The thing about living in Las Vegas is that everything in this city is a bet. You bet on sports, you bet on the slots, you bet on which restaurant has the best happy hour, you bet on yourself constantly. I have lived here my whole life and I have internalized that framework completely. So when I decided to quit smoking at 31 after nine years, I did the most Las Vegas thing possible: I turned it into a wager.

I started smoking at 22 when I was waitressing at a casino on the Strip. That job was designed to break you. Twelve-hour shifts, no natural light, the constant noise of machines and people, and a smoking section that basically functioned as the employee lounge. Half the floor staff smoked. It was a social currency. During breaks you either went to the smoking section or you went to the bathroom alone, and the smoking section was infinitely more interesting.

I quit that job eventually but I kept the cigarettes. By the time I was 30 I was smoking a pack a day of Marlboro Lights, spending around three hundred dollars a month, and coughing every morning in a way that was starting to embarrass me. I had tried to quit twice before. The second attempt lasted eleven days before a bad shift at my new job (marketing, which turned out to have its own kind of stress) sent me straight to a gas station.

My best friend Kayla and I have known each other since high school. We have a friendship built on mutual honesty, which means she had been telling me for two years that my smoking was getting worse and I needed to do something about it. She’s not a smoker. Never was. She fundamentally did not understand why I couldn’t just stop, which I found maddening in the specific way that only people who love you can be maddening.

One night in February we were having dinner and she said, again, that I should quit, and I said, again, that I was planning to, and she said that I’d been saying that for two years and she was tired of hearing it. And I said fine, how much do you want to bet? And she said five hundred dollars. And I said done.

We wrote it out on a cocktail napkin. Six months smoke-free, verified by Kayla, or I paid her five hundred dollars. If I made it six months, she owed me five hundred. We each took a photo of the napkin.

My quit date was the following Monday. Cold turkey, no patches, no gum, nothing. Partly this was stubbornness and partly I figured that if my motivation was financial, introducing products I had to pay for felt counterproductive. I was going to white-knuckle it for five hundred dollars.

The first week was rough in the physical way that everyone describes. Headaches, irritability, trouble concentrating, hands that didn’t know what to do with themselves. I chewed a lot of Trident. I started drinking more water than I ever had in my life because drinking water gave my hands and mouth something to do. I went on a lot of walks. I reorganized my apartment. I cleaned out my car, which smelled overwhelmingly of cigarettes, and then got it detailed so it didn’t smell that way anymore. The clean car smell was a small daily reminder of what I was working toward.

Kayla showed up at random moments to check on me. She came to my apartment unannounced twice in the first two weeks. We’d go for a walk or watch TV. I think she was partly checking on me and partly making sure I wasn’t hiding a cigarette somewhere. I wasn’t. Five hundred dollars is a significant amount of money.

She also instituted surprise breath tests. This was her idea and it was absolutely ridiculous and I loved her for it. She would lean over at dinner and sniff my breath. She would ask to smell my jacket. This is the kind of friendship we have. I passed every test.

Week three was when it almost fell apart.

I went to a concert at the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas with a group of coworkers. One of them is a social smoker who only smokes at concerts and events, and about forty minutes in, she lit up and the smell hit me in a way I was not prepared for. We were outside at that point and the night air was warm and the music was good and every single part of my brain said this is the moment, this is exactly the moment, just one.

I texted Kayla from outside the venue. I literally typed “I am about to cave” and sent it to her at ten-thirty on a Friday night. She called me within a minute. She stayed on the phone with me for twenty minutes. She talked about what I had already done, three weeks without a cigarette, and she talked about the five hundred dollars, and she talked about my cough going away, which she had mentioned noticing. She kept talking until the coworker had gone back inside and the immediate crisis had passed.

I did not smoke that night. It was the closest I came.

The rest of the six months had hard days but nothing quite like that concert. By month two the mornings were easier. By month three I had stopped thinking about smoking at work. By month four my coworker who smokes offered me one out of habit and I genuinely felt nothing, just said no thank you and meant it.

At six months, Kayla brought me a check. An actual check, written out for five hundred dollars, with a note in the memo line that said “you actually did it.” I took a picture of it before I deposited it. Then I went to the Aria spa and spent a day doing every treatment on the menu and it cost almost exactly five hundred dollars. I sat in the steam room for forty minutes and breathed air that my lungs could actually process and thought about all the times I had stood outside in the Las Vegas heat, which is a specific and punishing kind of heat, waiting for my cigarette to be done so I could go back inside.

I don’t stand outside anymore unless I want to.

Here is what I didn’t expect about quitting: how fast the smell sensitivity came back, and how weird that was at first. Las Vegas smells like a lot of things that a sensitive nose is not always thrilled about. But I can also smell rain, which is rare enough here that it feels like an event. I can smell jasmine. I can smell food before it gets to the table. My sense of smell had been essentially offline for nine years and coming back online was genuinely disorienting and then genuinely wonderful.

I’ve saved enough not smoking that I’ve taken two trips I wouldn’t have otherwise afforded. Three hundred dollars a month adds up faster than you’d think.

If the standard quit-smoking messaging hasn’t worked for you and you keep saying you’ll do it later, consider doing what I did: make it real by making it have stakes. Tell someone specific, someone who will actually check up on you, and attach a consequence to failing. The bet was stupid and it was exactly what I needed. It turned an abstract health goal into a concrete financial fact. Every time I wanted a cigarette I thought about Kayla’s face when she handed over five hundred dollars. I wanted to see that.

You know what motivates you. Use it. I used money and I used my best friend’s particular brand of loving annoyance, and it worked. Find your version of that and use it without apology.

You can do this. Somebody out there needs to hand you a check.