Pokies

The time has come for me to make a confession: I am addicted to the pokies. Some years ago I made a vow never to spend more than $5/week on these machines and have managed to stick to that goal with almost complete success, many weeks I play not at all. How then am I addicted you may ask? Gaming rooms offer me little excitement, but these diabolical dens festooned with bells and whistles provide comfortable access to my real addiction – observing problem gamblers.

What started as innocent curiosity fast became a weekly ritual. After spending a few Friday lunchtimes ushering the weekend with a beer and some football highlights at the bar near work, I noticed the same faces glued to the flashing lights week after week with clockwork regularity. My five dollars never lasts long; it is simply an admission fee that allows me to watch the plague of hopelessness leak from these machines with every spin – a slow, incremental death.

The regulars often acknowledge me with a nod of recognition as I straddle the nearest vinyl stool. The fragile bond between problem gamblers is plain to see; an attempt to mask personal shame and loss with some sort of social interaction. They recognise me as one of their own during my occasional visits, but make no mistake about it – this is one lonely place. There’s the bubbly Filipino lady who is there almost daily and the tradesman who always has his Ute parked out front; yet it’s the two old ladies who wrench my gut the most.

"Free coffee! I'm losing money by not being here."

A large and lovely woman of about seventy, she sits there with a $50 note always at the ready. She generally has at least $100 in the machine, watching it tick away $1.50 at a time – her friend sits beside her doing the same. As her credit drops, she raises her bet to $3.00 each spin, her twitching jaw becomes more noticeable with each push of the button. Finally, her anxiety is quelled with the clattering of chimes and the promise of fifteen free spins. Within seconds she has winnings of over $150. Less than seven minutes later, she needed that extra $50 note…and she only just arrived.

One more individual is worthy of a mention: the barman who services the gaming longue. A young man of gentle demeanour, he treats me with the same tortured courtesy as the rest. The conflict in his eyes is plain to see as he nods politely at small talk about winnings and features from the same chicken battery of people seated at their empty troughs, nursing their soon-to-be empty wallets.

A friend once explained the mathematics of gambling to me after completing a subject on it at university. Poker machines (all casino games) are programmed* in such a way that if you play an infinite amount of times, the result will always be less than zero. In others words, if you keep play forever you are mathematically certain to lose. There is no if, but or whether – poker machines are designed to take your money and no amount of luck can help you.

When I tried to explain this to the dear lady before she put that extra $50 note in, she chuckled telling me not to be bad luck. The young barman hung his head and avoided eye contact. She always strokes her palm as if it she has some irritation – then I realised that she constantly rubs the corner of the machine in some sort of gambler’s ritual. Not only does she put her pension in this machine, she puts her blood into it as well as if it loves her back.

* ‘Designed’ sounded like too nice a word.

Snowboarding

Skiers seem like nice people. They might walk down stairs like Tick Tock from Return to Oz with a crescendo of clonking boots, but they seem friendly and approachable. Sometimes they are frustrated when your snowboard gets caught between their skis on a chairlift, but that’s nothing a warm smile cannot fix. Even when a dandily-dressed family of four stops dead so they can bask in their own mediocrity on the gradual uphill slope at the bottom of a run, for which you desperately need to maintain speed to avoid having to stop and unclip your binding before being glared at by a pretentious matriarch for having the gall to point out such alpine practicalities to her dawdling children and…actually, I hate bloody skiers.

This is not a problem of my own making, but stems from a thirty-year conflict involving only two sides. As fate would have it, by purchasing my own gear yesterday I officially became a snowboarder. It is not a war of set battles and uniforms, but a mercenary skirmish in which combatants supply their own arms and armour. Anybody who has made this financial commitment understands that – apart from being reduced to two-minute noodles for next month – at least another ten snow trips will be required in order to reconcile the cost. Oh well!

Having never tried skiing, the only reasonable option is to fear and distrust what I do not understand. After just one day of snowboarding, you can utilise plenty of aging stereotypes to label skiers as retarded, help you revive old feuds and to pat yourself on the back for making the right choice. Even though 40% of ski-riders are now snowboarders, you can still class yourself as a struggling minority, thwart with oppression from the conservative bi-pedal alpine elite. Put simply, snowboarding can turn you into a bitter teenager from the nineties overnight.

Origins of the modern snowboard.

There is a certain level of nostalgia employed by snowboarders. When Michigan father, Sherman Poppen, fastened two skis together and attached a rope to the front for his daughter in the mid-sixties, a new sport was born. Thankfully, people thought ‘snurfing’ was a silly name and by 1977 insurance agencies recognised snowboarding as an activity deserving cover. Despite this, only 7% of ski resorts allowed snowboarders in 1985 and it wasn’t until the nineties that they were more common. Arguably, this piste-shredding, grungy, riff-raff helped many US ski resorts stay in business – much to the disgust of the onesie-clad Old Guard.

Like all things rad, mass adoption by bandwagon-jumping thirty year olds with a new found desire to hurt themselves like they used to has confused the term extreme with foolhardy. Combined with the growing desire among skiers to tackle terrain parks and powdery chasms, the line between the two eternal foes of the slopes has all but faded. Thankfully, being a snowboarder still makes you feel like you’re in with the cool kids at primary school, even if it’s because they’re using you for your Mega Drive.

Now, all that is left is the eternal torment waiting for that next snow excursion. Soon you’ll be leaning into your turns while riding the bus and standing sideways with your knees bent going down an escalator; all the while praying for the weekend. Before long, you will be looking completely awesome in your new clothes, bracing yourself as you climb that first mountain and - with utmost dignity - taking out three skiers when you stack it coming off the chairlift.