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I like Las Vegas. I’ve been there a half-dozen times, including a family vacation a couple summers back that made me question why in the world I would bring two teenagers to Sin City. Nevertheless, I’ve always found it to be one of the most uniquely weird places in America, and I’ve usually enjoyed my time there even though I’ve never been a gambler.

Until 2023.

I’ve always been fascinated by gamblers, but I’ve always considered the practice to be a bad idea. Everyone knows that “the house always wins,” so, to borrow a phrase from WarGames, the only winning move is not to play.

Last year, though, I found myself in Vegas twice and in a North Carolina Cherokee reservation casino, and I did catch the bug. Some of the more sophisticated slot machines do an extraordinary job of using the sensory experience to hook you in, and I’m as degenerate as the next person. I won pretty decently on one trip and lost pretty badly on another, and I consider myself fortunate to live far enough away from a casino that any trip is going to be a special occasion.

Slots YouTube, though, is always here for me.

When I first learned that there are people that point cameras as slot machines and record half-hour videos of them talking over the game, I thought it was maybe the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. How mentally cracked do you have to be to watch someone gambling 88 cent bets a couple hundred spins? But I’m a person who caught myself watching the Excel World Championships over the holidays, so I may not be the best person to ask.

Slots YouTubers like Mr. Hand Pay, Ruby Slots and Vegas Matt have become as much a part of my regular YouTube viewing as Linus TechTips, Dawid Does Tech Stuff, Digital Foundry and Dave 2D. Being able to check out the new machines and get some of the dopamine from the wins (and, who are we kidding, the schadenfreude from the losses) is fun in itself, and I’ve actually come to enjoy the ribbing, banter and some of the outrageous stunts that the hosts pull. Where else can you watch a person blow through $25,000 in fifteen minutes and laugh it off?

I just really need Georgia to never legalize casino gambling.