The odds are most gamblers won’t be lucky enough to break even at the tables in Lake Tahoe

On our weekend at Lake Tahoe we rode the free shuttle bus from our hotel to Caesars casino, in Nevada, and blew all our quarters, dimes and nickels on the slot machines.

When my wife suggested that we go across the street to the High Sierra, I felt that we had lost enough money to pay for our shuttle bus ride. So it was all right to desert Caesars for another house.

The High Sierra was no less intimidating than Caesars. We were out of coins, and I didn’t want to get any just to chuck them back into the slots.

I was drawn to the poker tables, having been rather a good poker player in my wasted youth, but it would take hours and lots of money to get into a poker game, and I didn’t know the local rules. Nobody wants to be a hick. Besides, all the players had the glazed, unshaven look of men who had been at the game for days. They wouldn’t warm to a lucky newcomer.

My wife was tempted to try blackjack, but she had played a few hands in Las Vegas many years before and the dealer had rebuked her rudely in front of the other players for innocently breaking one of the house rules. She was afraid to try again.

In the casino everything is designed to get your money. It is a maze of games and gambling devices, electric glitter and seductive enclaves. The nickel slots are near the exits, so they can get your last one as you’re on your way out.

Hundreds of slots are lined up in banks with aisles between them barely wide enough for two players, back to back. Most of the slot machine players were middle-aged women. Some played two or three machines at once. They seemed almost as mechanical as the machines.

Now and then one of the slots would pay off with a tinny sound of coins cascading into the pay tray. The dollar machines paid off with a big, clanking sound of silver dollars. The players hardly responded to the payoffs. Their expressions never changed. They merely reached into the trays for more coins and began plugging them back into the machines.

I felt that the house was after my last dollar. But they weren’t aggressive about it. There was no hustle. No carny barkers giving you a hard sell. You could play or not. The patrons had come with their own motivations. Everybody loves to challenge the odds. In the end, the house would get its percentage. Everything was computerized. Welcome. Go home free on the shuttle bus.

There is no escape. The dazzling lights give the enormous room a look of endlessness and unreality. Even in the bars, or at your table in the restaurants, you can play keno, a mindless numbers game in which you mark a ticket of numbers, picking anywhere from one to 12, and then 20 winning numbers show on an electronic screen. If you have picked enough of the numbers that show on the screen, you win. Or something like that. I wondered if they had slot machines and keno in the restrooms.

We decided to eat.

There were keno tickets on our table. You filled out your ticket at your table and took it up to a young cashier at the keno bank about 10 steps away. She took your money and stamped your ticket. Above us a moving electronic strip sign kept admonishing, “Have your keno ticket written for 1, 3, 4, 5 or 10 games in advance. Sit back and enjoy your meal.”

We ordered dinner and felt guilty because we weren’t playing keno. I couldn’t enjoy my meal.

Our waitress told us how to play. She looked like the Barbra Streisand of “What’s Up, Doc?” Bright, flip, sassy. I decided to bet $5. My wife bet $1. We filled out our tickets and my wife took them up to the cashier with our money. The cashier stamped the tickets and gave them back. When the waitress came back she saw my ticket. “You bet $5?” she said. “That’s dumb !” She said it was wiser to bet $1 or $3 and told me how to pick my numbers. If she was that smart, I wondered why she had to be a waitress.

We didn’t win anything.

I asked the waitress how she liked living in Tahoe.

“You can’t buy any clothes,” she said. “They don’t sell anything here but Levi’s and T-shirts.”

I told her I’d seen a Miller’s Outpost.

“Yeah,” she said. “Levi’s and T-shirts. I have to go to Reno to buy anything decent.”

I realized that all the young people working in the restaurants and bars and at the gaming tables were people like any others.

They had homes or apartments; they might have kids in school; they had to go shopping in supermarkets; they had bank accounts and had to pay taxes and had worries like everyone else. So there was a reality within the unreality.

When we left the casino we noticed that a shuttle bus was waiting out front to take patrons back to their hotels. Well, we’d lost $6 at keno. That ought to justify a free ride.

We climbed aboard. Two other couples joined us and the bus took off. In a few minutes it delivered us to our hotel.

We were in bed by 11 o’clock. A big night.

And we would have to start the next day without a nickel.