A stunning surprise

I'm not much of a football fan, or a sports fan in general, but I have been participating in the Coast Casinos' and M Resort's free football contests this year. Both are easy to enter and the Coasts make it particularly easy to check for winning entries. In both cases, entries are handled at kiosks, and it's possible to pick your winners using a quick pick feature, as in lottery games. In the Coast contest, you also have a pick a "tie breaker" for each entry, a prediction of the total score of the Monday night game. I always use the quick pick feature for both contests, and for the tie breaker, I just type in a number more or less randomly.

Each week I press the "winning entries" button on the screen on a Coasts kiosk, and each week I've been told "no winning entries" -- until this week. On Tuesday when I hit the button at the Gold Coast, the message said something like "Winner $10000." There was no comma in the number so I had to look twice to make sure it was what I thought it was -- $10,000, and not $1,000. The kiosk spit out a ticket. I couldn't concentrate well enough to read the fine print, so I stepped over the the players' club counter and asked the woman there, "What do I do with this?" She read the small print, gave me a high five and told me to take it to the sports book.

There a supervisor handled the paper work and explained to me that I was one of nine people who "picked" the winner of all 12 games that week. Further, I was the big winner because my tie breaker came closest to the actual point total for the Monday night game. The other contestants who picked all the winners got only $2,500 each.

In my entire gambling "career," including the 3-1/2 years I've been living in Las Vegas, this $10,000 win was my biggest single hit.