Pythagoras
05-13-2004, 11:10 AM
Even the Winners Were Losers
M. G. Pritchard
Unit 8
3 Taylors Road
Mitcham. 5062
South Austalia
618 8271 0521
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.1 Frontier Cultures and Gambling
1.2 Existential Angst and Self-destruction
1.3 Easy Come, Easy Go 1.4 Small Dick, Big Wallet
Hustlers, Hookers and Hamburgers
2.1 Women are the Rake 2.2 Fat People Can’t Win 2.3 The Salvation Army Can Give You Food and Shelter
2.4 Finding a Great Gambling Conversation
Cyborgs and the Future of Gaming
3.1 There was Gold in Them Thar Hills
3.2 Deeper Blue was Not a Great Bluffer
3.3 The Mindset of the Croupier
Dracula’s Favourite Game
4.1 Why People Don’t Get It
4.2 Why People that Get it Don’t Get It
4.3 Why People that Really Get it Get Out
4.4 Why People Can’t Talk About it so Drink Vodka
Even Mozart Couldn’t Play Billiards all the Time
5.1 Yes, They Have Poker in Tasmania
5.2 All Rounders Make Likely Winners
5.3 Decimal Considerations in Poker
5.4 Rock beats Scissors beats Paper. Does Water beat Rock?
The World Champion
6.1 The Best Roulette Player in Adelaide
6.2 The Best Blackjack Player in Nevada
6.3 The Best Poker Player in the Empire
6.4 The Worst Gambler in the World
Retirement, Which Game to Play Now?
7.1 New York, the Capital of the World
7.2 The Greens are Wild in Politics
7.3 Monopoly, What You Really Wanted to Know
The Big Fellows Do What They Like
8.1 See You On Monday Big Fella
8.2 Napoleon, Hitler, Nixon and Hussein
8.3 Them That Can’t Do, Them That Can Teach
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.1 Frontier Cultures and Gambling
We’ll look at two main frontier countries for this topic, Australia and the United States of America. They are closely related on account of the recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain in 1776 and its subsequent need for new land to place its undesirables in. It seems Mad King George really did muck things up by letting a future superpower out of his hands so that he could have more time to dance around in his knickerbockers. Luckily, Captain Cook was sailing around the Pacific Islands at the time, and took interest in a place that had very large jumping rodents. Even luckier was that the Dutch and Portuguese sea farers didn’t take much interest in the land. This might not have happened if those Dutchmen had known that the country would one day produce Olivia Newton-John.
England founded three convict colonies in Australia. They started in 1788 with Sydney (New South Wales), then Perth (originally a free settlement until they found they needed to make money so built some prisons) and Van Diemans Land (later to be named Tasmania). Three other colonies and some territories were also founded before federation in 1901, but these were settled by businesspeople and other immigrants with the odd Kanaka slave thrown in (and let me tell you, they were very odd). Chinese and Arabs came to join those in the business of prospecting during the gold rushes of the eighteen thirties and nineties, they didn’t mind the heat. To this day, Australia remains an ore rich country, mining many minerals and gases, but has developed other industries that make it a well developed and well visited country. Australians like to refer to themselves as being in the ‘Lucky Country’ and show a ferocious interest in all sorts of gambling, from sports tipping to betting on two flies crawling up a wall.
It’s possible that this South East Asian allure for the gamble, comes from the genetic compulsions of indigenous peoples it started with, those attracted by the lure of gold and finally, those produced all on its own in the last two centuries. Aborigines around the coasts of Australia were fantastic fishermen, enjoying the thrill of the hunt as much as the new Australians enjoy their two up. Friends, around the world, men’s brains are designed for fishing, coincidentally making some fish themselves. Predictably, most of them become great suckers for glitzy Vegas casinos that use Tom Jones and Anne Margret for bait.
Nevada and Califonia in America also had similar rushes of gold and silver in the nineteenth century, and Nevada is happy to identify itself as the silver state. People came to this part of the country from all over the world, but very large numbers of new Americans headed west to make a few dollars. Most of them came up short of course as the real winners were the ones that ripped off the tourists and got in on the side action. Mark Twain was one of those young men who ventured out into the Wild West to seek his fortune, but he made a bad prospector in places like Carson and Virginia City, towns that were much bigger in their heyday. He wandered around broke most of the time, making mental notes of the lifestyles and habits of the men, later to be explored in his culturally defining novels and lectures of comparative studies of international cultures.
Australia had its fair share of bums during its heyday with more losers than winners in the prospecting business. An attempt by the British government to impose a tax on the miners in the free settlement of Victoria, led to an important revolt by Irishmen and other ratbags called the Eureka Stockade. The Southern Cross was the trademark used by its instigators and can still be found next to Britain’s Union Jack on the Australian flag. It seems that these particular revolutionaries did not like a tax imposed on their preferred gambling opportunity, working hard in pits and sieving water for bits of gold. Speaking of Irish trouble makers, Ned Kelly was running amuck in the bush at this time too, he didn’t do much prospecting, but he certainly robbed a few banks and fixed a few card games in his times.
What might have added to the severity of these cultures wasn’t just the nature of the work, but the lack of wives for the men to go home to. As prospecting areas, Virginia City (Nevada) and Kalgoorlie (Western Australia) attracted fit, young, hardworking men who often had to leave behind any romantic attachments in the search of their fortunes. Australia as a nation had to wait two full generations for some of these wiry old critters to finally kick the bucket. It was at the start of the twentieth century before the country even approximated a population where there was enough women to listen to all the hard luck stories. The new “Diggers” who had been born in this environment then got sent off to Turkey and got their hats blown off in the First World War. In reality it was the indigenous people, the Chinese and Afghani immigrants who were the best at toughing it out in this harsh environment. This eventuated in a Chinatown in every big settlement and plenty of feral camels strolling around the desert trying to avoid territory battles with the ferocious frilled necked lizards.
Nevada had the same problems with women at a similar time, there just weren’t enough Jill’s for the amount of Jack’s roaming the streets. Perhaps this is why one can find three gay bars in a little city like Reno, but only three shirt lifter saloons in Saigon, you can’t be sure. To this day Nevada attracts many young women to work there as dancers, escorts and casino staff, often from as far away as Russia. They are lured here by the promise of easy money and promises of subsequent economic freedom. They end up catering for the gambling men who drag their families to Vegas for that convenient Grand Canyon slash Craps holiday. It can be argued that too many women go as far west as Hollywood in the hope of catching that lucky break on the silver screen, ending up working as a waitress at the local flee bitten café.
So many men, so much time, what did these frontier cultures have in common with your local prison or Real Estate lawyers convention.
Oh, the usual capers. They drank, they gambled, they ogled nude women and they picked fights with each other.
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.2 Existential Angst and Self-destruction
Let’s face it, most people lose money when they pick up an interest in a gambling activity. Some people lose it all. This book might show you how I have made a living from gambling, but it will more importantly bring up the pitfalls that might cause you to drop your bundle. They are so many and various, that the title of the book lets you know I’m predicting that you will lose something over all if you take up financial speculation seriously. Making a living from wagering is like walking a tightrope of fear, with a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a pornographic novel in the other, your temptations can lead you to lose balance and topple over. Whether it’s an interest in horses, poker or Amway, the vast majority of people lose money when they take a punt and really we have to guesstimate why.
Perhaps there is a destructive gene within us that makes us want to lose all of our money and send us to the rail. Maybe we are designed to be broke and hungry, hunting and gathering rather than sowing and reaping. Perhaps gambling activities are a substitute for a lack of sexual activity in our lives? This might explain why we find the national eight ball team being slightly uglier than the average set of four men, or why some roulette players find their only discussions with women come about when they lose their weekly pay check at their local casino. Certainly, casinos are apt to hiring attractive women to do the crouping and schmoozing, it just makes better business sense.
Personally, I find playing golf very sexy. When my two iron connects with the ball and it goes a hundred and eighty yards with the propulsion of my club it feels like a knife through butter. Making that thirty foot put has got to have some parallels to talking some stunner into parting with her panties, certainly the thrill of golf has me polishing my clubs at least once a week in preparation for a big game. Breaking eighty for me is like a wonderful love making session, I find myself getting to the clubhouse for a ginger ale and a cigarette with a satisfied grin on my face.
As we suggested in our last essay, Men’s minds are programmed to enjoy the irregular reinforcement of a day out in the boat, pulling in some King George whiting or holy mackerel. Often a whole day out on the lake without a nibble on your line can still feel satisfying and natural, especially if you spend it with your best mate, drinking beer and shooting the breeze. If you haven’t worked out why professional poker players call losers fish and sometimes wear silly hats to work, then you really do need to read on.
Running a business in a free economy can have the same effect on a man, getting that sale and watching their pyramid scheme blossom with hard work. This can often make up for those days when you don’t make a cent. Perhaps it’s that characteristic in the brain that makes working for the government feel unnatural to many men. Getting a regular hourly rate, and having most of their ideas manipulated on the way up the bureaucratic ladder can cause even the laziest man to want to lose the cushy job and have to actually work for a living. But I’m not here to tell you that it’s men’s genes that caused the fall of the iron curtain. What I want you to think about is why this particular form of entertainment is so popular. What makes people want to lose, and then to buy books on ways to lose less money more slowly.
