The Catholic Casino - Lessons in Game Selection
Last Saturday, I volunteered to help out my father and work his booth at the St. Joseph Orphans picnic. For those of you not familliar with the Catholic picnic circuit in Louisville, St. Joe’s picnic is the picnic to end all picnics in the city of Louisville, and every year around the 2nd week of August, Catholics come from all over the city to eat fish, drink beer, and attempt to win cakes, fruit, stuffed animals, and other inexpensive commodities.
My assignment that day: the front line at the Ker Plunk booth. Ker Pllunk is basically a smaller version of the Price is Right game of Plachinko, but instead of $10,000 being on the line, the best prize a customer at the booth could win was an inflatible Sponge Bob, which I am quite sure was out of style 3 years ago. Regardless of that fact, it was amazing the amount of traffic I saw at this booth after working only a short 3 hours. Parents, children, bum unlcles, etc. all stepped up to try their luck and attempt to win the inflatible and stuffed assortment of prizes that the booth offered.
There was a little blonde girl who kept coming up to the booth and playing Ker Plunk for a $0.25 per attempt. She won a few prizes for the $15 that she spent, but I don’t think she really cared about them. I saw the addictive look in her I that I sometimes get while meandering through casino floors, wanting to place bets where no edge existed for myself. The girl just cared about beating the KerPlunk game, regardless of how worthless the merchandise was. I could respect the competitive and never-say-die attitude of this girl, but I think she could have found a better game to play. Maybe the girl was not thinking Risk/Reward at all as she was dropping disc after disc into the KerPulnk board, and I did not bother to ask her, but that’s the read I had on her after she spent 30 minutes at the booth.
So what is my point, you may ask? The point is, when walking through casinos or surfing the internet, find a game where you have an edge and can beat the game. Walk by the blackjack, craps, and Let it Ride tables and get into a poker game you can beat. Read up on the poker knowledge you learn from PartTimePoker and other poker sources, and then put your knowledge into practice out in the real world. Let’s play another hand……
