The Ski Journal • Volume 15, Issue 3 • SHAKE-A-DAY

Keeping après safety first, urinal head pads come in handy at the Bierstube in Whitefish, MT. Photo: Grant Gunderson

When you win $1,300 on a 50-cent roll of the dice at a dive bar, you order Fireball to celebrate.

I learned this valuable life lesson in a cantina in Columbia Falls, MT, from a man named Alexander, whose name fit him like a borrowed jacket and was in all likelihood a nom de guerre.

There was no great ceremony to his windfall. One minute Alexander was telling us his preferred way to plow through the free books at the local Eagles club: “I just pick up a book, read a random page, and put it back.” The next, he was asking the bartender for a shake. A cheer erupted from the bar shortly after and it had nothing to do with the game blasting on TV.

With little fanfare, the bartender counted out a pot of money, which had been stuffed in what resembled a kid’s allowance jar, keeping out 10 percent to reseed the pot and sliding the rest to the winner. Alexander strutted around the bar ordering shots for the half-dozen of us in attendance. Not wanting to outclass my benefactor, I matched him: a shot of Fireball to mark the day.

Shake-A-Day, the dive-bar diversion similar to Yahtzee for a progressive jackpot of quarters, may not be unique to Montana, but it’s achieved near-mythical status here. The house rules are simple, universal and enshrined by state law (seriously): No more than five dice may be used, shakes cannot exceed 50 cents per play (or “shake”), and only one shake per customer, per day is allowed. The unofficial rules: If you win, tip your bartender a percentage of the pot and buy everyone in the bar a drink.

The game has achieved its status despite—or perhaps because of—its nature as a no-stakes game. The tinny plink of slapping two quarters down on the bar is unlikely to turn heads. Putting those same quarters into the jukebox would require more mental commitment.

The money jar usually rests unassumingly next to pickled pigs’ feet or other dive-bar delicacies (a no-less-risky way to spend pocket change). The odds of rolling five-of-a-kind are one in 1,296: Not great, but with the maximum investment of one roll a day, the sting of getting skunked dissipates quickly.

Like many a triviality-turned-totem, Shake-A-Day has numerous claimants to its creation. In Jackson Hole, the bar game has become a fixture, albeit with looser rules than in Montana. At legendary bar The Bird, the pot has reached almost $70,000 thanks to $1 shakes and rules that allow for multiple dice rolls. The upper Midwest makes a claim, too, and I’ve seen Shake-A-Day snapshots from as far away as China. Presumably, anywhere you can find people indoors waiting out a storm—or a heavy buzz—you can find this game or one of its derivatives.

Despite its status in the Jackson Holes and Whitefishes of the world, Shake-A-Day is synonymous with the out-of-the-way places on Montana’s backroads that barely qualify as towns, let alone ski towns. I was introduced to Shake-A-Day at the Pastime Bar and Lounge in Libby, MT by my friend Jesse Hansen after a late-spring trip into the remote Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. Hansen, a former ski-bum bartender in Whitefish, couldn’t believe I’d never played. But after that first time tipping the plastic cup and watching the faux-ivory clatter across the bar, it became a shorthand for our ski adventures. The dive bars where we threw dice were inseparable from the mountains where we ripped skins, whether it was the Stillwater Bar on the western edge of the Whitefish Range or the Hungry Bear Bar and Grill on the skirts of the Swan Range.

A trifle, sure. But also a ritual, one that gave us a few more minutes of boots drying under the bar’s woodstove, a few more minutes to prolong the adventure and forestall a return to civilization. Not a bad return on a 50-cent roll.

The Ski Journal - Volume 15, Issue 3

SHAKE-A-DAY

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