Already, we have covered what cultures and parts of the world tend to have more gamblers, ones with lots of men with time on their hands. Since most of these men are losers during a flutter, why else would they do it, when, in all probability they will lose the lot and think about jumping off a bridge? Mandarin Chinese language uses the same word for crisis and opportunity, is it the crisis of losing at the casino, or the opportunity to lay bets that motivates the gambler. Later in the book we will certainly recommend playing bridge as a substitute for slots, the thrill of victory is still there, it’s just that it won’t cost us all of our bickies.
Existential angst can be defined in a number of ways, but was most popular with try hard black turtle neck wearing beatniks in the fifties. Albert Camus would certainly let us know that the absence of God in our lives makes even the most successful men capable of being unsatisfied, and choosing to unwind at the race track. Jean Paul Sartre was so upset at having so much freedom in his life, with so many choices, that he ended up choosing to be an active member of the French Communist party. Well at least that gave him something to do. These guys were pointing out to us that in the free world, without God, when we are not broke and hungry, we have so many choices and freedoms that we often look for activities that limit our choices to a simple few.
Gambling offers us these choices and a way to go broke enough to ensure that we once again have to return to a state of desperation for survival. That is, trying to get food to eat and a place to stay. The existentialist would admit that a person who gets involved in gambling is unsatisfied in being in this world and is looking to escape from his or her reality into another reality that provides choices, say black or red in roulette.
Years ago, when I was a highly educated teenager with too much hair, I would often tell my friends that I preferred to play pool then study how to make money. It was my existential protest. If there was no reason for my existence, then why not just make some balls move around a billiard table, or some cards around a card room. It made perfect sense to me. It makes perfect sense to so many men in our society, and it’s only the ones that make plans about running pool halls or write books on winning poker that really make any sort of plans for their future. And what do they do in the future when they have plenty of money? They get into bigger business and become bigger players in the world, but not any different to when they were small time hustlers, looking for trouble and trying to be somebody.
Cards are made up of four suits, clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. They represented four classes of people in the middle ages, the army, the aristocrats, the clergy and the workers. Most games that are played with cards are metaphors for the control of these classes and are forms of escapism, definitely simulations of war and other such manly activities. Making a deck of cards with the fifty two most wanted Iraqis is no coincidence, nor are computer games that teach men advanced military tactics involved in defeating alien invaders. Men are designed for fishing and for war.
Men also get very lonely sometimes and enjoy the comradely of poker games, chess tournaments or playing stick for beers. Its not just loneliness that makes some people want to go to the local hall and play Canasta (A popular cross between Gin Rummy and Monopoly), it’s the feeling of being a player that people are looking for.
Being a player like Hugh Heffner is the dream of so many men. Hugh has four blond escorts, a big house with a zoo and plenty of hair and smiles a lot for a seventy year old. When you really think about it, Hugh has made his millions off the right hands of millions of his readers, his magazine is designed to give its customers stress relief. In a way, Hugh Heffner is as much a professional wanker as the struggling college student that donates at the sperm bank once a week for fifty bucks.
The seventh chapter of this book might help us look at ways in which we can still be players in the world without losing all of our money and our families as well. The next few essays will start to explore current and future issues in gambling, which you may wish to avoid if you’re looking to win some money at a casino tomorrow. If this is the case, head straight to the middle section on Internet bonuses, slot hustling, blackjack and poker. Concluding chapters come later on if you’re not much for the technical bits coming up.
If you are feeling desperate because you are single and lost your job because of your drinking problem, perhaps you should read this essay again before you drive to Vegas with this book in your left hand.
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.3 Easy Come, Easy Go
Ever wondered what happened to the garbologisit who won the four million dollar lotto or to the Onassis kid that inherits many millions? There is a big difference in those people who inherit and those who build up big companies and grow their own fortunes. There are those that have had to work hard to get a lot of money and do not tend to change their Scrooge like attitude. Sometimes their kids can be a bit loose with their inherited cash, because they are so used to having and spending money.
Successful businesspeople do not tend to spend hours and hours in casinos, they have much more important gambles to take in the office. It’s only the playboy and the bum that turn to gambling for the excitement and the feeling of dangerous fun. My favourite customers at the poker table are men that have inherited millions, and businesspeople that have got lucky in business by employing people that not only do all the work, but generate all of the ideas. These types of individuals are loose gamblers. They sometimes do their homework, but eventually gamble like maniacs when drunk or angry.
These types of individuals are most likely to part with their money in a casino without thinking twice about it. Other bored people that do not have the money also tend to have a flutter if there are two important characteristics filled. Firstly they must have a brain designed for business, gambling or fishing, which is the majority of men. Secondly they must have a lack of self-esteem, or the angst mentioned in the previous essay. In some instances, the poor man who gambles a “No questions asked” pension is often susceptible to parting with it easily. If you enjoy fleecing other seagulls to earn your keep, the lonely pensioner is your bread and butter.
For a low income individual, to want to spend all of their remaining money at the casino, again, they would need a subconscious want for self destruction. If they don’t feel comfortable getting a couple of hundred dollars a week from a crappy job and seem to get turned down from every employer under the sun, they may take up pool, gambling or organising his bar code collection. Losing every last cent brings a man to the end and lets him live purely on what he can scrimp to eat, pinch to sell or bludge off friends.
The wealthy man that has nothing to live for might eventually lose the lot also, in his quest to feel like he’s really living. As his gambling gets more diverse, the rich bum will look to up the ante, to make the stakes more interesting, and the likelihood of him going broke much higher. This is most notable in the man who has worked in his father’s business out of lack of ambition, now running the company badly, and playing some craps on his many days off. Freud would say that this is a result of the repression of a man’s intense desire to kill his father for sleeping with his mother. Mario Puzo would say that it’s got to do with a man’s erroneous need to have a son running the family business, ensuring his own immortality.
If the family business includes casinos, as the Corleones did, then really you’ve got nothing to worry about financially, however, you should be more concerned about the competition putting a cap in your ass.
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.4 Small Dick, Big Wallet
When you bought this book, maybe you were a bit confused at why it said “Even the Winners were Losers” and why there’s a photo of me and two women with very big tits on the cover. Friends, maybe I thought it might just sell me more books and perhaps get me more money to gamble with. But then after a pot noodle and can of Pepsi it surfaced from my subconscious mind and came to me. This book, its contents, and so many other things that have interested me since I was a child are probably just about my dick.
Viagra has an interesting correlation in its arrival. It has appeared out of the blue for men who have trouble with their penises and coincides with quite a lot of them having time on their hands when they’re out of work. Perhaps they think about their members too much, perhaps rode a bicycle too hard in their teens and have injured their perineum, or perhaps they have stopped feeling like men (or feeling men literally) since retiring. What I have noticed in the gambling community and also in the drinking community is that men aren’t prepared to talk about the size and effectiveness of their penises until they are drunk; are making jokes at other people’s expense, or are in a casino or poker game, where all the normal restraints in conversation with other men go out the window.
Last week I was at a reasonable stakes private game of poker where the host had put on some low level pornographic film for the punters, the dealer had worn extra supportive underwear so that we couldn’t see through her jeans, and the topics of Richard Gere and ferrets came up. The conversation then progressed to sauce bottles, the stockmarket and supper. Being around gambling allows men to talk to each other in this intimate way, all women need is a cup of tea and some Oprah. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t cost women the large amounts of money that gambling can for men, it quite often does. By the way, have you seen the price of books in Oprah’s book club?
One has to wonder if it goes much deeper than that, perhaps as deep as Freud and penis envy, Skinner and sexual substitutes or Pritchard and the inverse wallet penis ratio. That’s right, I’m starting to believe that the more money I win, the harder it isn’t and the more broke I am the easier it is to hit the sexual jackpot. I’m sure that this might be difficult for some of the readers to digest but I had to make the book at least a hundred pages or you guys might suspect that I’m just ripping you off with this sale.
Either way, my ex needs some more money to spend on that young doctor of hers.
Hustlers, Hookers and Hamburgers
2.1 Women are the Rake
Once again, we’re going to rip off a quote from the film “Rounders” to illustrate one of the well-known facts about advantage gaming. Women do not tend to gamble as much as men, especially when it comes to wagering in potential advantage areas such as poker, blackjack and sports betting. In casinos and hotels, many women can, however, be found diligently placing quarters into slot machines, sometimes at a highly addictive level, but we’ll leave it to a female enthusiast to write a book on how women can best lose money in their efforts to win the lotto or a new car.
Women have started to catch on to sports betting in the office place and are regular winners of the office football pools. Many people say it’s the people that don’t know much about football who win the pools because they’re lucky, but as we’ll see later on in poker, sometimes thinking too much about a proposition can lead one to make fundamental judgement errors. Totalisers can be beaten in the same way poker can be beaten, but you need to be at least ten percent better in horse knowledge than the average Joe to be able to beat the commission taken by the bookie.
