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More tables, better prizes, bigger event: Gambling After Dark steps up their game big time

(from left to right) Teresa Santana, Jon Rodgers, John Romano and Nicole Hamel made up last year’s e-board. (Courtesy of John Romano)

Shane Foley
Connector Editor

Occuring for the fourth year in a row, the event many have come to know as Gambling After Dark has undergone a huge makeover. This year’s event will host more tables, bigger prizes and more activities.

“We’ve upgraded a lot of things,” said Justin Killgoar, member of the event’s e-board. One of the improvements, he said, was a more realistic horseracing section, which has gained notoriety as one of the more popular activities at the event.

“We are keeping most of the games the same,” said Killgoar. “We just bumped up the appearance and the aesthetics and the amount that we are going to be having, [and are] going to try to reduce the amount of wait time as much as possible for people.”

The e-board for the event also has been able to provide more prizes for attendees this year, as well as over 9,000 condoms. “We have a much larger budget for prizes this year than in past years. We have invester over $600 in two prizes,” said Killgoar, who also said other prizes will be “the standard headphones and other things, and our black box items.” The black box items are a staple of Gambling After Dark, as they are many variant tools that promote safe sex.

As for the other prizes, The Gambling After Dark team are keeping them a surprise. “There will be a few teasers on the Facebook page on the days upcoming to the event,” said Killgoar.

Gambling After Dark has typically benefitted from the contributions of many third party organizations, such as LASA and Healthy Hawks. This year, however, the event is also promoting the It’s on Us campaign, an initiative created to raise awareness for sexual violence. Attendees will be able to take a pledge, as part of the campaign, to denounce the dangers of sexual violence and pledge their support to sexual violence survivors.

“The chancellor of UMass Lowell is going to come during the day and she is going to take a pledge,” said Killgoar. “And anyone who takes the pledge will receive additional condoms for gambling.”

While this is his first year working the event, Killgoar has attended the previous two years. He said he is now a part of the biggest e-board team the event has seen. Plenty of new voices have contributed to the changes Gambling After Dark has undergone.

“It’s nice because some of the problems that I had attending can now be more brought to the spotlight. Especially since in past years it was mostly people who worked the event as opposed to people who had attended the event that came up with the ideas, so they didn’t really know much of the problems,” said Killgoar.

Gambling After Dark will take place in University Crossing, Maloney 260, on Monday, Nov. 28 at 6 p.m.

“It’s also more of a fun event, and the educational component is almost more of a passive feel for a lot of people, because how often does the university open up a casino for three hours on a random night?” said Killgoar.

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