve ("midnight") are the rarest numbers so payout the most. Then 3 ("the shocker") and 11. How much does that lay three payout on that $400, I asked him.
$50, he says. I do it for the comps.
He rolled the dice and did OK and talked to me more because he was starting to feel like I was lucky for him. Then the 7 came, night comes, as it always does, and he lost his $100 in place bets and scooped up his $50 payout on the insurance bet. What happens when you get that $400 lay knocked off, I asked. "It's gambling," he laughed. I liked him. I found myself thinking about what he said about the insurance bet getting knocked off. "It's gambling."
I go up to visit my friend downtown at El Cortez and we conclude that by all measures, downtown is better. More low-key and worn-in and Western. His room looks out on the railroad tracks and mountains and feels like an Old Vegas boarding house where an outlaw or gambler or Townes Van Zandt would hole up for a few weeks to write an album.
An older Filipino Uber guy drives me downtown. I like him immediately. We sit in silence as the neon glitz of "The Love Store" and Palace Station roll past.
"If I could I ask" he says, "Where are you from?" Everyone in Vegas is so nice, so polite. More Southern than the South. Can-I-ask, where-you're-from. Anywhere else they would just say "Where are you from."
He used to be a poker dealer, at The Venetian, he said. I asked if he gambled himself. I'm always interested in the gambling habits of dealers. They usually don't play, but sometimes they do. "I only play games where I can use my intellect, my brain, to seek an advantage. And that's poker. Avoid slots at all costs."
It's true: in poker, you can use your intelligence and cunning to consistently win money in a way you can't with craps or other games. The whole business of poker is the manipulation and ultimate destruction of the other players, for your own advantage. Something about this is sad or morally wrong to me. Craps to me seems much more human.
I should really learn poker but I love craps. I love how all the human energy in a casino is drawn towards the craps table. I love the stickman, the dice, the energy, the easy camaraderie. To me, it's a remnant of the former world.
It's a legacy game. It's a game of wild swings up and down. And it's a game where players band together against fate and against the House.
In its most romantic form, craps is a kind of war against death.
A bunch of people gather around a table, they know odds are stacked against them, they're hoping for just one minute to win against the system. Just one minute. That's all they need.
If they get lucky, it’s exciting and they can win a lot of money very fast and the pit boss comes over to watch and see what’s going on and see how much is going out the door, they are going to raise the buy in on the table if too much goes out the door on a long roll. But most of the time, the odds are the odds, the seven comes, and everyone gets wiped out and walks away. In the end, if the system loses or for one minute falters mathematically (odds wise), it's just a streak, a kind of happy accident.
The casinos don't make great money on craps (the house edge is quite low and the labor costs are comparatively high) which is why they're slowly phasing the game out. But if they got rid of it completely there might be an insurrection. They're not allowed to fully murder all of the Old Vegas vibes, even if they would like to, they have to keep them on display like museum objects, out of respect. Otherwise the old Vegas ghosts might curse everything and take their revenge.
To make it more profitable, they are slowly shifting over to Bubble craps (dice rolled by a computer inside a machine—widely suspected of being riggable by making the dice "tight" or "loose") and Roll-to-win tables (a form of digitized craps table where a person actually rolls but which requires fewer workers to operate.)
***
But each time I seriously play craps, I am reminded that this is not a serious way to gamble. It is literally un-winnable. There's no way to think or hedge or strategize yourself into success.
But I've seen people win. Win big. Very big. Crazy things happen out there, unbelievable things, all the time.
People look for patterns, people switch up strategies, people have money-management strategies, but the sad truth is this: Each dice roll is truly random. The best craps players are naive, lucky, aggressive, or some combination of those things. They ramp up their bets quickly, climbing the mountain; if they happen to hit a lucky roll, they keep climbing in the face of fear.
The "thinkers" of craps (like myself) who are always weighing and measuring and being cautious are doomed.
They might eke out a little here or there, might "grind" as it is called, but a streak of bad luck will quickly wipe them out.
The fact is the Seven is the most likely number to be thrown on two dice. Unless it is the opening dice roll, The Seven in craps means the end of play and the loss of all the players bets to the House.
Like death, the Seven is inevitable—it IS coming. On average, The Seven will appear within 4-8 rolls.
For this reason, many serious craps players religiously believe in "dice-setting"—physically setting the dice and throwing them in a certain way to get a number that is usually not the Seven. Dice-setting is either a key to the game or absolute nonsense, depending on who you ask.
The goal of craps is to descend into the underworld and collect as much as you can and come back up to the surface before the door closes up on you—before the devil knows you're dead.
Perhaps that's why I like thinking about craps so much, because it's like an unsolvable puzzle. You can't outsmart or evade it. Our time is limited. Death is coming. And we ultimately have very little control.
***
You cannot necessarily read how someone will throw the dice by sizing them up physically, but you kind of can. When someone "feels" like a loser, they often end up throwing the dice badly. Oh, I was right, you say in your head or whisper to the person next to you, I could just feel they were trouble.
When someone seems to have some soul-depth or sweetness, as a shooter, they seem to go on a streak. Of course, these are just post-facto projections.
I am superstitious and so I tend to try to stay close to the elderly, chain-smoking Chinese people. By Chinese people, I mean people from China. Most of the money I've ever made in craps has been on the back of some elderly Chinese man who shoots the dice real good.
All week I find myself writing 80s-era Karate Kid buddy comedies in my head: a young Matt Damon-y failure of a white guy who has come up through the Biloxi and Cherokee casinos ends up at a table with a chain-smoking old Chinese man who cut his teeth on the back streets of Macau. At first they don't like each other but then they become friends and allies. Young guy learns the ropes from the old Chinese guy. They both hate the dude-bros who don't know how to play and are always fucking up the flow, they want to make gambling sacred once again, and stumble into some kind of thing where they have to take on bad guys.
