Perched on a stool inside Black Hawk’s Riviera Casino, Bob Burgard fired up a Doral, studied his cards, and wondered aloud how a man could gamble without a cigarette in his hand.
“This is what I enjoy,” he said, eyeballing a possible straight flush. “The pace picks up when you’re smoking. Lots of people think it brings them luck.”
I sat for a moment, recalling my Winston days. Then I shook my head in sympathy.
As midnight rings in the New Year, fortune will frown on folks like Burgard. That’s when a state ban on smoking in Colorado’s 44 casinos takes effect.
If you’re a superstitious smoker whose mojo revolves around cigarettes, can you have luck without Lucky Strikes?
Ellie Johnson considered the question at a slot machine. It was a “Pompeii” model, named after that Roman town lucky enough to have a mountain view. She pulled on a Parliament and jetted a cone of smoke toward the ceiling.
I asked her what she thought of the smoking ban. Johnson grimaced like she’d just seen one of those cancerous-lung photos they showed you in eighth-grade hygiene class.
“Every 10th time I pull the lever I take a puff,” she said. “I know it sounds crazy but that’s what I do.”
Eight years ago in Reno she rang up a $700 payout at slots and calculated that it came on her 10th puff. “I’ve been doing it ever since,” she said.
She pulled the lever. The three wheels spun and aligned on the bar. Ding-ding. A $5 credit.
Gamblers are a quirky lot. That’s especially true of those who play the casinos, where everything — from games to floor plans — is rigged to separate you from your money.
So gamblers look for an edge. An edge means luck, and luck means ritual. If you’re a smoker, cigarettes are your ritual.
Now the state of Colorado is telling casino smokers to take it outside.
For lawmakers, it’s a model of forward thinking. Thanks to our new heart-healthy casinos, gamblers can burn through the retirement savings they once would have squandered on oxygen tanks. State coffers will swell with the extra casino revenues.
“I don’t know what I’ll do”
Good news for the rest of us, but not for Mary Reynolds, who sat at a keno machine with a friend. In front of her, eight cigarette butts kept each other company in an amber ashtray.
“I enjoy my cigarettes,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ll do when the ban starts.”
I wished her well and headed out the door. It was an icy day, and luck — specifically, driving luck — was on my mind as I headed down the mountain’s long S-curves.
Just east of Black Hawk, I passed three crows pecking at the carcass of a deer that had been hit by a car. It seemed a bad omen.
A few miles on, a clutch of vehicles sat on the road’s slim shoulder. A group of men stared down into Clear Creek. About 100 feet below, a red pickup truck sat on its side atop a rock-studded snowbank.
I drove on, hoping that not all the good luck in the canyon was parked at Ellie Johnson’s slot machine.
William Porter’s column appears twice a week. Reach him at 303-954-1977 or wporter@denverpost.com.
