My niece was born Aug. 12, some 700 miles from Las Vegas. That same day, somewhere over Greenland and Spain, there was a total solar eclipse. 

A new baby, a cosmic event and Treasure Island handing out $200 in free slot play to anyone who signed up for its rewards card. Free money from an established Strip casino, on a lucky day.

My wife and I aren't the type to double-check our omens. We got in the car and headed for the Strip.

Walking in from the parking garage shortly before 7 p.m., I passed someone on the phone saying, "Don't worry, I have someone standing in line for me." My first thought was that I should sign up for TaskRabbit. 

Then we saw what that phone call was about. The line wrapped the entire casino floor, one massive, slow-moving snake of humanity coiling past the slots and back around on itself. 

You had to sign up in person, at the desk, and you could only activate the offer Monday through Wednesday. Once activated, you had 24 hours to run the entire $200 through a slot machine in one sitting, one time, once per person. Miss the window and the money is gone. 

Typical Strip free-play offers run somewhere between $20 and $75, and usually you have to gamble some of your own cash to unlock them. Two hundred, just for signing up? That's the biggest free-play offer I've ever seen. That's also why the snake existed.

About 200 yards from the rewards desk, my wife asked a man in the line how long he'd been standing there. About two hours, he figured. He wasn't moving. He was committed. 

The crowd around him was everybody. People who had clearly come straight from an office job, visitors towing suitcases and hoping to hit something before a red-eye home and mostly, as far as I could tell, locals of every description.

Vegas is full of promo-chasers and points hobbyists, people who treat casino marketing as a sport. Nobody in that line was being conned. 

Or at least that's what I thought in the moment. Multiple hours of your evening for a shot at $200 is a trade plenty of reasonable people would take.

I suspect that for many, that $200 wasn't just a deal or a casual bonus. It was utility money. In a struggling economy where the cost of existence continues to outpace wages, the pursuit of two bills becomes a desperate necessity rather than a hobby. 

But I don't actually think anyone was really there for $200. They were buying hope — or maybe the hope of hope, the chance that a free spin becomes a windfall, and a windfall becomes a different life. 

Gambling is a terrible plan for getting there. It only works for a vanishingly small number of people, and the only way to find out if it's going to work for you is to stand in the line. 

Or look at the line and change your mind. We live in the gambling capital of the world, in a state whose Constitution won't let the state sell you a lottery ticket, and that night the closest thing to one was a rewards card at Treasure Island.

Whatever you lose was never yours to begin with. Whatever survives the play-through you can cash out or, more likely, feed back in, because you're already there, and the bar is right there, and dinner is right there. Which, as we all know, is the whole idea. Treasure Island wasn't running a charity. It was running the oldest play on the Strip, eating a loss up front to get bodies in the building and trusting human nature to do the rest. 

Casinos don't go broke for a reason. On a long enough timeline, the house always wins. Cue Danny Ocean's speech in Ocean's Eleven.

We looked at the line for a few more minutes, mostly to see where it ended, and then we drove home. I didn't need $200 badly enough to give it my whole night, and I'm aware of what that sentence says about me. 

Here's what I found out the next day. Around 10 minutes to midnight that same night, Treasure Island shut the promotion down. The offer, originally advertised to run into early September, ended after three days. 

A woman named Michelle Miller had gotten in line that evening, waited five and a half hours, and was still standing there when management called it. People who had been assured for hours that they were inside the cutoff spent the rest of the night getting different answers from different employees. The casino offered a statement: "Due to overwhelming response, the offer reached its planned capacity earlier than anticipated."

This is Vegas. Treasure Island is a casino. Counting things is more or less the business model. Somehow, the one thing nobody thought to count was the people standing in line. 

So the $200 was never the sure thing anybody in that line was told it was. Not for the man who priced his evening at two hours, not for the woman who priced hers at five and a half, and not for us. 

This didn't land like a standard Strip promotion because the city no longer feels like its old self. In this era of Vegas, whatever it is, locals have been squeezed by endless stadium bonds, tax abatements for billionaire-led corporations and erosion of wages. A $200 offer hits less like a marketing perk. Honestly, now it feels more like a taunt. 

Some of the people who did the math right and followed every rule the casino posted ended up exactly where we did anyway. My wife and I decided the baby niece's luck was real, that it just steered us away from the line. I'm not sure that holds up, but at least I got to be in bed before 10.

Bryan Driscoll is a Las Vegas-based human resources consultant who advises employers on workforce compliance and legal risk.