When did you start gambling?

When I was a kid I sometimes had money making ventures such as selling Kool-Aid, or comics.

One day I got hold of a toy roulette wheel and had the neighborhood kids play it, for pennies and nickels.

I banked their bets and won.

Ka-ching!

But my gambling interest was dormant until the nineties: I flew to Las Vegas for the first time, saw some shows, but knew nothing of gambling.

But my interest was piqued.

That xmas my secretary gave me John Patrick's tome "Advanced Craps:" I read it, thought about it, and headed off to the tribal casinos with money in hand and hope in my heart.

Probably around the same age. Outside of certain games with my dad, five-card draw poker with deuces wild at Elementary School.

I went to a casino in St Maarten during our honeymoon. It was my first time gambling and my first AP play but I didnt realize it was an AP play till recently.

The year was 1976.

At the casino I played $2 blackjack. When I won the dealer paid me with a $1 chip on top of a $5 chip. She expected big tips. But that isnt the AP play.

My wife and I were talking to another couple while standing by a row of 25-cent slot machines. Out of boredom I turned to the machine I was standing next to and I put in a quarter and pulled the handle. There was only a handle -- no buttons. Its 1976 remember.

The three reels started to spin... slowly... and they didnt stop for about half a minute. And when the reels stopped there was a cherry. Out came two quarters.

I put in another quarter... and after thirty seconds another cherry.

The four of us spent the next ten minutes taking turns winning 25-cents at a time.

Then a suit came along and disabled the machine.

I learned a lot that night. LOL

3rd grade...flipping baseball cards.

First sports bet...I took Ali in Ali-Frazier 1...no cash on the line, we bet baseball cards.

I used to gamble on Sports illegally when I turned 18 with a local Italian bookie in my hometown. I started off just betting $5.50 or $11 as straight bets on some games each week and I would play some parlay cards.

I ended up moving to college about 2 hours away from my hometown. The bookie from my hometown start letting me make bets on credit. So, I started running numbers myself out of my dorm room at college. I had white boards in my dorm rooms with all of the lines listed every day and a stack of parlay cards I backed all of the money myself and ended up making a nice chunk of profit doing this over the course of a few months.

The fact that I was able to gamble with credit with my bookie in my hometown over the phone, and the fact that I was doing so well running numbers myself from my dorm room I ended up getting in over my head pretty quickly. When Florida State played against Virginia Tech in the national championship game, I had over $22,000 of bets booked myself. A lot of the Action was one-sided so to hedge the bet, I called in a five-figure bet to my bookie in my hometown over the phone. He honered it. The bet I made with him ended up losing but I won enough money on the bets I booked myself I drove up and paid him.

Considering he let me make that bet on credit and I paid him he started letting me bet big on credit all the time. Needless to say being a kid young dumb and stupid I started making big bets over the phone everyday. I got on a massive losing streak and kept trying to Martingale over the phone. He eventually saw what I was trying to do, cut me off and demanded I pay him instantly. I had to borrow money at 25% through CitiFinancial to get my loan paid off.

Needless to say I learned a lot from that experience, and I do not gamble like that anymore as an adult. However, that is how I got started.

I started going to Roosevelt Raceway the summer I graduated high school, so I was 17. That fall I started hustling free chips at various local Las Vegas nights. I pretty much stopped gambling after that until 1999 when I started working one night a week in Atlantic City. After pissing away my earnings several weeks in a row on slots, I read an article on BJ, played it for a few hours and got hooked. Read every book I could, and practiced constantly. Due to commitments, I wasn't able to go to Vegas much until 2001 but from then until I moved there in 2016, I'd spend about six weeks there each year.

One hell of a story by MWalz9!!!

Am I allowed to like that post if I want to? Where are the arbiters of what I may or may not like?

Played a game called Rummoli for pennies with family when I was about 8 I think. Started playing 3-5 player sit-n-gos with friends at 13 for $2-$5 per person… I might have cheated…

At 16 a friend of my best friend transferred to our high school and his entire family played the horses, so he took me to the Pomona Fair one Saturday. The only winner I had that day was Pet Label, a favorite that I placed $10 to place on (while thinking the teller would bust me for being underage but didn't). That horse won easily and I was hooked. Went to Vegas a couple years later when I was 18 with other friends and their parents, stayed at The Stardust one night and then at MGM Grand.

Wanted to try gambling in a casino so I had packed my one leisure suit, put it on one night and walked into the Barbary Coast and quickly lost $20 on the Big Wheel, but what an adrenaline rush again thinking I would be booted but didn't.

When I was 14, the pool hall near my middle school had a couple of bingo pinballs - that's where I got my start. It closed a couple of years later, and I went "cold turkey" until I turned 18 and could bet on horse races at the track.

My first casino experience was in 1985, in Reno (my father and brothers were in the Greater Reno Italian Golf Association tournament held each summer for a while). My second was in Vegas, I think in 2004 - and pretty much the only reason I went to Vegas was because of the Pinball Hall of Fame (next to the movie theater on Tropicana & Pecos back then).