This creates punters who use statistics to beat totalisers at the track and sports pools when the losers back who they want to win, not who probably will. Totalisers collect all bets from gamblers on a race or a football match and vary the payouts depending on the amount of bets that come in, resulting in corresponding payouts to action for a win, minus a substantial tax or rake. That’s why the horse with the most amount of money on it, the favourite, pays the least odds. Online, one can also bet on the flip of a coin in a cricket match, and since the amount of bets on each outcome tend to be equal, the totaliser approach to payouts makes sure that each bet pays one ninety for a win. This bet can never be beaten without a biased coin, but losers still want to have action on it, and not too many of these idiots are women.
On many occasions, simply picking the home teams in any tipping competition is enough to get a fifty five percent success rate and surge one to the front of the pack by the end of the season. In my office experience, some women get so much into the football tipping competition that they are often found organising the whole thing, to the pleasure of the men. They don’t realise that this little flutter can be part of the office politics and then complain about how hard it is to break through the glass ceiling. My reaction to this was twice to organise a netball tipping competition, and to my delight, found that I knew more about netball by the end of the season than most of those who play the game. It’s a good little earner for me, a great hustle.
Lets say that this is your tenth book on advantage gaming and you fancy yourself as a great blackjack tournament player, a super holdem hustler or an idiot savant on the nature of horse racing. Will women want to sleep with you when you make a million?
The answer is a resounding no. Not only do the vast majority of women not understand or care to understand how you can win from these games, in all probability you will have to pay women to sleep with you. At least, you’ll have to tip the sexy ones handsomely to bring you your bourbon if there are other generous men in the room vying for the cocktail waitresses’ attentions.
Backpacking around North Africa in my early twenties gave me many intense experiences, none less than a scorned Moroccan woman at a card room. I was at a pool table, playing the local champ for a few dirham, meanwhile twenty men were playing cards on the side of the café. Cards weren’t my thing until my late twenties so I can’t remember what they were playing. In stormed a fuming wife of an obvious loser, throwing her arms around and cursing this dead beat of a husband that Allah had blessed her with. The poverty that I saw in this part of the world was an eye opener for me, but this comical scene certainly represented trouble at home for this moustached escapee, the ball and chain had found him and he was cornered. This happens all over the world in casinos and card rooms, with the typical reaction from other male players consisting of non-chalant cackles or outright drunken uproar.
My experience with women while gambling is that at the start they have little understanding for what you are doing, then they have little care to learn about it, and finally have no respect for your skills if you win. When you lose, they will often give you such a bad time as to send you to the bottle. And with all that booze in your system, its tough to give your other half the time of day, let alone help her with the shopping. Staying away from women is the best way to be, if you’re going to take up gambling seriously, even try to keep the conversations off winning with your Mother, after all she’s a woman too. It’s their nature to collect and prepare, while it’s ours to hunt and gather.
That reminds me, I’m running late for my “Millenium Man Tribal Warrior Chest Beating” support group.
Hustlers, Hookers and Hamburgers
2.2 Fat people Can’t Win
This section may get a little technical or offensive for some people, but if the writer is talented enough, then the concept should come through loud and clear. What concept? We explore it with the term Polydipsia, an interesting result for behaviourists, first noticed in the nineteen fifties when B.F. Skinner was the leading researcher on behavioural analysis. (Using advanced psychological concepts when talking about losing gamblers is a great way to explore some of these topics, psychology was the fastest growing vocational qualification at the end of the last century. My honours thesis was on facial expressions, but I didn’t hand it in, I was too keen to get out there and make some easy cash).
Polydipsia is the interesting phenomena of rats drinking excess amounts of water, whilst in a cage that presents them with pellets of food at non-regular intervals. If rats are given a pellet every time they press a button in their cage, or every fourth time they press a button, hungry ones gorge themselves early and when satisfied, press the bar less often when they are looking for their fifth course and an early supper. When rats are given a pellet unpredictably, say on average every fourth press, but ranging from one press to ten, not only do the rats press the buzzer more often, they also drink from their water container a comparatively higher amount. Non-regular reinforcement is like playing the slots. The gambling rat likes hits the bottle pretty hard.
Humans display arguably more advanced but similar responses when engaging in activities that provide entertainment reinforcement, say watching television or playing blackjack. When one watches television, sometimes the show gives away that an advertisement is on the way, but with live shows like Letterman, often it doesn’t, and what do most people do during the advertisements? Quite often the person in charge of the remote will do a bit of surfing, look for more entertainment and reinforcement, but regularly during advertisements people will get up and get themselves a snack. When I watch the football and barrack for the 49ers, every time they get a touchdown (non-regular reinforcement) and an advertisement comes on, I celebrate by going to the fridge for a can of Bud.
Quite often men have money on games that they watch on television, just to keep things interesting, so how does the concept of polydipsia apply to games in the casino? Pretty easy comparison really. Casinos that charge for booze make a lot of money out of the punter, those that don’t, make so much money from excessively drunk gamblers that they are happy to just give it away (as they do in Nevada).
There are a lot of calories in alcohol, but some other forms of polydipsia are able to be seen at a poker table in the casino. If you are playing a high stakes game with regular service for food and drink, there is ample opportunity for the gambling man to put on some weight. In between hands on the Internet, I’m often found rotting my teeth with too many cups of coffee and far too many water crackers dipped in caviar. I’ve put on at least twenty pounds since I took up full time gaming, so even winning players struggle to avoid the phenomena of polydipsia.
Successful business people are also provided with unlimited opportunities for food and drink. When you read about successful poker players, politicians, businessmen and golfers such as Phil Hellmuth, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Tiger Woods, are you surprised that they show the discipline to have a workout regimen to help with their career? I’m not, that’s a great way to keep you sharp and can give you time out from the tables to think through some advanced Chinese poker strategies, the West Bank, digital media or how to make more money from Nike.
It’s the really fat guys in gambling that concern me. Especially the ones that were obese before they took it up. Besides the people that have genetic disorders, most overweight people have problems with polydipsia, eat for emotional comfort or just know fantastic cooks. When they get into a money game however, I often wonder if they have the discipline to play one hundred, two hundred holdem with a tough field at the Mirage, where you might have to fold eighty percent of your hands before the flop. Do these guys have the patience and modesty not to rebuy in a gin rummy game when the pot is not laying the correct odds? What kind of people have the patience to play like this?
Those that use their free time to study their opponents when playing, and those too cheap to catch a taxi home are getting accidental exercise by walking home.
Hustlers Hookers and Hamburgers
2.3 The Salvation Army Can Give You Food and Shelter
I was always a bit of a loser at school, quitting the football team to play tennis, playing chess at lunchtime, joining the quiz team and always getting dumped by my girlfriends. At university in my teens, I was far too angsty and neurotic to get full value for the excessive drinking and womanising that was available to me as a science student. It wasn’t until I got my first job as a psychology graduate that gave me a real perspective on the losers and winners in this world of ours, I scored a job as a care worker with the Salvation Army.
The William Booth hostel had a number of different types of men living in it, crazies, drunks, gamblers and of course the odd transvestite would run out of money and start banging their head against the wall. Working with these men could give one a feeling of superiority, if you continually hear the stories of broken windows, terminal illnesses and gambling debts, but one has to understand that there are many ways to break a man psychologically, it doesn’t have to be self inflicted. Putting a man on tilt is about finding the buttons to press and then to press them with the correct.
Timing is very important when you are trying to upset an individual and the bigger the man the harder they fall. This includes upsetting men that have a lot of money, an important position, or a trophy wife. Putting people on tilt comes naturally to some cunning humans. My two favourite individuals that put people on tilt are: Michael Moore, the academy award winning documentary filmmaker, and Judge Judy, for her ability to control people and help them to lose the plot. Personally, I find in poker that putting a person on tilt is great for short term gains and for getting beaten up, but that gradual fleecing of an individual’s life savings is more convenient and sustainable. Many of the casino industry executives are yet to realise this.
Do the casinos put people on tilt with cheap booze and unbeatable games? Yes.
It seems far more profitable to the bottom line to get all of the punters’ cash in one session and to leave it to the Salvation Army to pick up the pieces. Professional Blackjack players make some small inroads into the profit of the casino, not just via their wins, but more importantly by the amount and cost of their surveillance. As professional gamblers, casinos have to act like card sharks, if they are in an intimate city like Auckland or San Jose, they have to be seen to be friendly and concerned for their customers. In Vegas or Moscow however, there is too much competition and an individual poker player or casino can preserve their anonymity and go for the jugular.
The vast majority of people that decide to take up research into gambling in order to minimise their losses will become so obsessed with the games that the amount of time spent on them will inevitably get their cash, no matter how small the casino’s edge. If one just sticks to poker for example, sure ten percent of players will not lose, but only five percent will make an award wage, some a bit more, but all will find an unproductive way to spend it.
If you don’t end up on the rail yourself, your neighbour just might end up singing songs and banging tambourines, or if they find Karma, end up with the Hare Krishnas.
