A brief history of gambling and poker with Poker Elmo – part 2.

After the sportsbetting fiasco, I decided that sportsbetting was not for me. But blackjack, yes blackjack, now that is where I would make money. I bought books and starting learning how to count cards. In MN, you could legally gamble at 18 and there were several casinos around. I turned 18 shortly after I graduated from high school and I was ready. Armed with a very loose knowledge of how to count cards and the willingness to risk up to $30 meant that I was destined for success. Quite surprisingly, however, things did not work out quite the way I had hoped. Perhaps it was because counting through 8 decks was not necessarily exciting, or that I spent more time hitting on the female gambling degenerates at the table with me, but my losses came as often as wins. It surely could not have been my lack of card-counting talent, so it must have been something else.

As I went off to college, I could not gamble often anymore (you must be 21 years old to gamble in most states), so my gambling adventures were limited to when I came home from school. What better thing for a broke college student to do than go to the casino? More time passed, and as I was entering my senior year of college, I realized that I should give sports betting a shot again. I was pretty smart, and surely could pick enough winners to make a profit. Well … the only positive thing I could say this time is I did not convince my friends it would be a good idea. Only I lost money here, but this spanking from the sportsbooks convinced me again that I should not gamble on sports.

I graduated from college and decided that the whole “get a job” movement was overrated, so I decided to stay in school. While I admired the tenacity of my friends who were going to take 8 years to get a bachelor’s degree, after 4 years in college I found myself in graduate school. I was quite busy with schoolwork there, and even though I lived 25 minutes from a casino, I did not go gambling too often. A few times a year I might go play blackjack, but that was it. My wife and I would host get togethers for my grad school friends and we would play micro-stakes poker. But I was pretty focused on grad school and was not thinking about gambling as any sort of serious activity …