“Want me to teach you how to play Pai Gow?”  Helen’s eyes light up like a firecracker in July, while I stare skeptically at the deck of cards that she shuffles with a practiced hand.

Helen, while still in her twenties, used to be one of those high rollers who got rooms comped in Vegas and the expensive liquor brought to her table.  She claimed that for several years, she was a professional gambler with no need for a 9-5 job because she could live off of her winnings in Vegas.  That was all, of course, before she lost over $30,000 in one weekend.

After that, she ended up working at the same company and department that I did (back in the days when I had a corporate job) and vowed to stay away from Vegas for good.

Now here she is, salivating over a deck of cards that I left lying in the living room. Oops, I guess that’s like leaving a bottle of liquor out in front of an alcoholic.

“Let me teach you!”  She’s so excited, her hands are shaking.  Being able to hold that deck of cards is like an early Christmas for her.

When I worked at “The Corporation,” there were three Asians in my department and all of us were related to a problem gambler.  Helen’s case was the mildest of the three.

Susan’s mother, whom I’ll call “Gambling Mama” loved Vegas so much that she convinced Susan’s father to buy a house there.  That was the first mistake.  Susan would get frantic calls from her father after Gambling Mama would disappear for days without word. Eventually she would be found at a casino throwing their life savings out the window.  Not surprisingly, the house was lost and so was Gambling Mama’s marriage. Sadder still was that Gambling Mama would call her daughter at work, trying to hit her up for money.

A cousin of mine also lost his house, his job and his marriage to gambling at pachinko parlors.  When I think of pachinko parlors, I think of claustrophobic dens of smokers watching metal balls go ‘round, accompanied by the most annoying synthetic sounds on Earth.  And yet, pachinko is a $250-$300 billion industry with parlors in every corner of Japan.  You could pass through a vista of never ending paddy fields when suddenly there looms a giant pachinko parlor with garish neon lights looking like the alien mother ship had landed.

The machines are like vertical pinball machines that use dials instead of flippers to spit balls out.  My cousin, however, figured out a way to stick a thick wad of paper between the dial and a metal piece above it so that it was permanently on, shooting balls into the money sucking machines. You could run two, three machines at a time like this to make your money disappear even faster.  And it did.

Helen lays out the cards in front of me and starts explaining the rules, which I half-heartedly try to pay attention to.  “It’s all about numbers and odds.  You should be good at this,” she tells me.

I don’t know if that’s part of the draw for Asians—that the stereotypical “good at math” thing makes them think they can beat the system.  Or perhaps there’s the whole voodoo mysticism about luck and fortune.  I had a friend who was a pseudo-fortune teller who calculated ages, birthdates, moon tides, astral foot positions, etc. to make charts of her luck factor and if the stars aligned, it was time to hit Vegas.

I’m not exactly sure how to explain pachinko except that maybe the pattern of spinning balls and electronic music induces some kind of mind-altering hypnosis.

“Are you paying attention?”  Helen is getting angry at me because I’m a bad student.  How could I not understand the joys of playing Pai Gow Poker?

While I have been known to yell and babble incomprehensibly at a slot machine for the magical 7’s to line up, I get anxiety attacks over losing more than $20 at a time and tend to throw more money at the shows and buffets.  So I think it’s safe to say that the gambler’s itch just ain’t in me.

So eventually, Helen sighs and gives up, unsuccessful in making a convert out of me.  The glimmer in her eyes has gone out and she leaves, ready to go back to the grind the next day.