(In case you missed it, Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy starts here and describes (mis)adventures in Reno, the Biggest Shitty Little City in the World.)

Last month, I joined Kyle and a bunch of other degenerates in Vegas as part of a team organized by a guy nicknamed Fixer. There was a casino- a decent sized one, in the Strip area- which was having a double payouts promotion for jackpots from midnight to 11:59:59 pm for one day. This was big. Depending on what game was available, it could turn something which is ordinarily a 95% game- that is, returning 95 cents for every dollar wagered- into a 130% game. We were looking at being able to pull a profit of about $1500 per hour per person.

Unfortunately, when we got there, it turns out they had Nerfed the two best plays. Sadly, this dropped things to around a 107% game- still good, still running around $300/hr per person, but not quite what we were hoping for given that most of the team had flew in for this. But hey, it could still turn out to be a solid profit if we could get in a half dozen hours of play before they pulled the promo. If we could get in a marathon session, so much the better. We’d work in pairs and sit spread across the gaming floor, hoping to avoid identification as a team.

Hopes for this died around dinnertime, four hours before the promo started. There was already a group of advantage players sitting around hogging a bank of machines, eating a pizza. They weren’t even playing. Now that’s crass. Elsewhere, little knots of people could be seen, studiously playing nickel video Keno.

By the time 11 pm rolled around and my partner Edmund and I found a couple of reasonably ergonomic and payout-friendly machines, it was obvious the promo wasn’t going to last anywhere near 24 hours. Just from the walk in, I could identify five other teams- and given that I could only see half the floor and that some teams might be less blatant, I figured there had to be at least twice that number present. This was going to get messy. It was entirely possible that the casino would end up losing money to the tune of 50 thousand bucks per hour. People weren’t even trying to be subtle. And through it all, casino employees were remarking to each other about how traffic was unusually heavy for the day and time; how usually there wouldn’t even be a quarter this many people.

Midnight struck and it was like horses bolting out of a starting gate. Within five minutes, we saw someone’s machine light up, indicating a jackpot. Five minutes later, Edmund hit quad aces for the jackpot. Five minutes after that, the other guy next to me lit it up.

It rapidly became apparent that the casino was hideously understaffed. Not realizing what they had done, they kept with the usual graveyard shift staffing level. It took nearly 20 minutes before anyone came to take down Edmund’s information for jackpot processing. Immediately after that, he started playing another machine. He must’ve had his lucky gerbil that day, as he promptly quadded up again.

The place was a zoo. I overheard one harried worker say that over 25 jackpots had already been hit, and the first hour wasn’t even out. There was a kind of distress in their eyes, the kind you see at a toy store on Black Friday when someone screams out there’s exactly one unit left of the must-have toy of the year. At 12:55, they had processed maybe 5 out of the 25 jackpots.

At 1:10 am, they went over the intercom announcing that the promotion was cancelled immediately. What followed is likely going to be one of my defining memories of the outing.

See, in the old days, cashing out meant a cascade of coins hitting a tray. Casinos have gone to electronic tickets and redemption machines these days, but enough people are nostalgic enough for the coins that the the machine will play the sound of coins hitting a tray as it prints out the ticket.

Well, at 1:10, they made that announcement, and then all around me came the sound of cascading coins. Everyone cashing out. All at once. It was surreal.

The game was over. Sort of. Edmund was still waiting for his payouts. By the time he got both, it was 3:15 am. It was an okay trip- since the team got real lucky, we walked away with expenses paid and a bit extra, but not the killing we were hoping for. The funny thing was, the casino still didn’t really realize where it had gone wrong. I estimate that it lost around $55k; could’ve been a whole lot worse.

Coming soon: part 2, or, how I got professional gamblers to ask me what the fuck is my problem.