The Perfect Game of Chance
Chana opines about the differences between card games, board games and games of chance.
Chana Shapiro is an educator, writer, editor and illustrator whose work has appeared in journals, newspapers and magazines. She is a regular contributor to the AJT.
I’m worried about the deleterious impact of table games that require strategy, skill, experience, or even worse, natural ability. I sympathize with folks who wish to avoid the stress of competition while at the same time want to socialize and have fun. I’m talking about card players who have never been successful at Bridge.
How about people who start perspiring when challenged to a game of Scrabble or chess? Let’s not forget innocent children playing games like Tiddly Winks and Pick-up Sticks that favor the kids with superior depth perception and hand control. Even the pop-up game of Perfection honors figure-matching acuity and speed.
Games of chance are different: there is a winner, but non-winners are never riddled with self-deprecation, feeling they weren’t smart or adept enough. In games of chance, one’s abilities don’t matter. The winner has no reason to kvell, and losers have no reason to kvetch.
Fortunately, Chanukah’s game of Dreidel, a classic game of chance, offers an antidote to anyone feeling like a loser, because playing Dreidel requires no talent, intellect, canniness, or expertise. Happily, millions of competition-averse sufferers are safe playing Dreidel, in which an MIT graduate’s spin is as randomly unpredictable as that of my toddler nephew. Dreidel guarantees favoring no one.
Or so I thought.
Let me take you back to our 2024 Chanukah Dreidel game, which challenged the activity’s MO as a game of pure chance. The playing field was carefully egalitarian: we used a set of perfectly matched (none loaded) dreidels, and each player selected one. In games of my youth, my grandfather used working-class, unshelled sunflower seeds as betting currency, but good old U.S. legal tender seemed more fitting for the workers in our game. So, for betting, I brought my big penny jar to the table, from which each player grabbed 10 random pennies. Everyone anted one cent, and the game began.
After a few rounds, Mr. A., at the end of the table, began using his cell phone to determine the numismatic value of his pennies, hoping something in his stash was collectible. A couple of other players followed suit and started checking various websites to see if the dates and mint marks on their pennies made them rare.
Naturally, a debate ensued over who actually owned the pennies and thereby had the right to sell them to a hypothetical collector. Was it the original owner of the pennies (yours truly), or were the other players the owners, because the pennies had been tacitly transferred into their possession? The resident legal expert (my husband) would not invoke Jewish law. He recused himself, claiming partiality. The issue turned out to be moot because, according to the coin evaluation sites, the pennies in play were worth exactly their face value, one cent each. But there were at least a thousand more pennies in the jar, so it seemed prudent to continue searching for treasure.
A new game of chance, Find a Valuable Penny, commenced. Most of the players started pulling pennies from the jar, mining for valuable copper, while continuing to play Dreidel with their original stash. But spinning too many “shins” and “nuns” soon rendered one player after another penniless, too broke to ante in order to stay in the game, and a winner emerged. (Keep reading)
However, rather than heading to the jelly doughnuts, players wanted to examine more pennies. I admit that I, too, grabbed a bunch of pennies. Our granddaughter announced that she would apply the sale of any truly valuable pennies she found to her college loan; forthwith, her parents intensified their search.
We finally despaired of finding valuable pennies, but, for fun, we decided instead to look for pennies minted in our birth years. Unfortunately, this new birth year-focused effort proved equally unproductive. Lots of pennies remained in the jar, but frustrated, we gave up and turned to the doughnuts. Yes, even though eating fattening comfort food to quell disappointment is never a good idea, it was Chanukah after all, and we needed a fix. We dug in with gusto.
During the last few rounds of the game, we had watched our grandson throw “gimmel” after “gimmel,” steadily wiping out all competitors, finally winning all the pennies. Then, following his run, he reached into the penny jar. As if his Dreidel lucky streak wasn’t enough, unlike the rest of us, he pulled out a penny minted in the year he was born, 2006! Was this an additional sign that he is immune to randomness? Or were his continuously spinning “gimmels”– in the supposedly 100 percent random game — and then pulling his birthday-year penny out of the jar on his very first try a mere coincidence?
Another player, Mrs. B., an experienced recreational gambler, asserted that some people are genetically lucky, and she declared that our grandson’s dual inexplicable successes obviously resulted from a good luck mutation in his DNA; thus, his good luck is clearly a permanent endowment. Guided by her conviction, she vowed to take him to Vegas on his 21st birthday.
Until then, just in case Mrs. B. knows what she’s talking about, we’re encouraging our grandson to enter more raffles and play more Powerball.
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