Quote: ThatDonGuy

My second was in Vegas, I think in 2004 - and pretty much the only reason I went to Vegas was because of the Pinball Hall of Fame (next to the movie theater on Tropicana & Pecos back then).

Tim, the owner, lives in that neighborhood.

Started out pitching pennies at about 5 years old against the curb on our corner. Had to be able and pick up the coins and run in an instant when the older hoods (12 - 14 years old) came around, came around.

My first gambling was at age 7 betting on Cleveland Browns plays for three cents a play. I would get to bet on whether the plays would be runs or passes. Back then almost every 1st and 2nd down was a run. Yes, it was an advantage play even back then.

My first experience with what might be viewed as "casino" gambling was in the mid-1950s, when I was about 10 years old. My family was headed for vacation at a Florida beach one summer. This was before interstate highways, and the welcome station where the old highway crossed the GA-FL line had some slot machines. I have no idea what the laws about such things were at that time. Anyway, my mother played a few of the slots and had no objection when I tried some. Don't remember the denomination, but they were likely either 1¢ or 5¢, meaning they used actual pennies or nickels. Don't recall my results.

The first time I played in a "real" casino was on the first cruise ship my wife and I sailed on -- the Monarch Sun, sailing for four nights in late summer 1976 out of Miami to Nassau and Freeport. The entire casino staff was Korean and had apparently trained at a school in Korea. I later encountered two of those dealers working on another cruise ship. I played blackjack for what I now recall as $2 a hand. I kept a $1 chip as a souvenir of the cruise, and that was the first chip for what later became my chip collection. I posted it on this forum in the Casino Chip of the Day thread. (I haven't checked to see how well my current memories match with whatever tale I told in that post.)

My first visit to Las Vegas was in March 2003. I was on a project team working on some tasks for the U.S. Marine Corps at a number of facilities in the Southwest. We spent a week at the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Barstow, CA followed by a week at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, AZ. Nobody on the team wanted to spend the weekend at either of those locations, so we spent Friday and Saturday nights at the Tropicana Las Vegas. I think that may have included my first experience with a real craps game.

My uncle was a cop in New Jersey; he was a bit "bent."

He wound up setting up in his finished basement a nickel slot machine which had been seized in a raid.

While the adults yakked and drank it up at his finished bar, I plugged lots of paper route money into the one armed bandit.

I liked it.

A lot.

I suppose first gambling ever was playing card games for quarters with family.

First official casino gambling was about a week after I turned 21. I had been to a casino dozens of times with parents but couldn’t gamble. At 21, I had 2 college friends with birthdays within a week or two of mine. One of those friends was from NJ. His bday was last of the 3 of us. On the day of his birthday, his dad got us a room at Ballys AC. We drove up from college for the night. His dad met us there and gave us each $100. I can’t remember if his dad had a separate room or drove back home to stay at his place. In either case, one friend camped out at the nickle slots playing 1 coin in and got blasted on drinks. Me and my other friend went between poker and Blackjack for the night. I think we both lost like $200 and my friend at the nickle machine lost something like $2. Next day we drove back to college. It was a fun and memorable trip.

Quote: AlanMendelson

I went to a casino in St Maarten during our honeymoon. It was my first time gambling and my first AP play but I didnt realize it was an AP play till recently.

The year was 1976.

At the casino I played $2 blackjack. When I won the dealer paid me with a $1 chip on top of a $5 chip. She expected big tips. But that isnt the AP play.

My wife and I were talking to another couple while standing by a row of 25-cent slot machines. Out of boredom I turned to the machine I was standing next to and I put in a quarter and pulled the handle. There was only a handle -- no buttons. Its 1976 remember.

The three reels started to spin... slowly... and they didnt stop for about half a minute. And when the reels stopped there was a cherry. Out came two quarters.

I put in another quarter... and after thirty seconds another cherry.

The four of us spent the next ten minutes taking turns winning 25-cents at a time.

Then a suit came along and disabled the machine.

I learned a lot that night. LOL

What was the issue that made this an advantage? Being exposed to such things early on and even later knowing there are good AP opportunities what made you decided to chase -EV games?

I first gambled at age 23 at Delaware Park casino, where they have the sweatiest and least friendly table game staff.

I immediately posted about it here asking why -
https://wizardofvegas.com/forum/off-topic/general/20483-reasons-for-general-table-rules/

After that, I became really interested in AP and started doing all the reading and research I could on the topic. A few very nice posters here sent me some good info via PM here.

After that, I started going to AC quite often doing some extremely light AP. My goal was to get as much free rooms/food possible and break even gambling.

The past few years, even though I now have family with a vacation home in AC and I am there all the time, I hardly ever go to the casino.

I think a lot about doing more serious AP, but I really struggle to find it appealing. It’s just work, and often boring and repetitive work at the end of the day.

Until I fill out some gambling paperwork, I've never gambled.