I still recall playing a card game called Guts with some friends in my late teens. Each player received three cards with the goal to get two or three of the same value. A 2, 3, 4 combination could beat anything, but after that, three aces was the highest followed by three kings, three queens etc... all the way down to having a pair of twos. It was a simple game with one twist. If you said you were in at the end of a hand (after perusing your cards and taking one draw), you had to match the pot if you didn't win it. While the pots always started out with pennies, it didn't take too much pot doubling for forty or fifty dollars to be on the table. To an eighteen year old kid, the potential to win fifty bucks without doing any slave labor for a fast food company was always enticing.

I was a pretty safe gambler, usually winning twenty bucks one night and losing twenty on another. Once we had a few hands get out of control, and people were starting to write checks and put them on the table. One game starting with pennies had swelled to over four hundred dollars. I didn't win the big pot and ended up having to pay a hundred dollars (which came out of my slave wages from a fast food company). I understood the aphrodisiac of gambling, but I realized that I would never win as much as I wanted, and probably lose more than I expected. A potential addiction was derailed in my young life.

A friend of mine came to town with her boyfriend. They arrived at my place at five in the morning. She crashed on the couch, and he went back to the casino (where they had been for the last two hours). After I shook the man's hand in the dark, I never saw him again. The guy's plan was to gamble all day. That's it--just gamble all day.

I might have been much more open to gambling at casinos if I didn't know and understand one simple truth--the house always wins. It's not like a Friday night poker game with friends where all of the conniving and bluffing is on a personal level. It's not like investing stocks in companies that are trying to make themselves more valuable. It's not like the office pool where the person who understands the sport the least usually wins. Casinos are out for your money. Systematically, methodically, predictably. They give up a little and gain a lot.

Do we avoid these places like a filth-ridden whorehouse with more flies than floozies? Do we teach our children the dangers of gambling with the fervent rhetoric we use with illicit narcotics? What do we do? What do we do? We created a town called Las Vegas and never looked back.

What is truly disturbing is that many of the people who look down at me for ducking out back and smoking a joint defend the sanctity and validity of casinos and gambling. It will be a joyous day when we realize that everyone in this country has some sort of weakness or pleasurable addiction. Dismissing someone because of their addiction is the most hypocritical of all actions.

I keep pondering a way for the rich to give back to the working class and poor, but maybe that's not such a good idea. I'm starting to believe the poor would just give it right back to the rich. For every $100,000 jackpot winner, there's a million dollars collected from a pool of suckers. For every poor person who scrimps and saves, there are four or five dropping twenty bucks a week on the lottery. For every person struggling to "make it," there's a slew of institutions daring them to "blow it."

But I can't fault the casinos too much. It's not like they drag people in off the streets and force them to cash their paychecks in chips. They know we're all fools and deserve the everything we lose.

I guess that's the point this week. We're all fools searching for a way to feel different than we always do. And nothing punches the queasy anxiety button more than the possibility of winning that four hundred dollar pot on the table by doing nothing but having the best set of cards.

But it's not worth it. It's really not worth it. It's really, really not worth it.

Chris Jungle has the uncanny ability to watch a sporting event without betting.