In a previous article we talked about why casinos don’t tend to give out certain currency. One of them was the $50 bill. Many find it unlucky, and while we referenced it in passing in that article, we didn’t address the question directly, but we have a great opportunity to do so now:
I heard a lot of people say $50 bills are cursed when you put them in a slot machine. Is that true or just another myth?
Mary T.
Thanks for the question Mary! While the superstition is of course that, there’s some reasoning behind why it became one. A reader left the comment on our previous article on the topic:
The “$50 bills are unlucky” belief started because when the Mob killed someone, they put a $50 bill in his pocket.
Amethyst
This has been reported enough that either it’s true or an often shared urban legend at this point, but with the mob’s history with the development of Las Vegas there’s enough connections to understand the gambler superstition kicking in.
Of course the $50 bill isn’t the only number that yields tweaks to what you see in places like Las Vegas. Many elevators, not just Las Vegas, purposefully skip floor 13 for superstitious reasons, and many Las Vegas casinos, especially ones catering to Asian customers, skip the 40-something numbers altogether due to 4 an unlucky number there (the word for 4 sounds similar to the word for death in some Asian languages).
So the $50 bill falls into that category – given the bill’s history and gamblers being pretty superstitious, some avoid it, but $50 bills don’t tank players ability to win, so ultimately it’s still a myth from that perspective – just one with a pretty good story behind it.
You can safely bring $50 bills and it won’t have any impact on your casino play, even if some will choose to avoid it for their own personal reasons.
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Another thing I have noticed at the ATM/Payout Machines, they do not have dimes. I asked a casino manager about this, and he said it is just something else they would have to load into the machine, and it’s just as effective if they just payout two nickels instead of one dime.
That’s true Rick – casinos thin out some of the coin and bill options just to have less to manage! It’s the same reason why they tend to skip $10 bills.