Hustlers, Hookers and Hamburgers
2.4 Finding a Great Gambling Conversation
So the food’s no good and its sometimes hard to get a good night’s sleep when you’re a gambler, who can you relate to when women don’t give you the time of day? Well quite simply it’s other gamblers, and there’s plenty of them out there, all nations, all creeds and all night long. Be prepared for hustlers that bait you into wagering on fixed coin tosses, magic darts and obvious card tricks. Bars and strip joints might be a place to start, but these can get expensive when you’re starting out.
My favourite place to find out where the action is is at the local Gamblers Anonymous. Popping into their meetings is a good way to find out where the local illegal card rooms, pool halls and dog fights are held. Just take care to avoid the Christian types that run these groups. Apparently, for a carpenter, Jesus didn’t go much for games. Being brave and being able to hold one’s own in a group therapy session is good practice just in case you catch that run of cold cards, have your stake lifted or get ripped off by a bookie and go broke, finding yourself staying with the Salvos.
As a retired semi-professional pool shark, I like to hang around pool halls to get the low down on track meets, card games and nude bars. On my last visit to Adelaide, I ran into Loose Lewi, Exaggerator, Leo The Mechanic, Wombat, Gopher Glen, Whinger, Car Stereo, Torch, Mad Dog Mario and Ice Cream Jack. That brings me to handles and what kind of handle that you might take on now that you’re throwing yourself in the deep end. I’ve gone by many names including “Basic Strategy” on account of my Blackjack Background, “Mad Mick” on account of my florid fervour for a flutter and “The Cunt” on account of my mercenary approach to cards. My official poker handle is “Saint Mick” on account of my patience and charity work, but you may have to hang around with these sorts of guys for quite a while for them to establish a handle that you can hang yourself on.
Hang around these type of negative individuals for too long and you’ll be looking for a tree to sling your noose.
Cyborgs and the Future of Gaming
3.1 There Was Gold in Them Thar Hills
There are billions and billions of dollars currently being made in online gambling by the professional poker player, the basic strategy blackjack players, the small-time hustler and of course, by the casinos. The provision of Internet gambling is illegal in the United States of Australia, but the use of Internet casinos isn’t. These days many Internet casinos do their business in Central America, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. These are the places where your winnings will come from if you read this piece, understand it and have the discipline to carry it out.
One of the first Internet casinos was set up around the turn of the millennium in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia, linked with the local Lassiters Casino. The federal government in co-ordination with the Green Party decided to outlaw the practice except for horse racing, costing Lassiters a potential squllion in profit. The United States do not allow brick and mortar casinos to have on-line brothers, the government is also looking at banning players because so many of them have gone broke. Nowadays online gaming is so competitive that some people setting up Internet casinos are somehow starting to lose money, while the professionals find ways of making more and more money from buying rights to the software written by others.
The industry is super competitive, so tough that the complimentary odds and ends that some casinos offer their players are so enticing as to be profitable for the advantage gambler. There are tenfold more casinos online now compared to the hundred or so in Las Vegas, so it should be much tougher to attract the business. The problem is solved by the fact that anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card could become a customer of theirs, logging on while playing in bed or escaping the missus in your ‘Workroom’. This results in enormous turnover and action and means you will have to find a new way to hide things on your desktop, I suggest putting the links in with your porn collection.
Because the market is so competitive and lucrative in Las Vegas, many casinos offer food, money and rooms for new and loyal customers. Online casinos cannot offer food or rooms to their customers, so instead they offer cold hard cash. This can be quite a lot of cash, sometimes thousands of US dollars just for opening a high roller account. They do this of course because the vast majority of these high rollers will lose the lot. They needn’t lose it all, there are some games available that minimise one’s losses, but since there is no card counting (the computer dealer shuffles after every hand), none that can be beaten.
The stipulations for getting a ‘hundred for a hundred’ buy in at an Internet casino are sometimes a bit loose, sometimes a bit stringent, but almost always beatable with determination, knowledge, and most importantly discipline. The average site will say that one has to wager two thousand dollars worth of any game to be able to cash out the two hundred in your bankroll (after your hundred buy-in and match bonus). We will use this typical site as a model for our approach to fleecing casinos like it. The solution to this problem is to find a game that has less than a ten percent losing average, and then to follow through with the wagering at a low level, negating big swings in your bankroll.
Most sites eliminate roulette and craps from your options in the small print and some eliminate blackjack and jacks or better power poker, but the smart ones let you play whatever you like. Chances are that you will find a game that you think you enjoy and you will lose the one hundred bonus plus the one hundred buy-in, possibly going back to your credit card to see if you can fund your new passion for online scratch cards.
Purchasing chips to an online casino on your credit card can be a sobering experience when you receive your statement from you bank in the mail. The hundred here and the hundred there certainly add up, and if you’re an advantage player, it can give you an excellent record on how much you are actually winning. Poker enthusiasts that think they are pretty much a break-even player, will find that they actually lose quite a lot of money at the game when they get their statements. Software involved in gambling online means that the average player loses much, much faster than in a physical casino.
Security in online transactions is another consideration for the computer player, but is usually unnecessarily overly concerning for most people for one simple reason. There is more money available to a casino that conducts itself legally and fairly, than one set up to rip off all of its players. The obviously well built online casino can be trusted as much as the physical casino, it’s just bad business to rip off people in transactions, when they can do it with one armed bandits. Personally, I have played on well over a hundred online casinos, cashing out in the positive about seventy percent of the time, breaking even twenty percent of the time and losing my bonus, original buy-in and sometimes more ten percent of the time. I have been misbilled once, which was corrected, and I have only been very suspicious of the software on one casino where I lost a significant amount of money. We all get a little paranoid when we lose though.
Opening a paypal account used to be the best way to gamble online. You used to be able to take a thousand off of your card into paypal, put a hundred in to play at a few different casinos at a time and then to bring back your buy-ins to the paypal account when you win. The problem is that most people that did this lost and were maxing out their credit cards due to gambling, causing paypal a lot of concern, business and in the end money. These days, neteller will let you buy chips at a few casinos if you put a thousand dollars into one of their accounts. Putting a thousand dollars into a neteller account with your credit card means that you won’t have to go back to your card and then the Internet casinos will not have access to your credit card number. It’s also a good idea to get a deposit only credit card before you think about going through these steps. I didn’t and the banks made a lot of money in transactions and interest from me.
The way to win as often as I did is merely through playing the minimum conditions in the bonus clause. To do this, one needs to find a game where the casino house edge is well under ten percent. Doing this with such a regular win rate is achieved by limiting one’s play to two games in particular that have a low house edge and very low variability in results, Blackjack and Jacks or Better Poker.
In our example, we needed to wager two thousand dollars to cash out the hundred bonus and we might do this by using basic strategy blackjack. Basic strategy blackjack and its pitfalls will be addressed later in this book, but you will have to take my word for it that the majority of software used in online casinos has a maximum of a one percent edge for the house. Therefore if we keep track of our wagering we should lose twenty dollars on average of our two thousand dollars of action, keeping eighty percent of the bonus, cashing out and becoming a winning gambler.
Variance is our problem, with two hundred dollars, we can’t bet two thousand at a time, we actually should play one thousand two dollar hands. Blackjack is not quite a coin toss, we only win forty five percent of the time and some more from blackjacks and double downs, but it approximates it. If you play one thousand hands of blackjack with basic strategy you will rarely waver more than fifty bucks either way of your one eighty (expected return), but most can’t control themselves and go for the swings.
Blackjack has a low house edge when one plays perfect basic strategy and has confidence in that strategy. When you read the next chapter on the game, hopefully I will convince you to trust the computer simulations, and to learn basic strategy using it online to become a winning gambler. Variance refers to the amount your two hundred bankroll (that cost you a hundred) will fluctuate, and Blackjack has a small variance game compared to most other games. In Blackjack, you win over forty percent of the time and the most you can lose online is usually four bets, when you are allowed to split and double down on one hand.
If you need to play two thousand dollars worth of Blackjack online to qualify for your bonus, I suggest that you play the minimum stakes, which is usually two dollars a hand. You will then need to play a thousand bets (which is around nine hundred hands) at this level before you are allowed to cash out a profit. Nine hundred hands sounds like a lot, and it is, but for your first couple of wins its imperative that you get a feel for basic strategy blackjack and learn to trust it and see its results. Nine hundred hands for the novice will take around five hours, for the experienced player around two. It varies again depending on the speed of the software and your computer.
When I’d cashed out in the positive on my first couple of web sites, it was now possible to up the ante and increase my hourly win rate as an Internet casino hustler. You do this by playing four sites on the same day that offer a hundred for a hundred, and play eight dollars a hand on each. You will need to once again play nine hundred hands that day and you will get sick and tired of typing in your particulars for the cheques to be sent to, but it’s worth it. Since so many of the casinos are identical and use the same software and bonuses, this is easy. It will take you around the same amount of time as your first casino, but now you’ll make four times as much. You have increased your variance however, so you might lose on one of the four casinos, cashing out say zero, one fifty, two fifty and three hundred.
With so many hands to be played and so many qualifications on the sites, you can never expect on average to cash out the full bonus, but you should aim to cash out on average half of the bonuses and aim for three quarters of them. If you are a winning live poker player and limit yourself to low action, you can expect to cash out the full bonus almost every time. If you are allowed to play roulette in bonus play, then simply place two thousand dollars evenly on all thirty seven numbers. This will take you about ten spins and will cost you most of the bonus anyway. It will cost you half the hypothetical bonuses if you only have one zero, as in European roulette.
