Most people who win the lottery are exactly as they were prior within a few years if they are not worse off. The fiscal management skills that lead one to give over daily money for scratch-offs will also cause the new money to vanish.

No story about Las Vegas should begin in Vegas. It is a place one goes, often rashly, and from which one returns often poorer in money and richer in experience. It is a crapshoot—pun intended—if the outcome will match the intention. Las Vegas will not disappoint, becoming a story one can tell in a bar, how one got an unfortunate tattoo, or drunkenly married a new acquaintance at the Little Vegas Chapel in front of an Elvis impersonator.

Las Vegas may have residents and not merely tourists, but it does not want to welcome you. You are swallowed. Maybe it will hack up your hair and bones later, but the oddsmakers are not on your side.

Do you think, one day, your number is up? That the gods look down and say, ‘Oh, you have had a winning streak when it comes to not having your throat torn out by a tiger, but you’ve come up snake-eyes today'?