Question of the Day - 12 July 2016

You win! (And we promise not to pay you with a $50 bill ... because there's no prize!)

How, when, and why this superstition started is something lost in the mists of time, although we'll include the theories that we've heard (some of which seem more plausible than others), but it's certainly very real and isn't just limited to the gambling community: We understand that cowboys (another highly superstitious group) also consider fifties unlucky. As steer-wrestling champ Matt Reeves told a reporter from the R-J ahead of NFR 2013, "I don’t wear yellow, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with (superstition). I kind of look stupid in yellow. I don’t eat chicken on game day, but that doesn’t have as much to do with superstition as I’ve never made a dollar on a chicken, so we just don’t eat much chicken. I don’t carry ($50 bills) very often — that’s one people have, to don’t carry $50 bills — but mostly because I don’t have $50 bills most of the time."

That same thinking -- that it's unlucky even to have a $50 on your person for any length of time, let alone buy chips using fifties -- also applies to gamblers, although it seems to be more-closely associated with Las Vegas than other gambling locations -- $50s are much more commonplace in everyday life on the East Coast, but gamblers travel and take their superstitions with them, and we gather that fifties are considered a jinx throughout the poker-playing community, regardless of the locale.

And, speaking of chickens, that's part of this whole chicken-and-egg scenario: Partly because they're considered unlucky, there aren't too many $50 bills in circulation; hence, they become more unusual and unfamiliar, making them even more suspicious to the superstitious. (While researching this answer, we read in a 2007 thread on the "2+2" poker forums how one player had received $50 bills from an ATM machine at the Tropicana Atlantic City; we wonder if this flying-in-the-face of casino superstition had anything to do with the property's later demise?!)

As to how it all started, here are some of the stories we're aware of:

• One version has it that a dislike of fifty-dollar bills dates back to the Civil War and an antipathy for Ulysses S. Grant, who appears on the obverse of the bank note (and didn't have a great record when it came to money and the economy, either).
• Another historical explanation ties the superstition firmly to Las Vegas and a legend that when the Mob ran town and took out a hit on someone, they'd bury the body with one of $50 bills in the jacket pocket of the victim (or, according to another version, in their mouth, although we thought it was something else that got stuffed in the mouth...)
• A supplement/alternative to this theory is the story that Bugsy Siegel, of Flamingo infamy, had three $50 bills on him when he was gunned down by the bosses.
• A variation on the Bugsy Siegel story has it that "Wild" Bill Hickock had only fifties on him when he was shot playing the infamous "dead man's hand" in that Deadwood saloon, back in 1876. No source we came across could cite any support for this account, any more than there's any evidence of the Siegel connection, so we'd bet a fifty of our own on both of these explanations being be entirely apocryphal.
• When discussing this superstition, columnist Mark Pilarski, of Casino City Times, recounts, "When I worked at the Cal Neva at Lake Tahoe, the long-time casino cage manager named Mae, who was even there when Frank Sinatra owned the joint, told me that the $50 bill was seen by Asian gamblers as god-awful unlucky. At the Cal Neva, we could take them in, but we didn’t dole them out." While that policy holds true at many Nevada casino cages (although not all), we've never heard of the number 5 or 50 being unlucky for Asian gamblers, for whom 4 is the biggest no-no. And while many Las Vegas casinos skip all floors in the 40s, in addition to the thirteenth, for that reason, for some other reason Mandalay Bay also inexplicably skips all the 50s, meaning that the House of Blues is actually located on the 43rd, not the 63rd floor, as the elevator would have you believe.
• Moving on to more practical theories, we understand that at one point it was the $50 bill, as opposed to the $100, that primarily was being targeted by counterfeiters; hence, gamblers chose to avoid accepting fifties in case they got stuck with a fake bill.
• The only other explanation we've come across, which is the one most-widely circulated, is that $50s tend to be confused with $5s and/or $20s, leading to a reluctance to use them in transactions for fear of being short changed.

We have to say that none of these theories strikes us as particularly satisfactory, but these are the only accounts we've come across (and this isn't the first time we've answered this question in this column). If anyone out there has come across another account, please drop us a line and we'll keep adding to the list. In the meantime, one thing we can say definitively, is that if you want to remain generally on people's good side in Las Vegas, it's advisable to avoid the use of a $50 when paying or tipping for anything -- regardless of whatever the original reason may be.