2 Good Reasons Why Casinos DON'T Pump Oxygen Into The Air

The Myth: “Did you know that casinos pump oxygen into gaming rooms, to keep players awake? The pure oxygen keeps them playing for longer.”

One of the great things about Google is its advanced search feature. By setting custom dates, you can estimate when — roughly — urban legends first appeared.

The myth, that oxygen is pumped into casinos, seems to have originated in about 2005.

Curiously, in an episode of How I Met Your Mother (season 2, episode 8), which was first broadcast in November 2006, the story gets a shout out.

Maybe, this is where the myth gained some momentum. Who knows…

Anyway: it’s total BS.

The myth has been debunked countless times, but it still persists.

1. It Would Cost Way Too Much

Let’s head over to BOC, a British multinational industrial gas company and part of the German Linde Group. The business has been manufacturing oxygen since 1886. Life is — literally — a gas for this lot.

For the purposes of this debunking, we will use diving grade oxygen, at 99.5% purity. A standard cylinder costs $103.07 It contains 12.13 cubic meters of glorious oxygen.

To keep things simple, we are going to stay metric and we are going to focus on one of the most iconic casinos in Las Vegas: the Bellagio.

The Bellagio boasts a gaming room that is roughly 14,500 square meters in size. To get the cubic volume, we also need the room’s height. That’s a tricky one to source.

The Bellagio Casino floor appears to be approximately twice the height of a typical player. Let’s say, being conservative, the room is four meters in height.

To work out the total volume of cubic meters, we take the floor space and multiply it by the room’s height: 14,500 x 4 = 58,000 cubic meters.

Now we divide this number by 12.13 – the number of cubic meters in a single cylinder of oxygen. The answer is 4,781.

So – extrapolating this: to completely ‘refresh’ the players, and to refill the gaming room with a dose of diving grade oxygen, would require 4,781 single use cylinders at $103.07 each.

That adds up to more than $492,777.

We know that both land-based and real money online casinos are in the business of making money.

There is just no way they’d be dropping almost half a million dollars, multiple times a day, just to try and keep their patrons awake. Think about it.

2. Everyone Would Die

Let’s try and keep it simple. There are scores of papers on the effects of increased oxygen and the probability of combustion.

Paraphrasing their conclusions: if you start pumping oxygen into a casino, and the little old lady, playing the slots, fires up a Marlboro, there’s a pretty good chance the action at the blackjack table is going to heat up – a lot.

Even a small increase in oxygen levels can turn a small fire into an inferno.

Casinos might want to milk every dollar, but they don’t want to cremate the golden geese, gambling away.

3. That’s Enough

Do you really need any more reasons?

It’s insanely expensive and everyone could die, in a self-inflicted inferno.

Two footnotes:

a) Yes, casinos do use ventilation and filtration systems; mainly to remove the smell of stale fags and lost hope.
b) If you really want some fresh oxygen for brunch, in Sin City, you can get it at the Breathe Wellness Oxygen Bar and the Serenity O2 Bar. We’ll have two lungfuls and a bag of nuts, please…