I hear regularly from Maria, a reader who mostly plays craps. She’s often found herself the only woman at the table, but it doesn’t bother her. She does, however, sometimes take some grief about being the only “wrong” bettor – a player who bets against the shooter by wagering on don’t pass and don’t come.
“My husband taught me to play craps, and he’s a don’t bettor,” she wrote.
The tale she shared this time involved a day when her husband was tied up in meetings at a conference. That didn’t bother her. She was used to heading to the craps table on her own.
“It was a table full of dudes, and they were only too happy to see a lady at the table – until I put my money on don’t pass,” she wrote. “They started giving me the business. ‘Hey, girls against guys? Is that the way it is?’”
Maria didn’t intend for it to be a battle of the sexes, but she was able to shrug it off. When her husband isn’t around, being both the only woman and the only don’t bettor is just business as usual.
“I laughed, and they kept teasing,” she wrote. “We were all about breaking even I guess, winning some and losing some, but it was back and forth.
“Finally, one guy said, ‘Come on, Maria,’ – they found out my name when the pit supervisor gave me my players card back. ‘Be one of the guys!’”
And, she wrote, she gave into temptation.
“I said, ‘OK, just this once.’ Lucky I did. The shooter made a few points, and I won a couple of hundred dollars. I cashed out, and one of them said, ‘Nice to have you on the team,’ and I said, ‘Please, no one tell my husband.’”
“But I told him later, and we had a nice laugh about it.”
They also had an extra couple of hundred dollars to play with, so even her husband agreed that just that once, it paid to be one of the boys.
