“Not fun at all, really…”
Nervous breakdowns, late Vegas nights, and the friends we made along the way
I’m finally home after a whirlwind of summer travel. After the previously reported trip to Gen Con in Indiana I met up with my family at the Jersey shore for a few days then drove up to Lechworth State Park for some kayaking through the gorges. From there I went straight to Las Vegas for Bet Bash, and just got home from there. So I’ve been too exhausted to write anything.
I did somehow manage to get a new episode of the podcast up this week. That felt like a small miracle. You can probably hear in my voice how wrecked I was, and that was only Friday morning. I still had the weekend to go. It’s ridiculous to think I used to be able to go several nights without sleep in that town. Perhaps I’m getting too old for that proverbial shit.
Interestingly enough, I’m not too much older than John Gregory Dunne was when he wrote Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season. He had the energy to stay up all night cruising the strip with bail bondsmen, prostitutes, hack comedians and private investigators, or sit awake in his apartment writing draft after draft of suicide notes he then crumpled up and threw away. He didn’t let being in his forties slow him down from his nervous breakdown. Skill issue, I guess.
You can listen to me rasp my way through a conversation about Vegas with my friend Haley Mlotek in this week’s episode. She’s very funny, insightful and smart. She liked the book way more than I did, which honestly is a great recommendation for this book because she has far more taste and class than me. And talking to her about it made me appreciate it quite a bit more.
That’s one of the cool things about doing this podcast. Reading is much more fun when you get to talk to people you like and respect about the books. A book you didn’t like and maybe felt like you wasted your time with can serve as a jumping off point for a riveting and illuminating conversation. Even a bad book can be a catalyst for learning something new or deepening an appreciation for something you care about. And sometimes you might also realize you were wrong about the book all along. I mean there has to be some hope for those one star reviews of The Vapors on goodreads, right? Perhaps they just needed to talk to their smart friends about it.
This was the fifth Bet Bash, and my fourth. I was at the first one at a bar in Jersey City five years ago, and it’s been incredible to watch it grow into a major conference, especially given that the team who has organized and hosted it year after year aren’t professional event planners, but a group of sports bettors from New Jersey. For those who don’t know, Bet Bash is a yearly gathering of professional and semi professional sports gamblers. For anyone among the square public who doubts anyone can win at betting on sports, come to Bet Bash and meet 700 people who make their living doing it. They’re some of the smartest and strangest people you’ll ever meet. And they know how to throw a party.
The first few Bet Bashes I went to as a friend of Spanky and a recreational bettor. Last year I attended as a journalist writing about the industry. This year I suppose in some sense I was there as an author working on a book, but it felt more like I was there to hang out with friends and make some connections to help me make more money betting on football. I also was there to help out with the conference, as Spanky had asked me to help organize the conference’s puzzle hunt this year after finishing a close and disappointing second place in last year’s event.
A lot of people probably don’t know this, but Spanky isn’t just one of the biggest gamblers in America. He’s also a board game and puzzle nut. He competes in the World Boardgame Championships every year. He once co-owned a board game store in New Jersey. And the puzzle hunt, while not the most popular event at Bet Bash, is something close to his heart. And it’s easily the biggest overlay you’ll find. It’s free for any Bet Bash attendee to enter, and there’s a $10,000 prize to first place. This year I wrote a number of the puzzles, including one where players had to play blackjack in a makeshift casino we created with playing cards that had strange symbols on them. The teams didn’t fare so well, and in order to get the game over before the sun came up the next morning, we needed to pull some puzzles from the hunt and nudge them all along. Still, one team managed to finish around 2:30 on Friday morning and take home the cash. So that’s at least four people had fun and will be back next year. I know from experience the others might still be smarting from the loss. And they may even be annoyed at how difficult the game was. But come on - it’s a 10k freeroll. It’s supposed to be hard.
I’ve been doing puzzle hunts and road rallies for a long time now, and they aren’t for everybody. I can attest for how grueling and painful they can be, particularly when they go all night long (or longer!). At a certain hour of night the brain malfunctions - regardless of your age or intelligence. It’s just biology. A person can only process so much data for so many puzzles for so long before needing a break - and in what is effectively a race to the finish line, there are no breaks.