Variance will be increased if blackjack and roulette are unavailable to you. In this case, I usually turn to Jacks or Better poker. Similarly to blackjack, this also has a house edge of less than one percent if played correctly. Since you need a royal flush every now and then to compensate for the regular losses in this game, the variance is often too high to be able to grind out reliable wins in online Jacks or better poker. If it is possible to play power poker, that is three or ten hands at a time with the high payout, then its much easier to regularly cash out most of the bonus when you are forced to use this game.
Craps is another game that is usually unavailable to the bonus freeloader in internet casinos, due to its small percentage on the come bets. To be able to cashout most of the bonus, you really have to stick at these games. Even if the slots are paying up to ninety nine percent, the variance in results for this game can put a hole in your Visa card. I recommend sticking to basic strategy blackjack for the first dozen casinos that you rip off. There are thousands and thousands of dollars to be made from using systems similar to this, I just wish I could design a robot to do the wagering for me.
Friends of mine have made money the same way, but they usually train their kids to do the wagering for them and pay them two dollars an hour. Hey that’s business.
Cyborgs and the Future of Gaming
3.2 Deeper Blue Was a Great Bluffer
All Internet casinos have special sections in the small print that warrant interest in those of you familiar with the Turing test, blade runner and online nineball. Personally I am a bad chess player, but a winning gambler and have experience in what we are about to cover. What we will explore means that this book has a shelf live of less than ten years, programs will be winning money online, and when they let cyborgs play poker in live card rooms, I’m out of there.
In Nineteen Ninety seven, a historical event took place that is yet to gain its legend. The IBM company designed a computer, Deeper Blue, one of a string of ever improving computers, to take on the best chess grandmaster at the time, Garry Kasparov. My friend and I had an argument about the game of chess and the intuitivity, computational knowledge and creativity involved in the game. As your usual arts graduate, my compadre rationed that computers could never beat humans and that the pc would have a nervous breakdown. Kasparov had lost one game out of five to Deep Blue, the inferior predecessor of the new software, so I felt that IBM’s computers were starting to be able to out compute the human brain and that Deeper Blue had a good chance. Of course the science graduate won the twenty dollar bet, and let me tell you that was a sweet bill.
Chess is just a game, like poker, baccarat and paigow, but quite a lot more complex. It is also played for money. I’ve played for cash both online, in tournaments and in New York’s Washington Square. The issue is that computers are now stronger than players, I can’t even beat some hand sized chess games these days. Finding an online site where members plays chess for cash gives one the opportunity to use that software to do the work for you. Chances are that your opponent also owns the same, so then it comes down to the best pc, you put money on your pony, sit back and barrack for moves that are too complex for you to understand. But I don’t play horses, the only thing that excites me is gambling on my own actions, cards, golf and tiddlywinks.
The Internet casinos that we were referring to in the last chapter, the ones that we were hustling for bonuses, will not let you use a program to do your wagering for you. How they would find out is beyond me. When none of the games are beatable once your bonus is gone, letting a computer gamble will still lose you money and be about as entertaining as actually setting light to your hundred dollar bills.
In the future, profitable software play will be limited to poker sites, and other sites where people are playing against other people and a growing number of suspicious sounding programs calling themselves Roger. At the lower levels, poker tends to be won by the patient and mathematically correct play, so if you can program well enough to get a pc playing holdem and opening with a pair of tens or better go your hardest, put your slave on the twenty four seven shift and watch the cash compound.
I also recommend that you design Roger to be able to type the odd vulgarity in the chat box when he loses a pot, that should be plenty to convince his customers that he’s just the motorcycle riding coalminer from Liverpool he says he is
Cyborgs and the Future of Gaming
3.3 The Mindset of the Croupier
Refereeing events that people are insanely passionate about is a very difficult and often unrewarding job. Years of experience in umpiring baseball games and refereeing boxing bouts in my younger days gave me all the excuses I needed to avoid being a casino croupier. I would rather be a coal miner. Dealing cards is like dealing drugs, unhappy work with unhappy people.
The problems lie within the punters’ profession that dealing cards is an easy job and a job that should be done perfectly every time. The fallacy lies with the gambling bum assuming that humans are perfect. He thinks his imperfect blackjack and poker play are fair form. He loses his money, so, in his opinion, he can do what he wants, including insulting the dealers, blowing smoke on the pit boss and passing wind in the direction of his fellow patrons.
Tipping the dealer in the United States makes dealing a potentially very financially rewarding occupation. This lends itself to a much higher level of friendliness, accommodation and higher proportion of big breasted blondes behind the tables. They are aware that they might be in line to get a twenty dollar tip if the high roller makes a big hand. Dealers ensure they are focussed on what is happening in that hand, offering a smile, win, lose or draw.
Friends, more problems lie at this juncture. As winning gamblers, we are not allowed to ensure the dealers’ twenty dollar a hour wage. Garnishing our earnings from blackjack, poker and slot hustling means that each dollar to the dealers’ hourly rate is a dollar off ours. In other parts of the world it may be in your favour to fire up and confuse the dealer, in Vegas however, we need to find appropriate tipping strategies.
A professional poker player is one who has the ability to earn at least the minimum wage from their game, say five dollars an hour from a low stakes stud. If she tips the dealer two dollars every pot and averages two pots per hour, she is really winning nine an hour. To avoid humiliation, she should tip fifty cents a pot and earn a more sensible eight dollars an hour, about the same wage as a Subway sandwich artist.
“Don’t kick a man when he’s down” I once said to a croupier at the beginning of my career, playing three six Texas holdem in Reno. The dealer had given me an extremely dirty look after tipping only one quarter dollar in a twenty dollar pot. “Why not, you’re kicking me” he rightly said in return. It was a losing night of a small stakes experience which was overall netting ten dollars an hour. It should have been eight dollars an hour; I was so cheap when it came to tipping. Naturally, the dealers were barracking for other players to win the pots; they would get a few dollars on a hundred dollar pot from Daisy from Dallas, but just fifty cents for the same pot if Michael from Mars won it. He just wasn’t on the same planet as everyone else.
Playing roulette is foreign to me, I don’t understand how people can put their money into action, knowing that nearly five percent of it will be eaten away on average every spin. Their bank rolls deplete like freshly exploded uranium ore. Years of experience dealing the game can give the croupier the same confusion of interest in the sport; they see the unskilled junkie watching their own personal stock market crash. The roulette dealer knows that the house collects on most spins, often every number gets filled by the half dozen gamblers, where the house will win money no matter what slot the ball slips into.
The most experienced casino staff will have seen red numbers come up fifteen times in a row, but most will know that the wheels are very evenly balanced, with five consecutive eights just being something that happens sometimes. The dexterous workers in the game have to concede to pursuing the collection of the losing chips and the payout of the winnings in an efficient and friendly way. Once their brains had learnt to do this automatically, their conscious minds are set free to daydream about that Caribbean trip, or that young Russian that works at the buffet.
Experienced staff tell me they switch to autopilot and rarely make mistakes, often dreading going to work, sometimes deciding to find something more fulfilling. They often get stuck in the job, trying to pay their mortgage; the darker ones take pleasure in watching people do their dough. They know monkeys could do their job, and the clever ones know that robots and other machines are already doing their jobs online, and will inevitably take their positions in the brick and mortar casinos.
Most casino people have realised that these machines don’t make mistakes, and in the last thirty years have replaced many of their table games with acres of slot machines and computer assisted roulette. What’s more, casino executives and other lazy business people know that there are huge amounts of money in providing fully automated gambling opportunities for people at home, and in the last ten years have opened thousand of on-line casinos. They buy the software off the young e-geeks, the license off the Central American governments, and fleece the suckers out of their credit card limits. They do all this with a the aid of their cyborg slave dealers, the new generation of shufflers, all under twenty one, all perfect deliveries, and only a few having day dreams of electric sheep.
Providing a graphic of a Lara Croft look alike dealing your Omaha game might arouse the poker player a little. Meanwhile, you might be getting ripped by four cooperating teenagers in Finland. If that’s what you like in your entertainment and that’s the kind of fantasy you need in your life, then go ahead. As you dream of Lara’s smile, you will also pay for the teenagers that wrote the software, the mafia executive who bribed the Honduran government and the quarter ounce of pot for the four Finnish thieves. Enjoy your escape to this reality, but understand all of its inherent problems.
One problem remains to frustrate when switching from live action to internet play. If you’re sitting in the first seat in on-line Omaha, you can’t look down the dealer’s top when she leans in to pull in the chips.
Dracula’s Favourite Game
4.1 Why People Don’t Get It
Blackjack is probably the most talked about, studied and played table game at casinos around the world. Only roulette’s play and losses compete with the forms of blackjack available to the gambler worldwide. Blackjack exploded half way through the last century, especially popular with the gangs of New York City, and its baby brother Atlantic City. These days the average punter will lose between zero and twelve percent of his money bet on this game, depending on how drunk he is and how much time and money he is prepared to fritter away.
