I’ve got a guest post up over a Budgeting the Fun Stuff on tips for your Las Vegas trip. Enjoy!
Off-Road Finance also appeared in the following carnivals this week:
- Canadian Finance Carnival #71
- Totally Money Blog Carnival #50
- Carnival of Wealth
- Carnival Of Financial Camaraderie #16
Thanks everyone!
Your article on Vegas was amazingly comprehensive. I’m curious about how you wrote that you have been a semi-pro gambler. What was your game of choice? Why did you quit?
Also, I’m going to link to your Vegas article and this site in my Friday Links post this week (for whatever that’s worth). 🙂
In general there’s three casino games you can make a living at from the player side (as opposed to the house side): poker, blackjack and sports/race betting. I’m fairly good at poker and sports betting, and only quasi-competent at blackjack. But if the opportunity arose I’d do any of the three. I never dug into race betting.
I quit for several reasons:
1) The people. When you work in a casino, a high percentage of your “co-workers” are ex-convicts, confidence men and hustlers of all sorts, pimps, strippers, drug dealers and users etc. Many are very smart people, and they can be entertaining for a while, but it gets old fast. To be fair, there are also many great, upstanding people in gambling but the ratio sucks.
2) No good way to get good health insurance
3) Lack of job security – not only is casino gambling capital intensive, but the swings can be very bad compared to say trading. This is especially true of blackjack, but poker had the unfortunate feature that usually the situations with the odds are most in your favor also produce the biggest swings.
4) There’s a limit to how much I wanted to be pickled in smoke. Vegas casinos aren’t TOO bad (good air handling) but it’s still a smoking work environment.