Gambling

Is a huge topic here in Hawaii. Huge!!! People who live here love to gamble. LOVE IT!!!! We even call Las Vegas the 9th Hawaiian Island. People from Hawaii go there so often that you can actually find deals to Vegas cheaper then almost anywhere else. It's crazy. And while they love to go to Vegas and gamble in person, they will gamble just about any way they can. Poker nights are huge - hell, there's one at my house every Tuesday and the guys really, really look forward to that. Fantasy football is big. So is online sports betting. Seriously big. Now in the interest of full disclosure, I myself am not a gambler. I will gamble with a lot of things; my time, my energy, my creativity; but not my money. But I do understand the attraction of it. The few times I have gambled, I have really enjoyed when I won - the rush of winning is awesome. And that may be why I stay away from it, because I could grow to like it too much.

There is a lot of talk here about allowing casinos. People here spend so much money in Vegas that they think if we build casinos here they will spend their money here. I'm not sure that's true, let me explain. Living here on an island things are expensive. Very, very expensive. Housing is among the highest in the nation. Food costs are astronomical. Gas is completely insane. It's expensive to live here. Also, we don't have things that they have on the mainland. Trader Joe's, Kohl's, and a bunch of other stores. So when people go to Vegas, gambling is not the only reason. They go to gamble and to visit all the stores we don't have here and get things we can't get. If they just wanted to gamble they can do that online. They can go to a bet calculator and figure out how much to bet, how much they would win, what the spread is, etc. And like I said, there are poker nights all over if they want the live action of gambling with other people. I'm not sure that people go to Vegas just to gamble. I think there are more underlying motives that lawmakers are missing. Of course I think that about a lot of things with lawmakers.