The game is also a game that some people can squeeze money out of. Those that write books on how to count cards, those who actually do count cards for profit and of course the casinos make money out of this game. Everyone else is a loser. The most beatable form of the game that I have seen was in a few California card rooms, a game where the players play against each other, with the casino getting two percent of the action. It is much easier to rip off the average punter than it is to rip off a casino. This game is very beatable if you have five bad players with you, and of course it doesn’t matter if you count cards, the casino will still get two percent of the action. They don’t care who plays, as long as someone does.
Last chapter taught us how to make a living from basic strategy blackjack combined with casino bonuses. This chapter will teach you why basic strategy makes sense, why counting cards is relatively easy, and why most people give the game away after a relatively short career. Personally, I play blackjack solely for the mental exercise these days. Counting cards is like getting my brain to do three sets of one hundred and eighty pounds on the bench press. Because I’m I small timer with not a lot money, I can’t play very profitably as I have no bankroll to damage the casino. Not until this book is published of course, then I can try kicking the casinos in the guts with your money.
Learning to play basic Strategy is like getting in the boxing ring with someone that has twenty pounds and two inches on you. You are going to lose over fifteen rounds, but if you learn to defend for most the time and combine it with some opportunistic body blows, it might keep you from being knocked out. Your coach stands at the side of the ring with a basic strategy table and your bankroll allows you to be dressed appropriately in knee high boots and strapped on gloves, which might give you the confidence to get into the ring.
At the beginning of the blackjack hand, you have two cards available to you while the dealer has one card up and one in the hole (one in the shoe in Europe). It is up to you to make a decision. You can hit, stand, take insurance if the dealer has an ace, double your bet for one more card, split if your hand consists of a pair and sometimes surrender your hand for half a loss. You must vary your play in basic strategy from aggressive to defensive behaviour because you will only win about forty five percent of the hands, and when you do win it is great to have two bets out there or preferably two very large bets if you’re counting cards.
One method of playing blackjack is to play exactly like the house, hit everything until you get to seventeen and never split and double down. When you first think about it, this might pay more than even money because you get one and a half bets for blackjack but the casino only gets one bet off you if they score two card twenty one. It’s only when you lose a few hundred like I did that you’ll realise that the one time in ten that both you and the house bust, the casino gets your money. If you bust first, they take your chips and then bust themse
M. G. Pritchard
Unit 8
3 Taylors Road
Mitcham. 5062
South Austalia
618 8271 0521
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.1 Frontier Cultures and Gambling
1.2 Existential Angst and Self-destruction
1.3 Easy Come, Easy Go 1.4 Small Dick, Big Wallet
Hustlers, Hookers and Hamburgers
2.1 Women are the Rake 2.2 Fat People Can’t Win 2.3 The Salvation Army Can Give You Food and Shelter
2.4 Finding a Great Gambling Conversation
Cyborgs and the Future of Gaming
3.1 There was Gold in Them Thar Hills
3.2 Deeper Blue was Not a Great Bluffer
3.3 The Mindset of the Croupier
Dracula’s Favourite Game
4.1 Why People Don’t Get It
4.2 Why People that Get it Don’t Get It
4.3 Why People that Really Get it Get Out
4.4 Why People Can’t Talk About it so Drink Vodka
Even Mozart Couldn’t Play Billiards all the Time
5.1 Yes, They Have Poker in Tasmania
5.2 All Rounders Make Likely Winners
5.3 Decimal Considerations in Poker
5.4 Rock beats Scissors beats Paper. Does Water beat Rock?
The World Champion
6.1 The Best Roulette Player in Adelaide
6.2 The Best Blackjack Player in Nevada
6.3 The Best Poker Player in the Empire
6.4 The Worst Gambler in the World
Retirement, Which Game to Play Now?
7.1 New York, the Capital of the World
7.2 The Greens are Wild in Politics
7.3 Monopoly, What You Really Wanted to Know
The Big Fellows Do What They Like
8.1 See You On Monday Big Fella
8.2 Napoleon, Hitler, Nixon and Hussein
8.3 Them That Can’t Do, Them That Can Teach
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.1 Frontier Cultures and Gambling
We’ll look at two main frontier countries for this topic, Australia and the United States of America. They are closely related on account of the recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain in 1776 and its subsequent need for new land to place its undesirables in. It seems Mad King George really did muck things up by letting a future superpower out of his hands so that he could have more time to dance around in his knickerbockers. Luckily, Captain Cook was sailing around the Pacific Islands at the time, and took interest in a place that had very large jumping rodents. Even luckier was that the Dutch and Portuguese sea farers didn’t take much interest in the land. This might not have happened if those Dutchmen had known that the country would one day produce Olivia Newton-John.
England founded three convict colonies in Australia. They started in 1788 with Sydney (New South Wales), then Perth (originally a free settlement until they found they needed to make money so built some prisons) and Van Diemans Land (later to be named Tasmania). Three other colonies and some territories were also founded before federation in 1901, but these were settled by businesspeople and other immigrants with the odd Kanaka slave thrown in (and let me tell you, they were very odd). Chinese and Arabs came to join those in the business of prospecting during the gold rushes of the eighteen thirties and nineties, they didn’t mind the heat. To this day, Australia remains an ore rich country, mining many minerals and gases, but has developed other industries that make it a well developed and well visited country. Australians like to refer to themselves as being in the ‘Lucky Country’ and show a ferocious interest in all sorts of gambling, from sports tipping to betting on two flies crawling up a wall.
It’s possible that this South East Asian allure for the gamble, comes from the genetic compulsions of indigenous peoples it started with, those attracted by the lure of gold and finally, those produced all on its own in the last two centuries. Aborigines around the coasts of Australia were fantastic fishermen, enjoying the thrill of the hunt as much as the new Australians enjoy their two up. Friends, around the world, men’s brains are designed for fishing, coincidentally making some fish themselves. Predictably, most of them become great suckers for glitzy Vegas casinos that use Tom Jones and Anne Margret for bait.
Nevada and Califonia in America also had similar rushes of gold and silver in the nineteenth century, and Nevada is happy to identify itself as the silver state. People came to this part of the country from all over the world, but very large numbers of new Americans headed west to make a few dollars. Most of them came up short of course as the real winners were the ones that ripped off the tourists and got in on the side action. Mark Twain was one of those young men who ventured out into the Wild West to seek his fortune, but he made a bad prospector in places like Carson and Virginia City, towns that were much bigger in their heyday. He wandered around broke most of the time, making mental notes of the lifestyles and habits of the men, later to be explored in his culturally defining novels and lectures of comparative studies of international cultures.
Australia had its fair share of bums during its heyday with more losers than winners in the prospecting business. An attempt by the British government to impose a tax on the miners in the free settlement of Victoria, led to an important revolt by Irishmen and other ratbags called the Eureka Stockade. The Southern Cross was the trademark used by its instigators and can still be found next to Britain’s Union Jack on the Australian flag. It seems that these particular revolutionaries did not like a tax imposed on their preferred gambling opportunity, working hard in pits and sieving water for bits of gold. Speaking of Irish trouble makers, Ned Kelly was running amuck in the bush at this time too, he didn’t do much prospecting, but he certainly robbed a few banks and fixed a few card games in his times.
What might have added to the severity of these cultures wasn’t just the nature of the work, but the lack of wives for the men to go home to. As prospecting areas, Virginia City (Nevada) and Kalgoorlie (Western Australia) attracted fit, young, hardworking men who often had to leave behind any romantic attachments in the search of their fortunes. Australia as a nation had to wait two full generations for some of these wiry old critters to finally kick the bucket. It was at the start of the twentieth century before the country even approximated a population where there was enough women to listen to all the hard luck stories. The new “Diggers” who had been born in this environment then got sent off to Turkey and got their hats blown off in the First World War. In reality it was the indigenous people, the Chinese and Afghani immigrants who were the best at toughing it out in this harsh environment. This eventuated in a Chinatown in every big settlement and plenty of feral camels strolling around the desert trying to avoid territory battles with the ferocious frilled necked lizards.
Nevada had the same problems with women at a similar time, there just weren’t enough Jill’s for the amount of Jack’s roaming the streets. Perhaps this is why one can find three gay bars in a little city like Reno, but only three shirt lifter saloons in Saigon, you can’t be sure. To this day Nevada attracts many young women to work there as dancers, escorts and casino staff, often from as far away as Russia. They are lured here by the promise of easy money and promises of subsequent economic freedom. They end up catering for the gambling men who drag their families to Vegas for that convenient Grand Canyon slash Craps holiday. It can be argued that too many women go as far west as Hollywood in the hope of catching that lucky break on the silver screen, ending up working as a waitress at the local flee bitten café.
So many men, so much time, what did these frontier cultures have in common with your local prison or Real Estate lawyers convention.
Oh, the usual capers. They drank, they gambled, they ogled nude women and they picked fights with each other.
