Some player superstitions

30 April 2019

By Frank Scoblete

Humankind is a superstitious lot. There’s no doubt about that. Throwing salt over our shoulders if some it had spilled on the table or floor; not walking under ladders or stepping on cracks on the sidewalk. Look at the number of religions in the world over time, perhaps tens of thousands, all basically explaining everything but doing it differently. We have magic stones and four-leaf clovers giving us luck too.

So how do individual casino players handle luck by way of superstition? In fact the very idea of “luck” itself may be its own superstition.

I did an unscientific survey on a few trips and here is what I found: A good one-third of players had some kinds of superstitions that they thought would help them in playing. Most were like something to the effect “I say a little prayer that I will win,” or “I wish my spouse luck and he wishes me luck,” but some players had more elaborate superstitions. Here are some of them:

CARLA: “I am a believer in some types of magic inherent in natural objects such as stones and sea shells. I have a yellow stone that I always bring with me to the casino and I rub it and talk to it before I play. I am asking it to give me luck and because it is yellow I think of it as a representation of the sun. By the way, never bring a green stone, it will give you bad luck. Green is not symbolic of money as most Americans think, it means like, you know, gangrene or rot.”

JAMES: “I am so superstitious. When I am playing craps if a number hits I immediately bet that number, same with roulette. I believe that sequences are real and that you have to hop on them when you play. Is this true? I don’t really know. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. You see I think you have to get that new bet out on the number that just hit or it goes dull and will not repeat for you, something like that.”

PETER: “I eat the same breakfast every day when I am staying at a casino-hotel; a three-egg cheddar cheese omelet, French fries really, really well done – not home fries – white toast with butter, two cups of coffee each with two sugars and an orange juice which I drink after I have finished eating everything. I have to have this meal before I play in a casino that day. That’s the way I am. I needed to have that meal before I took tests in college. I graduated so it must have worked!”

NANE: “I have this medal that my mother gave me before she passed on. It shows a woman smiling with her arms outstretched to you. I think she is the representation of Lady Luck. My mother taught me how to get luck from the medal. You put it in sea salt overnight and in the morning when you go to get rid of the sea salt you say, ‘I am removing the salt; give me luck.’ This empowers the medal to do its thing. I bring that medal to every game I play in the casino. Does it work. Sometimes.”

MARY: “I will not play a machine that just hit a big amount. I think the good luck on that machine is gone and it will need a lot of money put in before the luck returns. The more money in the machine will ultimately produce good luck but you don’t want to be the one putting the money in. So if it has been hot, it will get cold for a while; avoid it. But cold machines will get hot soon enough and those are the machines you should play. How do I find cold machines? I just ask people near a machine how that machine has been doing. If they say it has been cold, I jump right on it.”

I am sure that many of our readers have superstitions too. Just give it some thought: Do you have any superstitions?

Visit Frank’s website at www.frankscoblete.com.