7aram Money

And the burden of getting rid of it

In July of 2019, as I was finishing up a session at the Wynn Spa in Las Vegas before checking out, a friend gave me one of his last remaining $20 Encore-engraved casino chips, and because we had a flight to Orlando to catch I decided to “play and lose it quickly”.

It’s funny how I thought I could intentionally control the results of a game entirely dictated by luck. I underestimated the difficulty of deliberately losing a game of chance, which was virtually impossible: in the same way we can’t choose to win the lottery, we also cannot choose to lose it. The beauty of games of chance is that they will give you what they want, never what you want.

I went all in with my $20 on War, a simple 1:1 game where the highest card wins, and boy did I keep winning…

I ended up with $5,000 cash in my pocket on the Uber to the airport. It felt nice to win, perhaps due to the effortlessness of it all, but there was one problem: this money was 7aram. Sacrilegious. Not kosher at all.

A not-so-uncommon belief is that 7aram money should only be spent on 7aram things, but