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.2 Existential Angst and Self-destruction
Let’s face it, most people lose money when they pick up an interest in a gambling activity. Some people lose it all. This book might show you how I have made a living from gambling, but it will more importantly bring up the pitfalls that might cause you to drop your bundle. They are so many and various, that the title of the book lets you know I’m predicting that you will lose something over all if you take up financial speculation seriously. Making a living from wagering is like walking a tightrope of fear, with a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a pornographic novel in the other, your temptations can lead you to lose balance and topple over. Whether it’s an interest in horses, poker or Amway, the vast majority of people lose money when they take a punt and really we have to guesstimate why.
Perhaps there is a destructive gene within us that makes us want to lose all of our money and send us to the rail. Maybe we are designed to be broke and hungry, hunting and gathering rather than sowing and reaping. Perhaps gambling activities are a substitute for a lack of sexual activity in our lives? This might explain why we find the national eight ball team being slightly uglier than the average set of four men, or why some roulette players find their only discussions with women come about when they lose their weekly pay check at their local casino. Certainly, casinos are apt to hiring attractive women to do the crouping and schmoozing, it just makes better business sense.
Personally, I find playing golf very sexy. When my two iron connects with the ball and it goes a hundred and eighty yards with the propulsion of my club it feels like a knife through butter. Making that thirty foot put has got to have some parallels to talking some stunner into parting with her panties, certainly the thrill of golf has me polishing my clubs at least once a week in preparation for a big game. Breaking eighty for me is like a wonderful love making session, I find myself getting to the clubhouse for a ginger ale and a cigarette with a satisfied grin on my face.
As we suggested in our last essay, Men’s minds are programmed to enjoy the irregular reinforcement of a day out in the boat, pulling in some King George whiting or holy mackerel. Often a whole day out on the lake without a nibble on your line can still feel satisfying and natural, especially if you spend it with your best mate, drinking beer and shooting the breeze. If you haven’t worked out why professional poker players call losers fish and sometimes wear silly hats to work, then you really do need to read on.
Running a business in a free economy can have the same effect on a man, getting that sale and watching their pyramid scheme blossom with hard work. This can often make up for those days when you don’t make a cent. Perhaps it’s that characteristic in the brain that makes working for the government feel unnatural to many men. Getting a regular hourly rate, and having most of their ideas manipulated on the way up the bureaucratic ladder can cause even the laziest man to want to lose the cushy job and have to actually work for a living. But I’m not here to tell you that it’s men’s genes that caused the fall of the iron curtain. What I want you to think about is why this particular form of entertainment is so popular. What makes people want to lose, and then to buy books on ways to lose less money more slowly.
Already, we have covered what cultures and parts of the world tend to have more gamblers, ones with lots of men with time on their hands. Since most of these men are losers during a flutter, why else would they do it, when, in all probability they will lose the lot and think about jumping off a bridge? Mandarin Chinese language uses the same word for crisis and opportunity, is it the crisis of losing at the casino, or the opportunity to lay bets that motivates the gambler. Later in the book we will certainly recommend playing bridge as a substitute for slots, the thrill of victory is still there, it’s just that it won’t cost us all of our bickies.
Existential angst can be defined in a number of ways, but was most popular with try hard black turtle neck wearing beatniks in the fifties. Albert Camus would certainly let us know that the absence of God in our lives makes even the most successful men capable of being unsatisfied, and choosing to unwind at the race track. Jean Paul Sartre was so upset at having so much freedom in his life, with so many choices, that he ended up choosing to be an active member of the French Communist party. Well at least that gave him something to do. These guys were pointing out to us that in the free world, without God, when we are not broke and hungry, we have so many choices and freedoms that we often look for activities that limit our choices to a simple few.
Gambling offers us these choices and a way to go broke enough to ensure that we once again have to return to a state of desperation for survival. That is, trying to get food to eat and a place to stay. The existentialist would admit that a person who gets involved in gambling is unsatisfied in being in this world and is looking to escape from his or her reality into another reality that provides choices, say black or red in roulette.
Years ago, when I was a highly educated teenager with too much hair, I would often tell my friends that I preferred to play pool then study how to make money. It was my existential protest. If there was no reason for my existence, then why not just make some balls move around a billiard table, or some cards around a card room. It made perfect sense to me. It makes perfect sense to so many men in our society, and it’s only the ones that make plans about running pool halls or write books on winning poker that really make any sort of plans for their future. And what do they do in the future when they have plenty of money? They get into bigger business and become bigger players in the world, but not any different to when they were small time hustlers, looking for trouble and trying to be somebody.
Cards are made up of four suits, clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. They represented four classes of people in the middle ages, the army, the aristocrats, the clergy and the workers. Most games that are played with cards are metaphors for the control of these classes and are forms of escapism, definitely simulations of war and other such manly activities. Making a deck of cards with the fifty two most wanted Iraqis is no coincidence, nor are computer games that teach men advanced military tactics involved in defeating alien invaders. Men are designed for fishing and for war.
Men also get very lonely sometimes and enjoy the comradely of poker games, chess tournaments or playing stick for beers. Its not just loneliness that makes some people want to go to the local hall and play Canasta (A popular cross between Gin Rummy and Monopoly), it’s the feeling of being a player that people are looking for.
Being a player like Hugh Heffner is the dream of so many men. Hugh has four blond escorts, a big house with a zoo and plenty of hair and smiles a lot for a seventy year old. When you really think about it, Hugh has made his millions off the right hands of millions of his readers, his magazine is designed to give its customers stress relief. In a way, Hugh Heffner is as much a professional wanker as the struggling college student that donates at the sperm bank once a week for fifty bucks.
The seventh chapter of this book might help us look at ways in which we can still be players in the world without losing all of our money and our families as well. The next few essays will start to explore current and future issues in gambling, which you may wish to avoid if you’re looking to win some money at a casino tomorrow. If this is the case, head straight to the middle section on Internet bonuses, slot hustling, blackjack and poker. Concluding chapters come later on if you’re not much for the technical bits coming up.
If you are feeling desperate because you are single and lost your job because of your drinking problem, perhaps you should read this essay again before you drive to Vegas with this book in your left hand.
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.3 Easy Come, Easy Go
Ever wondered what happened to the garbologisit who won the four million dollar lotto or to the Onassis kid that inherits many millions? There is a big difference in those people who inherit and those who build up big companies and grow their own fortunes. There are those that have had to work hard to get a lot of money and do not tend to change their Scrooge like attitude. Sometimes their kids can be a bit loose with their inherited cash, because they are so used to having and spending money.
Successful businesspeople do not tend to spend hours and hours in casinos, they have much more important gambles to take in the office. It’s only the playboy and the bum that turn to gambling for the excitement and the feeling of dangerous fun. My favourite customers at the poker table are men that have inherited millions, and businesspeople that have got lucky in business by employing people that not only do all the work, but generate all of the ideas. These types of individuals are loose gamblers. They sometimes do their homework, but eventually gamble like maniacs when drunk or angry.
These types of individuals are most likely to part with their money in a casino without thinking twice about it. Other bored people that do not have the money also tend to have a flutter if there are two important characteristics filled. Firstly they must have a brain designed for business, gambling or fishing, which is the majority of men. Secondly they must have a lack of self-esteem, or the angst mentioned in the previous essay. In some instances, the poor man who gambles a “No questions asked” pension is often susceptible to parting with it easily. If you enjoy fleecing other seagulls to earn your keep, the lonely pensioner is your bread and butter.
For a low income individual, to want to spend all of their remaining money at the casino, again, they would need a subconscious want for self destruction. If they don’t feel comfortable getting a couple of hundred dollars a week from a crappy job and seem to get turned down from every employer under the sun, they may take up pool, gambling or organising his bar code collection. Losing every last cent brings a man to the end and lets him live purely on what he can scrimp to eat, pinch to sell or bludge off friends.
The wealthy man that has nothing to live for might eventually lose the lot also, in his quest to feel like he’s really living. As his gambling gets more diverse, the rich bum will look to up the ante, to make the stakes more interesting, and the likelihood of him going broke much higher. This is most notable in the man who has worked in his father’s business out of lack of ambition, now running the company badly, and playing some craps on his many days off. Freud would say that this is a result of the repression of a man’s intense desire to kill his father for sleeping with his mother. Mario Puzo would say that it’s got to do with a man’s erroneous need to have a son running the family business, ensuring his own immortality.
If the family business includes casinos, as the Corleones did, then really you’ve got nothing to worry about financially, however, you should be more concerned about the competition putting a cap in your ass.
The Little Fellows Do What They Can
1.4 Small Dick, Big Wallet
When you bought this book, maybe you were a bit confused at why it said “Even the Winners were Losers” and why there’s a photo of me and two women with very big tits on the cover. Friends, maybe I thought it might just sell me more books and perhaps get me more money to gamble with. But then after a pot noodle and can of Pepsi it surfaced from my subconscious mind and came to me. This book, its contents, and so many other things that have interested me since I was a child are probably just about my dick.
Viagra has an interesting correlation in its arrival. It has appeared out of the blue for men who have trouble with their penises and coincides with quite a lot of them having time on their hands when they’re out of work. Perhaps they think about their members too much, perhaps rode a bicycle too hard in their teens and have injured their perineum, or perhaps they have stopped feeling like men (or feeling men literally) since retiring. What I have noticed in the gambling community and also in the drinking community is that men aren’t prepared to talk about the size and effectiveness of their penises until they are drunk; are making jokes at other people’s expense, or are in a casino or poker game, where all the normal restraints in conversation with other men go out the window.