While the standard way to play craps is to avoid the Seven, there is another way to play it: the dark side. In which you bet on the seven coming soon. Another great thing about craps is it can be played pessimistically or optimistically or agnostically, where you acknowledge you can't predict anything, whether the Seven will come soon or not.
I do think the real money in craps—like in life—is to be won playing optimistically, aggressively, living to the hilt. At least that's what I've seen. The real money comes from optimistic streaks.
It's a good life lesson: You can't really win in life if you don't go for it.
A lot of brand-new craps players think betting on the dark side—betting ON the 7 coming—is some kind of hack, guaranteed money. You can make money being pessimistic, but all it takes is one lucky player to come up (who you are not able to size up as a lucky player) to wipe your ass out quick.
I walked up to a table at Treasure Island the other night, there was one young guy throwing the dice. He was betting against himself. Betting that he would roll a seven. This is unusual. Usually shooters bet FOR themselves.
He rolled the dice for a long time hoping for the 7 to come, losing against himself, and winning money for everyone else. I played FOR him and made some money. I said to him, have you thought about betting on yourself and he looked at me and awkwardly laughed.
He had not thought about betting on himself.
He didn't trust himself. A psychoanalyst could have a field day.
He and his dad were both terrible dice shooters. Then some annoying business conference people from Fargo or wherever, Sally and Bob from HR or wherever showed up and they were terrible dice shooters, they had no idea what they were doing. I made a lot of money quickly off their backs.
Then one of the guys from Fargo with the black frame glasses went on a streak. Of all the people there, he was the one I most wanted to bet against. He rubbed me wrong. It hurt. I kept doubling down against this guy, thinking he'd strike out soon and quickly lost all my profits for the night.
You just never know. Just because death is inevitable doesn't mean we know when it's coming, when we'll get lucky, when our time is up. Might live to be 105, have a great life. Good things can happen. The unexpected can happen.
We know that we're doomed in some way but our best hope is that we can defy death and the world and probability for a minute.
Maybe for a minute we can win against the system, against the machine and make death die.
We go out to a place we like, Champagne's—an old bar with video poker and a tiled ceiling and good karaoke. Amazing place downtown where the Old Vegas energy still gurgles up from underground.
The karaoke is some of the weirdest and best karaoke I've been to—all groups are represented and sit at tables by themselves and there is a latent tension between the groups, but everyone claps loud and supports each other.
There's the table of middle-aged black people, the table of aspiring actors and singers, the worn-out 40-something punks, a group of normie Zoomers out for a birthday singing their fucking Chapelle Roan, and a group of fat, gender-ambiguous people who look like they work as librarians. All the tribes represented, just trying to co-exist.
One strange guy sings Radiohead's "Creep" through a Ventriloquist puppet he's brought to the bar with him.
A very, very old man who looks like he's just crawled out of the tomb, preserved in embalming fluid like William Burroughs, saunters in wearing a blue pimp suit and a pink fedora and carrying a cane. I genuinely believe he might have been a pimp in the 70s or 80s, but time passed him by, and now he's old and alone, he hates the fucking world today, but he still loves Champagne's.
Only place left where a person can just be a person.
He sits on the edge of the stage and sings "My Way" his voice is raspy and beautiful. Then he sings Toby Keith's "I Love this Bar." Absolutely wonderful, life-affirming.
I believe in the power of life.
He staggered off alone, walking down the sprawling four-lane boulevard, to god knows where.
I always find myself rambling about how I love Vegas, especially to those who hate Vegas or cities like Vegas. It's just being contrarian, which by dint of nature, I apparently have to do.
But I love the lights and glitter. I love the hushed awe, how flying in over the desert strip at night the pilot says, "Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada."
Why aren't there more rom-coms set in Vegas? I mean classic romantic movies that warm your heart. It's a very romantic place. Why has no one made a Lost in Translation set in Vegas?
Yes, life today is being squeezed on all sides. By AI, by conformity, by the social panopticon, by everyone staying indoors and all becoming the same boring type of clever, know-it-all person. And we are each on our slow march towards death, and maybe our country or the world is also on a march toward oblivion.
And yes, Vegas has become a shell of its former self.
The soul is dying everywhere, it’s not just dying, it's being killed, everything is becoming a shell of its former self.
But that doesn't mean life is dead.
I get annoyed by the Zoomer-cusps and the professional-take-havers and shut-ins who turned scrolling the Internet into a job who say "there's nothing real out there anymore, it’s all gone" and "we're all online all the time now" and thus, life is dead.
Basically what they are saying is the dead life of the internet is the only life that matters. Gotta talk about it, gotta write about it.
"All culture is downstream of the internet." Just look at the screen time statistics. They don't lie.
But when you look into your child's eyes, do you actually think to yourself, "all culture is downstream of the internet"? Or is that an intellectualized, Being-in-the-world thing to say because it might pay you to live your hobby which is scrolling the Internet and bring you plaudits and perhaps put food in your child's mouth.
To me it just seems like a wild extrapolation, no different than me saying "I'm depressed all the time, so the whole world must be depressed and depressing." Maybe life is dead and the internet is all that exists, FOR YOU.
But life remains. It's not going away. It goes about its quiet way—not saying too much, not bothering anybody, not voicing its opinions.
You won't find it on the Internet, I'll tell you that much. You can get a glimpse of it here and there, at the post office, at the hospital, craps table, at Champagne's. But it’s not showy, it doesn’t want to be recorded or captured, it’s indifferent and doesn’t care to be found. It’s hiding.
Great stuff right here
Reading this in a wicker chair at the Virgin. Hope to see you next time.