Today I’ll tell you another story from my college days. I was visiting a friend in Cincinnati, Ohio, and he took me to a frat party. Warm beer in red, plastic cups. Low-key lighting slowing down your reflexes. Thick smoke filling up your lungs the moment you enter the house. A drunk girl dancing on a table. Strangers making out as if it’s the end of the world. Small groups of nerds seem totally out of place. Beer pong and flip cup teams warming up for some world-class action. You know the drill.

My friend Tom knew the crowd and was greeted here and there but he made a beeline for stairs. Upstairs, there were three guys waiting for us. On the table in front of them, there was a large roulette outline and stacks of one hundred-dollar bills.

Tom quickly introduced me to his friends whom he called “his secret roulette team.” They gathered once a week to practise playing roulette. In their attempt to beat the house, they were trying out different strategies and devising ones of their own. Turns out the legal gambling age in Ohio and in most states is 21. So, they had a few months before they could play at a real casino.

“I brought you over, Liam” Tom explained, “because I know you’ve played at land-based casinos as well as online casinos.” He paused letting the information sink in.

“That’s true…” I said tentatively. “But how could I possibly help?”

“Oh, we’ll just give it a few spins, have some fun and we’ll see where it takes us. And you get to keep whatever you win.” He added an ambiguous wink to his statement.

We played a few games. At first, I mostly placed outside bets to get a feel of the game and the table and then I decided to go for it and bet on straight numbers. I bet on my birthday. I won. I bet on my favourite numbers, all 8 of them. I won. I bet on my cat’s age and on the number of pets my little sister had managed to kill. You get the idea. I WON every time. Every bloody time! I got cocky, started wagering more and, because I was using a martingale strategy (Here’s martingale strategy explained), my winnings multiplied by the minute. I was at the top of the world and Cloud Nine was so damn comfy…

Then I heard my name from a distance… “Liam!”

Bathing in success, I thought it was Lady Luck calling me.

“Liaaam! Liaaaaaam!!!” It was Tom. “Wake up, man! We smoked a joint and you passed out!” He answered my question before I even had the chance to form it in my mind, let alone ask it.

“But what about the roulette? My winnings?” I mumbled, still in that hazy, half-asleep state.

“What roulette, fool?” Tom laughed, his voice booming in my ears. “You’re at a frat party!”

So, that’s it – a true story of me getting stoned in the good old US of A and dreaming of playing roulette and winning big, not dreaming of hot girls, like regular college students would.

It’s not exactly a secret that I’m a pretty big fan of online casino – as a matter of fact, many of my stories have to do with gambling, in one way or another! But, believe it or not, one of my first experiences in the area almost made me quit the whole thing, and it’s so fantastical that most people whom I’ve told it to don’t believe me! Honestly, I don’t blame them, because the thing sounds like something straight out of a Creepypasta. The story takes place shortly after I turned 20, maybe about a month or so after I began playing online casino. I won’t disclose the site where I played, mostly because I don’t want to discourage people from signing up (it’s a pretty great site that I still visit occasionally), but let’s just say, it’s one that even at the time was pretty famous for its live games. For those of you who don’t know what live casino is, you can learn more on this website, but to put it simply, it’s basically a game where you watch a real dealer through a webcam deal cards or spin a roulette wheel and place bets on the outcome remotely. It’s great fun!

So, due to college and my job at the time, I really didn’t have a lot of time to play casino games, so I typically did so pretty late at night, usually around 1 or 2 AM. When that story was happening, I think it was a bit later than that, maybe approaching 3 AM, because there was absolutely nobody in the live roulette room with me. Usually there is a certain number of players that can join a table at one time, but this time it was just me and the dealer – a mildly attractive mid-20s girl with a cockney accent so thick it couldn’t be thicker if she tried. Being the centre of attention for once was actually pretty fun as the girl (let’s call her Ann, less to preserve her anonymity and more because I don’t recall her actual name) addressed me by my username, responded to my text messages in the chat so we can have a conversation and overall we had a fun time. Almost felt like we were at a real casino. But that’s when a second player joined the game.

“Liam”, the player typed in the chat almost immediately upon signing on. I found that quite odd, because my username doesn’t even contain half of those letters, so how in the world did the guy know my name? “What?” I typed. “What?” Ann responded to me. “That guy just said my name!” I typed. “What guy?” She asked me. “Love, it’s just you and me here!” Ann insisted, shrugging her shoulders. “You abandoned me in Leicester, Liam”, the mysterious new player typed up, and now I was seriously sweating bullets because Leicester was my hometown, and there’s absolutely no way in hell a player could possibly know this! Like, even if they could somehow track my IP address, I wasn’t currently in Leicester, I was away for school, so what the hell? How could they possibly know my hometown? “Who are you?” I asked. “Carter”, the stranger typed up, and that almost made me fall out of my chair. My mother’s maiden name was Carter, before changing it to Randall when she got married. My terrified subconscious began conjuring up images of a sister of an aunt I didn’t know who passed away back home and had come back to haunt me. Horrified, I immediately shut off my computer by holding the power button and then went right back to sleep. Naturally, that didn’t mean that I was actually able to sleep.

Of course, the story isn’t really supernatural, but the real solution is so absolutely ridiculous that many people have found it harder to swallow than the ghost part! I thought about just ending the story here, but figured “Ah, what the hell, I’ll give you the full thing”. A few days later I received an e-mail from the online casino with an explanation of what had happened. As it turns out, while I believed that there was only one person in charge of each live casino room, there were actually two – the dealer and an IT guy who does stuff like put values up on the screen, monitor the transactions and address customer complaints in real time. As it turns out, both of them had handed in their resignations a few days prior, but according to their contract still had to work for a set amount of time before being allowed to leave unless they were kicked out. Well, I was their ticket to getting kicked out. Ann’s friend was the mysterious user, who used his privileges as an IT guy to look at my personal information and use it to spook the hell out of me. Well, they achieved their goal – both Ann and her friend were kicked out (according to the e-mail, at least), and for my troubles I got a nice deposit for free and another story to share.