Gambling at the Monte Carlo in Monaco

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the gambling scene in Monaco is slow and boring, as it targets a very unusual demographic. The best way to characterize this demographic is simply to say "the kinds of guys who would marry Anna Nicole Smith at age 86." The place has an overall geriatric feel to it, so much so that there are external defibrillators every 100 feet on the way to the casino.

If defib doesn't cut it, they have a whole cardiac center just around the corner.
Death does not occur in Monaco.

I don't like to play games where I don't have an advantage, so gambling in a casino is not for me. But it was interesting to watch others gamble in Monte Carlo. Most people were gathered around roulette wheels, a game of pure chance and no strategy. And almost everyone seemed to be following a Mersenne-like betting plan where you mostly double-down.

A typical player would take out a few hundred euro in chips, place them on a bunch of singleton bets (where you pick a single number, with 1 to 36 payoff) amended with a few corners (where you cover four numbers, with 1 to 9 payoff). These bets would cover a third to a half of the board. If they lost, they'd take out another few hundred and repeat. If they won, they'd continue to bet the same way, this time with double the number of chits per bet. With more than 50% chance, the ball lands on a number they did not cover and they lose all their bets, but otherwise, this strategy seems to net around 2x gains in a win.

Needless to say, it's pretty easy to lose substantial sums of money this way. Watched a guy blow through 200 within a minute, plus more before I arrived. Spending that 200+, even on something frivilous, can make you a lot happier than whatever that guy must have felt during that minute. He looked around for sympathy after his second loss, and the pain in his face was palpable. 

There was one guy who got really lucky -- he won a singleton bet at least several times in a row while I watched. At his last win, I thought "ok, if he cashes out now, he's a lucky guy with perspective; otherwise, he either has a gambling problem or an embedded camera in his glasses and a computer in his shoe that tells him where the ball will end up." To his credit, he cashed out and got a gigantic plastic token that said 50,000 on it, plus a few thousand more. Not sure what he started with, but when I arrived at the table, he had less than 10K. So, not bad. 

No pics from the casino. They very diligently take away your camera.