I often think of this quote I once read by Darren Skillton, an eight time competitor in the Dakar Rally (which is an off-road race from Paris to Dakar, Senegal that goes through the Sahara - think the Mint 400 race from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but on steroids and, perhaps, mescaline. Skillton said that Dakar is "not fun at all, really. But a few weeks later, or maybe a few months, you'll think back on it and wonder if maybe it wasn't actually fun, because you'll have this great feeling of satisfaction about it." That’s how I feel about pretty much every puzzle hunt I’ve ever done, including last year’s Bet Bash hunt. Hell, it’s how I feel about spending a long week in Vegas without much sleep and lots of gambling and social over-stimulation. It’s not always fun in the moment, yet when it’s over I can’t stop thinking about when I get to do it all again. It’s like Jim McManus says in Positively Fifth Street: “Part of me dies every time a plane leaves O’Hare for Las Vegas and I’m not on it.”
Hopefully the “Bet Dash” competitors who didn’t win the money will feel the same way. Or maybe if they subscribe to this substack they’ll cancel their subscriptions when they realize I wrote whatever puzzle they hated the most.
I hope they don’t, because then they’ll miss out on the book club that starts this week. We chose Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich. Barich was a writer for the New Yorker, and this was his first book. It was originally serialized in the magazine in 1980. Similar to Dunne’s Vegas, this book details a middle aged man in the 1970s having a nervous breakdown and holing up in a hotel near the racetrack to gamble and hang out with the denizens of the social fringe. Unlike Dunne’s Vegas, this book also has more than a few meditations on Rennaisance Florentine art and culture. It sounds goofy, but it works somehow. And it’s a breezy read, so even if it doesn’t, who cares? Maybe after you read it and talk to me and the others about it you’ll feel like at least maybe we’re all better off for knowing a little more about pace handicapping and/or Medici humanism.
To that end I will send out the first reader guide to paid subscribers this Friday that covers chapters 1-3. From there we will read three chapters a week, getting a guide each Friday, and we will do a live zoom on Sunday evening September 7th to discuss the book. I’ll do what I can to get Mr. Barich to join us, but no promises yet. If he can’t make it, I’ll see if any handicappers or Florentine scholars are available. If you’re not signed up yet as a paid subscriber but this all sounds fun to you, here’s your chance:
Before I leave you I want to share a couple of good gambling-themed reads I came across in the last couple of weeks:
Oliver Roeder, my guest in episode 2 of the podcast, had this wonderful survey of New York’s lively backgammon scene in the Financial Times, which included a game he played in Union Square with Jerry “Poe” McClinton. I have had my own encounters with Poe before, including one I wrote about in this story I wrote long ago. He also plays backgammon with Abe “The Snake” Mosseri, who you can hear interviewed in this episode of my old podcast Gamblers I did about gin rummy.
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik must have started reading this substack and decided to steal a little of our thunder, because he recently had this expansive and fascinating piece in the magazine that contextualized the current fight in New York City to bring a casino to Times Square by looking at gambling kingpins through the city’s history (and highlighted a number of really great books in the process). Adam, if you’re reading this, come on the show man! No hard feelings. Let’s chop it up, buddy.
My friend John Reeder, host of the wonderful podcast Risk of Ruin, had a new episode called “Casino Schemes” about a group of friends who organize various gambling capers through group chat and make lots and lots of money. It’s two hours long, but at the end you’ll be wanting more.
Finally, I want to thank everyone who has signed up to be a paid subscriber, but also everyone who has been buying the books we discuss on the podcast or the books written by my guests through my Bookshop link. The commissions are pretty small (10%), but it’s pretty great to see how many books have sold so far, and it’s confirmation for me that people are listening and digging what they are hearing. If you’re a writer reading this and thinking of coming on the show - we’re moving product! Come get that American Gambler bump! I’ve set up a storefront where I’ll keep adding books from the show for people to buy, so if you’re ever looking for one, you can find them all here. (the one exception is Michael Kaplan’s Advantage Players, which isn’t on bookshop. Order that one from the borg here.)
Until Friday,