#617 – CONTEST WINNER – Enigma – The Hero With a Thousand Hands

They say that every great story is really just one story. Gilgamesh, the Aenid, Don Quixote, Back to the Future – all the same story. Although the embroidery differs, every great story has the same elements: hero, mentor, journey, villinous obstacle, contribution from the gods, return.

As a reader, a storyteller, and a student of history and literature I ‘ve always assumed this to be true.  And now that I’ve asked you for your favorite gambling stories, I know it’s true. Every great story you told me – and there were many – had its antecedent in some other legendary story. Of course, in this case, the original heroes weren’t Beowulf or Hercules or Luke Skywalker but Ted Forest, Huckleberry Seed, and my dad.

The winner of the Enigma contest is Tyler, for this entry, about a bet, a bottle of milk, and a foot race:

My two roommates and I recently relocated to Las Vegas.  One day while sitting on the couch, I came up with a brilliant idea.  The bet was going to be to run a mile, then drink a glass of milk.  Sounds simple enough.  I added time constraints: 10 minute for each mile, 1 minute for each glass of milk, a 1 minute break, then the cycle starts over.  I know that you are thinking,”ten-minute mile! That’s easy!”  Let me assure you that none of us are by any means in great shape, and this is the desert in the summer.  The stakes were nothing big, just $100 each with all of it going to the last man standing.  Disqualifications would be for any task not completed in the time allowance, quitting (yeah right), or vomiting.  The last man standing would have to complete one more full round to officially be declared the winner, or else everyone would re-ante and do it again next week. Water would be allowed during the rest period. 

Well we found a weekday where none of us had anything going on, and it was time to have some fun.  Stocked up with milk and all stretched out, we were off with the stopwatch at the house and running.  The first round went pretty quickly, although no world records were broken.  The milk was cold and refreshing although it quickly lost it’s refreshing qualities.  The second round we all seemed to get in the groove with nothing too exciting happening.  The third round was not as good for one of my roommates, who failed to make it back from the run by less than 5 seconds.  I was now heads-up with the more fit of my two roommates for $300.  The milk was getting harder to hold down, but it was time to run again.  My roommate got about 100 yards in front of me for the majority of the run, and about 2 houses from ours, I struck gold.  He was vomiting.  I won’t go into details, but I will tell you it wasn’t pretty, and I almost lost myself right there.  It was all on me now.  I gladly drank my milk, and prepared for another mile. It was the longest mile I had ever ran, but I completed it in 9 minutes and 32 seconds.  I was $200 richer, but I felt awful.  Bowls of cereal have been few and far between since then, but I would definitely say it was worth it!

If you laid end to end all the stories of physically painful athletic bets written by Michael Konik (The Man with the $100,000 Breasts), Michael Kaplin (Cigar Aficianado and Aces & Kings), and me, we still wouldn’t scratch the surface. Nevertheless, it’s all the same story whether it’s Ted Forest and Huck Seed running a marathon on the Fourth of July, or Huck or Erick Lindgren playing four rounds of golf in the Las Vegas summer heat without a cart. The elements are the same.

And thank goodness, because every one of those “similar” stories is fascinating.

Your entries included many other entertaining tales, each enjoyable on its own and emblamatic of some other great gambling story. For instance, the runner-up (who receives no money, but mucho respect), was Menno, from the Netherlands. He told a humorous story about winning and then loosing a bunch of money at Roulette with a buddy. Disappointed that they had blown their lucky win, they placed a final desperation bet. Of course, they won the bet and restored most of their profits. But when they left the casino, they discovered a parking ticket on their car that exceeded their profit for the evening.

Professor Joseph Campbell would have had a ball with this one. The moral of every story of that genre, since time immemorial, is that No One Beats the Casino. I also enjoyed this story because it brought back memories from my genetic consciousness.

When my dad was a young man in the mid-Sixties, he used to go to Las Vegas often with his friend Roy. Their ritual was always the same: pull into the remote lot at Detroit Metro, read the ticket for their total parking costs ($12 for three days back then), and each put their six bucks with the ticket in the glove department. Then they would solemnly tell each other that whatever happened in Vegas, they would still have enough money to get their car out of the lot.

And, as my father would admit later after shaking the hold Las Vegas that on him, there were plenty of times when they needed that twelve dollars to get home.

[Note: I've already confirmed the eligibility of the winners of Tournament Star and Cash Game Killer so those results are final. If for some reason the winner of Enigma isn't eligible to claim the prize, I will inform you and announce an alternate winner.]

Final note: For the past several weeks, I’ve allowed you to comment in the space below at the end of the blog. I’ve enjoyed getting the comments and received some good ones. I’ve posted them all except for one I accidentally deleted, a few that were entries to the contests that I didn’t post as comments until those contests, and spam. The number of spam entries I’ve received is getting huge. Just deleting them all is becoming a chore. (By the way, if you want a drug for sexual dysfunction, I can refer you to about 5,000 web sites – or maybe it’s one web site that sent me 5,000 comment-links.)

Leave me a comment if there’s any reason I should CONTINUE leaving space for comments. As always, you can e-mail me at mrchaotic@aol.com and if I stop soliciting comments in the blog, I’ll make sure that’s frequently mentioned.

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