GAMBLING FUN

There are plenty of opportunities in Yuma to gamble if you feel lucky. There are three casinos within about a 20 minute drive from the Foothills thanks to the Cocopah and Quechan Indian tribes. The Quechan casinos used to cater to the large crowd of senior citizens who winter in the area drawing out many players when they offered $10 free play on their slot machines each week. On the $10 days you'd see hordes of seniors fighting for a machine to pull the lever on (actually you just press a button now making it less taxing to drop your money). It wasn't a bad deal because you also got free drinks. Soon some dishonest person (not a senior) found a way to cheat, probably by lifting player cards, and the $10 days ended. Luckily in The Community there started a way to gamble with low expense and still with that excitement that always accompanies games of chance. It is called Card Bingo and you can tell when and where it is being played on a Sunday afternoon by the shouts and screams emanating therefrom. For those not familiar with Card Bingo, here's how it is played. Rather than use bingo cards and the little numbered balls, the game uses playing cards. The cards from a regular deck of cards are dealt out to four people at a table. The caller then turns over cards from a regular deck and calls them out. The players who have the cards called discard them from their hand. The person who gets rid of their last card first is a winner. You really can't lose much money. There are only ten hands with the antes as follows: three for a nickel, three for a dime, three for a quarter and one for a dollar. Obviously, how much a winner gets depends on how many are playing. Even though the stakes are low you'd never know it from the eagerness of the participants. A requirement of play is that each person who is down to one card in their hand must knock on the table. This results in good-hearted cries of "Boo" or "She can't win again", etc. There are no free drinks but it's a lot of fun and much better than sitting in a big smokey, noisy place where the odds are in favor of the house. I just wish they would start Bingo a little later. I've had trouble getting home from late church service to gamble.