FTC students let it roll at Casino Night
The clickety clacking of poker chips and shuffling of cards filled The Upbeat last Thursday as the highly anticipated Casino Night returned after two years. Each student was given 500 chips to start with and a raffle ticket to put towards a variety of prizes. Casino games offered included three-card poker, Let It Ride (a variation of poker), Blackjack, Roulette, and Craps. Music played as attendees quickly filled in the tables and grabbed drinks like Shirley Temples and sparkling cider.
Winners started to emerge soon after the cards were dealt. For others, it wasn’t long before they began to lose everything. “I feel like air,” said Film and Television major John David Kororthy after losing his last chip at the roulette table. “I had a lot of chips, and now I don’t think I have that many chips. Actually, I don’t have any.”
There were chances to win more chips throughout the night by completing challenges or answering trivia. Assistant Dean of Campus Life, Michael Cavalli, awarded chips for things like being the first person to show a picture of their pet or a picture of the beach. Trivia was FTC-related, and participants had to answer questions like “What three towns did Five Towns have a campus in?” These opportunities helped those who’d accumulated a chip lead keep their advantage and allowed those who’d lost everything to re-enter the game.
Several of the tables were run by FTC faculty, including Library Director John Vansteen. “This is a lot of fun. This is the second time I’ve done it for this event, and it’s a lot of fun. I got to see all these students win a whole lot of “money,” which is really nice.”
As the night started to wind down, tables closed, and everyone started cashing in their chips, hopeful they had made enough to trade in for more raffle tickets to be put towards prizes, which included a $25 Target gift card, a $25 Cheesecake Factory gift card, a $50 Amazon gift card, an iPad, and a 43-inch Smart TV.
Mass communication student Megan Hartman won the coveted Smart TV and gave credit to a friend, saying, “My [friend Joey’s] luck definitely rubbed off on me. I don’t know; he has insane luck with gambling, so I think it definitely helped me out tonight. And I think he definitely taught me how to gamble a little bit. [I] got some tickets, got some money up, and uh, yeah, now I got a TV.”
Though Five Town’s Weeks of Welcome and the first month of the semester are coming to a close, Campus Events has more fun and community-building events in store for the fall. Be sure to follow @FTC Events on Instagram.
