A Lesson (almost) Learned the Hardway

Warren Buffet is said to uttered the wise wise words,

Never invest in a business you cannot understand

Well the wife learned a real life personal finance lesson this past vacation to the Dominican Republic.   Upon walking into the Casino the first night I was given a $5 free chip which could only be used on ONE single game (HINT this story is going to get bad lol).  Well, I didn’t know the name of the game (yet another hint), never have seen it before despite my love for gambling (hint) and didn’t know the rules of the game (biggest problem).

The game set up was this (if anyone knows the name I would love to know) I had a cup with 10 or so red balls that were then thrown into a salad bowl looking thing, the balls would fall into numbered wholes.  The cumulative number would then be applied to the board.  The board either had a winning money amount, a doubling of jackpots (and bets!), points, and a few other things.   If you got to 100 points then you would get the jackpot, the jackpot would double with the bets when my cumulative number would land on a doubling space.

Well here is the scam!

I started betting $5/roll with a healthy jackpot of $100! Wow I thought this was great…well then it would double a few times, and I was doing $80/roll with a jackpot of $1600!  But I was making real progress towards that 100 points! But the guy was counting WAYYYYYYYYYYYY to fast for any normal person to keep up.  We double up 2 or 3 more times! So now we are rocking out $320 rolls with a jack pot of over $6000! JEBUS!  Lucky for me, they took my credit card since I only had a $100 in cash on me.

After my 3rd Roll on $320, I flipped my sh!t.  I figured out what was going on since I made it to 84 points in 10 mins but now can’t get any points for the life of me.  I demanded to see a manager and I sent the Wife to the hotel manager.  The casino manager just happened not to be there, and the hotel manager told the wife that they were aware of the casino’s sometimes shady actions, but they were a separate entity.

I grabbed my CC back from the dealer, and told him to get me all the tapes from that night, to which he responded, “They didn’t have any” YEAH RIGHT MY ASS! I ran to the hotel front desk flipped out a bit, they gave me their phone and I cancelled my credit card.  In the ened…I learned two valuable lessons for $100 (the cash they got off of me):

1. DO NOT PLAY GAMES YOU DON’T KNOW THE RULES TO and
2. DO NOT TRUST SHADY DOMINICAN REPUBLIC CASINOS!

That being said I had an amazing time and am sad to have to leave the all inclusive fantasy world.  Anyone else have any funny/sad stories similar to this one?