I hate flying. Not the actual flying part—I understand the physics, I trust the statistics, I know I'm more likely to get hit by a falling vending machine than fall out of the sky. What I hate is the waiting. The two hours of sitting in a plastic chair, watching people eat overpriced sandwiches, listening to gate announcements that never seem to be about my flight. Time moves differently in airports. It thickens. Becomes something you have to push through.
My flight to Denver was supposed to leave at 6:15 PM. By 7:30, they still hadn't announced a gate. By 8:00, they told us the plane was delayed due to "weather in the connecting city." By 9:00, they told us to check back at 10:00. I had been at the airport since 4:00. Five hours. Five hours of fluorescent lights and rolling suitcases and the specific misery of travel when you just want to be somewhere else.
I was coming back from a work conference. Three days of networking and PowerPoints and forced enthusiasm. My social battery was dead. My back hurt from the hotel bed. All I wanted was my own couch and my own TV and the particular silence of my apartment at midnight. Instead, I was in Terminal C, Gate 42, watching a family of four argue about whether to get pizza or burgers.
I had my work laptop with me. I opened it out of habit, not intention. Emails, mostly. A few Slack messages from colleagues who didn't realize I was traveling. I cleared the inbox, closed the tabs, and sat there with the cursor blinking on an empty desktop. I was too tired to work. Too awake to sleep. Too restless to just sit.
That's when I remembered the browser bookmark I'd saved months ago. A friend had sent it to me. "For slow days," he'd said. I'd never used it. I'm not the type. I play fantasy football, I bet on March Madness, but that's the extent of my risk tolerance. Still, I was sitting in an airport at 9:30 PM with nothing to do and three hours to kill before they'd even tell me if my flight was happening.
I clicked the bookmark. The page loaded. I sat there for a moment, reading the terms, the fine print, the things you're supposed to read but nobody ever does. Then I shrugged. I had fifty bucks in my wallet that was earmarked for airport food I wasn't going to buy. I decided to
visit the official Vavada website.
The interface was clean. Simpler than I expected. No flashing banners, no aggressive pop-ups. Just games arranged in rows like an app store. I deposited forty dollars—not the whole fifty, because I'm not completely stupid—and started browsing. I didn't know what I was looking for. Slots seemed too random. Roulette felt like math I didn't want to do. I landed on blackjack. I know blackjack. Basic strategy, nothing fancy. Hit on sixteen against a ten, stand on seventeen, never take insurance. Simple.
I played for about forty minutes. The first ten minutes were brutal. I lost hand after hand, dropping from forty to twelve dollars. I almost closed the laptop. But there was something about the rhythm of it that kept me there. The cards sliding across the screen. The dealer's face never changing. It was hypnotic in a way that made the airport disappear.
I started paying attention. Not to the cards—to the pattern. The way the shoe was running. I adjusted my bets. Small when I was unsure, bigger when I felt the tilt. Twelve dollars became twenty. Twenty became forty. Forty became eighty. I was up. Not by much, but up.
Then I got a hand that made me sit forward. I was dealt a pair of eights against a dealer six. Splitting eights is basic strategy. I split. First hand: a three. Eleven. Double down. Second hand: a ten. Eighteen. I held my breath. The dealer turned over their hole card. A ten. Sixteen. The dealer drew a five. Twenty-one. I lost the double down. Lost the split. Dropped back to forty.
I wanted to stop. I should have stopped. But I didn't. I played one more hand. Dealt a nine and a two against a dealer four. Eleven again. Double down. The dealer gave me a ten. Twenty-one. The dealer turned over a seven. Eleven. Drew a nine. Twenty. I won. My balance jumped to eighty.
That's when the run started. I don't know how to explain it. It wasn't skill. Basic strategy is just memorization. It was timing. Every hand I played, the cards broke my way. I doubled on elevens and hit tens. I split aces and pulled face cards. Eighty became a hundred and fifty. A hundred and fifty became three hundred. Three hundred became six hundred.
I was holding my breath without realizing it. The airport was still there—the announcements, the rolling suitcases, the family who'd finally decided on burgers—but it felt distant. Like I was watching it through glass. My hands were steady. My head was clear. I played one more hand. Dealt twenty against a dealer six. Stood. The dealer flipped a ten, then a five. Twenty-one. I lost.
I closed the laptop.
Not because I was angry. Because I was done. Six hundred dollars was sitting in my account. I cashed out. All of it. I sat there in the plastic chair, laptop closed, watching people walk past. The gate announcement came ten minutes later. Flight 847 to Denver now boarding at Gate 42. I stood up. Grabbed my bag. Walked to the counter.
The flight was fine. Bumpy over the Rockies, but fine. I landed at midnight, took a shuttle to the parking lot, drove home. I didn't check my bank account until the next morning. The money was there. Six hundred dollars. More than I'd spent on the entire conference trip.
I don't play blackjack anymore. Not really. I still have the account, and sometimes on a slow night I'll open it up. I stick to the same game, the same strategy. I never win big again. Most nights I lose the twenty bucks I put in and close the laptop without a second thought. But sometimes, when I'm waiting for something—a flight, a meeting, a moment where I'm stuck between where I was and where I'm going—I think about that night in Terminal C. The way the cards fell. The way time stopped being thick and started being something I could move through.
I still hate flying. But I don't hate waiting anymore. Not entirely. Because waiting, I learned, is just time you haven't spent yet. And sometimes, if you're patient and a little lucky, it spends itself right back.
