Sleep-filled Days, Gambling Nights

One night... I remember it only too well... the pot was terrific. The table groaned under the bets.... Those glorious, instructive games! Gone forever.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel '25) was right when he reached the wistful conclusion of his 1935 article for the Jack0' Lantern. Those glorious games are gone, gone forever. There still are poker games to be played at Dartmouth, but they are spontaneous, half-hearted ventures. Gone are the days when the first dollars were tossed to the middle of the table on Friday night and the pot cleared away by the fortunate sometime the following Thursday.

Gone are the games lasting into the early morning hours, through the weekend, through classes, interrupted only by hunger, nature's call, and empty bottles." Gone are the smoke-filled rooms where camaraderies and hostilities shifted with the move of the pot.

The stakes can still run high, but the fervor is gone. The boys in Russell Sage talk about games where hundreds of dollars pass across the table, and a fellow from Bones Gate explains his depression in terms of the $300 he lost the night before. Those discontent with cards try other things: Psi U boys are known to try their hands at chain letters, every fraternity holds Casino Night, and one fellow in Casque and Gauntlet bets dinners on his squash-playing abilities.

There are simply no good stories. They still play poker at Theta Delt, but the brothers deny anyone ever loses more than S2O a night and insist that games are infrequent. The boys at the Boom Boom Lodge are afflicted with a certain paranoia when it comes to gambling: a fellow who came by selling football betting cards last fall was forcibly ejected from the house. Evidently, N.C.A.A. rules prohibit athletes from betting on games in their sport.

The betting cards went over fairly well outside of the lodge, but that was fall and even people in the real world bet on football. Backgammon put in a fleeting appearance, but most players consider it sport rather than business. Some students play pinball and others pool, but they aren't gamblers, because skill prevails over luck in such efforts. There is always beerpong, played in Dartmouth's own currency, but until about the 15th glass of beer, skill again dominates. So few players can last 15 glasses that beer-pong remains an insignificant part of the gambling scene,

DARTMOUTH just isn't a betting school. Too much fresh air, too much intellectual activity. But there sure was gambling" when the air was no dirtier. In fact, there still is gambling at Dartmouth, but the forms are so subtle that the players often don't even recognize it.

Some time after the days of the smoke-filled poker parlors, vending machines were installed at Dartmouth. In every dormitory on campus, these no-armed bandits offer the Dartmouth student an opportunity to risk his nickels, dimes, and quarters. True, the odds are in the player's favor. Better than nine times out of ten, a quarter risked, unless Canadian, will yield a can of soda. But there is always that suspenseful pause after the coin is inserted, long enough for several anxious heartbeats, before the mechanism activates to send the soda crashing down. But the gambler's caveat emptor: three dimes do not a soda and a nickel yield, for Coke machines do not return change.

Consider the candy machine in Gile Hall, a gambler's delight. During the three years I lived in Gile, the machine suffered total breakdown once a week, on random days. About every two weeks, the holding bar would break, sometimes under mysterious circumstances, allowing full return on no investment. On other unpredictable days, the Baby Ruth lever would operate gratuitously, offering further incentive to play the machine. Of course, there were days when the dimes would go in, and nothing would come out.

But I for one will never forget the day of the Great Payoff. On that muggy spring afternoon, 15 cents in the machine and a pulled lever yielded a candy bar and 30 cents change. After ten minutes of this, the machine required no more than a tug on the lever. No money and little effort yielded a candy bar, two dimes and two nickels. Word spread quickly, and in 30 minutes we had broken the bank.

THE GILE machine and its like remain the great lure for the Dartmouth gambler. But where are the pockets of solid, Ail-American gambling at Dartmouth? Long ago, a man who now professes geography won a car in a poker game, and here is all this talk about candy bars.

As a last resort, I went to talk to some members of the last true stronghold of traditional Dartmouth, the Cabin and Trail division of the Outing Club. I figured that if Cabin and Trail has changed much in the last 30 or 40 years, everything has.

Finally, I hit paydirt. They play cards for high stakes at Cabin and Trail, in a game of chance at which few are skilled. A mad Ukrainian, who loses squash games played for dinners in his spare time, reports that the venerable Czechoslo-vakian game of Taroky is played in Cabin and Trail's Robinson Hall offices. Related to bridge and played with a special deck of cards, Taroky is played for one fifth of a cent per point. "Hell," moaned the Ukrainian, "you can lose a nickel a night!"

Brad Brinegar '77, one of this year's undergraduate editors, is struggling througha long backgammon losing streak.