It was with something approaching glee that I read that the new Pittsburgh casino is not creating as many losers as expected.

That's not the way it was phrased, of course, and it's a long shot to say that just two weeks of play can predict the casino's take for a full year. But we can dream, can't we?

Early returns are these: After a strong opening, the casino on the Ohio River took in only $4.6 million and change in "gross terminal revenue" in its second week. (That's what customers on the short end of the slots equation might call "the losings.") That projects to only $242 million over the course of a year.

It may be ridiculous to put an "only" in front of a number such as that, but that's little more than half the $427.8 million the casino operators figured they'd haul in the first year. It's two-thirds of the $362.4 million that the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board predicted.

In short, Pennsylvanians may not be as dumb as previously thought.

I couldn't help but think of my mother when I read this. Joan Curran O'Neill grew up during the Depression, as she may have mentioned to my siblings and me a time or two thousand when we were growing up.

She has kept her purse sealed tighter than Tupperware for about eight decades now, but not too long after the Atlantic City casinos opened in the late 1970s, she became a semi-regular visitor -- and Mom beat the house on every visit.

Here's how she did it.

In those early days, casino operators wanted to make sure that every last blue hair in the New York megalopolis ambled through its doors. So they'd sponsor bus trips. Mom would get on a bus in Long Island with other members of, I don't know, the Holy Name Society or the American Legion Auxiliary or the Senior Citizens, and motor to Atlantic City.

The bus ride was free and pleasing. Mom was always among friends, even if she didn't know the person beside her on entry. Before they crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, she'd know their life story. I've seen her get the entire genealogy of the cashier's family before she was through a supermarket checkout line.

The beauty part of these casino junkets was that the little old ladies from Massapequa and other slices of suburbia were all handed a $10 roll of quarters to get them started. Slot machines have been called the crack cocaine of gambling, the gateway drug that keeps players hungry for more. Casino owners figured they'd get the $10 back quickly and then they'd essentially hang each bus upside down by its axles until all the money fell out.

These schmoes hadn't met my mom.

Mom would put the roll of quarters in her purse with God knows what else, but probably some of her First Communion money. Then she'd stroll the boardwalk, as she'd done as a younger woman from Jenkintown, a suburb of Philadelphia. If there was a restaurant coupon in the bus package, she'd use that, too.

I can't say how often she'd see the ocean this way, but it always made for quite a nice day, she told me at the time, and she generally came home with a little more money than when she'd begun.

I tried to jog Mom's memory about this last week. She'll be 88 next month and lives in an assisted-care facility about a 15-minute ride from my brother. She didn't remember details of her Atlantic City trips, but I'd swear on a stack of casino chips that I'm remembering the story as she told it almost 30 years ago.

I understand slots parlors use "player cards" now so Mom's gambit would no longer work. But if we are to live under a government by Barnum, wherein the state actively recruits suckers to "create thousands of new living wage jobs" and "lower property taxes for homeowners," the most artful move is simply to stay out of the way.

Gov. Ed Rendell would next like to legalize video poker machines in bars (where thousands already pay off illegally). That would generate more financial aid in state-owned colleges. Fine. But remember the big picture, which isn't quite the way Gus the Groundhog frames it in those Pennsylvania Lottery commercials.

Let other suckers provide the gross terminal revenue. In Pennsylvania, you have to not play to win.