Last week I was at a reasonable stakes private game of poker where the host had put on some low level pornographic film for the punters, the dealer had worn extra supportive underwear so that we couldn’t see through her jeans, and the topics of Richard Gere and ferrets came up. The conversation then progressed to sauce bottles, the stockmarket and supper. Being around gambling allows men to talk to each other in this intimate way, all women need is a cup of tea and some Oprah. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t cost women the large amounts of money that gambling can for men, it quite often does. By the way, have you seen the price of books in Oprah’s book club?
One has to wonder if it goes much deeper than that, perhaps as deep as Freud and penis envy, Skinner and sexual substitutes or Pritchard and the inverse wallet penis ratio. That’s right, I’m starting to believe that the more money I win, the harder it isn’t and the more broke I am the easier it is to hit the sexual jackpot. I’m sure that this might be difficult for some of the readers to digest but I had to make the book at least a hundred pages or you guys might suspect that I’m just ripping you off with this sale.
Either way, my ex needs some more money to spend on that young doctor of hers.
Hustlers, Hookers and Hamburgers
2.1 Women are the Rake
Once again, we’re going to rip off a quote from the film “Rounders” to illustrate one of the well-known facts about advantage gaming. Women do not tend to gamble as much as men, especially when it comes to wagering in potential advantage areas such as poker, blackjack and sports betting. In casinos and hotels, many women can, however, be found diligently placing quarters into slot machines, sometimes at a highly addictive level, but we’ll leave it to a female enthusiast to write a book on how women can best lose money in their efforts to win the lotto or a new car.
Women have started to catch on to sports betting in the office place and are regular winners of the office football pools. Many people say it’s the people that don’t know much about football who win the pools because they’re lucky, but as we’ll see later on in poker, sometimes thinking too much about a proposition can lead one to make fundamental judgement errors. Totalisers can be beaten in the same way poker can be beaten, but you need to be at least ten percent better in horse knowledge than the average Joe to be able to beat the commission taken by the bookie.
This creates punters who use statistics to beat totalisers at the track and sports pools when the losers back who they want to win, not who probably will. Totalisers collect all bets from gamblers on a race or a football match and vary the payouts depending on the amount of bets that come in, resulting in corresponding payouts to action for a win, minus a substantial tax or rake. That’s why the horse with the most amount of money on it, the favourite, pays the least odds. Online, one can also bet on the flip of a coin in a cricket match, and since the amount of bets on each outcome tend to be equal, the totaliser approach to payouts makes sure that each bet pays one ninety for a win. This bet can never be beaten without a biased coin, but losers still want to have action on it, and not too many of these idiots are women.
On many occasions, simply picking the home teams in any tipping competition is enough to get a fifty five percent success rate and surge one to the front of the pack by the end of the season. In my office experience, some women get so much into the football tipping competition that they are often found organising the whole thing, to the pleasure of the men. They don’t realise that this little flutter can be part of the office politics and then complain about how hard it is to break through the glass ceiling. My reaction to this was twice to organise a netball tipping competition, and to my delight, found that I knew more about netball by the end of the season than most of those who play the game. It’s a good little earner for me, a great hustle.
Lets say that this is your tenth book on advantage gaming and you fancy yourself as a great blackjack tournament player, a super holdem hustler or an idiot savant on the nature of horse racing. Will women want to sleep with you when you make a million?
The answer is a resounding no. Not only do the vast majority of women not understand or care to understand how you can win from these games, in all probability you will have to pay women to sleep with you. At least, you’ll have to tip the sexy ones handsomely to bring you your bourbon if there are other generous men in the room vying for the cocktail waitresses’ attentions.
Backpacking around North Africa in my early twenties gave me many intense experiences, none less than a scorned Moroccan woman at a card room. I was at a pool table, playing the local champ for a few dirham, meanwhile twenty men were playing cards on the side of the café. Cards weren’t my thing until my late twenties so I can’t remember what they were playing. In stormed a fuming wife of an obvious loser, throwing her arms around and cursing this dead beat of a husband that Allah had blessed her with. The poverty that I saw in this part of the world was an eye opener for me, but this comical scene certainly represented trouble at home for this moustached escapee, the ball and chain had found him and he was cornered. This happens all over the world in casinos and card rooms, with the typical reaction from other male players consisting of non-chalant cackles or outright drunken uproar.
My experience with women while gambling is that at the start they have little understanding for what you are doing, then they have little care to learn about it, and finally have no respect for your skills if you win. When you lose, they will often give you such a bad time as to send you to the bottle. And with all that booze in your system, its tough to give your other half the time of day, let alone help her with the shopping. Staying away from women is the best way to be, if you’re going to take up gambling seriously, even try to keep the conversations off winning with your Mother, after all she’s a woman too. It’s their nature to collect and prepare, while it’s ours to hunt and gather.
That reminds me, I’m running late for my “Millenium Man Tribal Warrior Chest Beating” support group.
Hustlers, Hookers and Hamburgers
2.2 Fat people Can’t Win
This section may get a little technical or offensive for some people, but if the writer is talented enough, then the concept should come through loud and clear. What concept? We explore it with the term Polydipsia, an interesting result for behaviourists, first noticed in the nineteen fifties when B.F. Skinner was the leading researcher on behavioural analysis. (Using advanced psychological concepts when talking about losing gamblers is a great way to explore some of these topics, psychology was the fastest growing vocational qualification at the end of the last century. My honours thesis was on facial expressions, but I didn’t hand it in, I was too keen to get out there and make some easy cash).
Polydipsia is the interesting phenomena of rats drinking excess amounts of water, whilst in a cage that presents them with pellets of food at non-regular intervals. If rats are given a pellet every time they press a button in their cage, or every fourth time they press a button, hungry ones gorge themselves early and when satisfied, press the bar less often when they are looking for their fifth course and an early supper. When rats are given a pellet unpredictably, say on average every fourth press, but ranging from one press to ten, not only do the rats press the buzzer more often, they also drink from their water container a comparatively higher amount. Non-regular reinforcement is like playing the slots. The gambling rat likes hits the bottle pretty hard.
Humans display arguably more advanced but similar responses when engaging in activities that provide entertainment reinforcement, say watching television or playing blackjack. When one watches television, sometimes the show gives away that an advertisement is on the way, but with live shows like Letterman, often it doesn’t, and what do most people do during the advertisements? Quite often the person in charge of the remote will do a bit of surfing, look for more entertainment and reinforcement, but regularly during advertisements people will get up and get themselves a snack. When I watch the football and barrack for the 49ers, every time they get a touchdown (non-regular reinforcement) and an advertisement comes on, I celebrate by going to the fridge for a can of Bud.
Quite often men have money on games that they watch on television, just to keep things interesting, so how does the concept of polydipsia apply to games in the casino? Pretty easy comparison really. Casinos that charge for booze make a lot of money out of the punter, those that don’t, make so much money from excessively drunk gamblers that they are happy to just give it away (as they do in Nevada).
There are a lot of calories in alcohol, but some other forms of polydipsia are able to be seen at a poker table in the casino. If you are playing a high stakes game with regular service for food and drink, there is ample opportunity for the gambling man to put on some weight. In between hands on the Internet, I’m often found rotting my teeth with too many cups of coffee and far too many water crackers dipped in caviar. I’ve put on at least twenty pounds since I took up full time gaming, so even winning players struggle to avoid the phenomena of polydipsia.
Successful business people are also provided with unlimited opportunities for food and drink. When you read about successful poker players, politicians, businessmen and golfers such as Phil Hellmuth, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Tiger Woods, are you surprised that they show the discipline to have a workout regimen to help with their career? I’m not, that’s a great way to keep you sharp and can give you time out from the tables to think through some advanced Chinese poker strategies, the West Bank, digital media or how to make more money from Nike.
It’s the really fat guys in gambling that concern me. Especially the ones that were obese before they took it up. Besides the people that have genetic disorders, most overweight people have problems with polydipsia, eat for emotional comfort or just know fantastic cooks. When they get into a money game however, I often wonder if they have the discipline to play one hundred, two hundred holdem with a tough field at the Mirage, where you might have to fold eighty percent of your hands before the flop. Do these guys have the patience and modesty not to rebuy in a gin rummy game when the pot is not laying the correct odds? What kind of people have the patience to play like this?
Those that use their free time to study their opponents when playing, and those too cheap to catch a taxi home are getting accidental exercise by walking home.
Hustlers Hookers and Hamburgers
2.3 The Salvation Army Can Give You Food and Shelter
I was always a bit of a loser at school, quitting the football team to play tennis, playing chess at lunchtime, joining the quiz team and always getting dumped by my girlfriends. At university in my teens, I was far too angsty and neurotic to get full value for the excessive drinking and womanising that was available to me as a science student. It wasn’t until I got my first job as a psychology graduate that gave me a real perspective on the losers and winners in this world of ours, I scored a job as a care worker with the Salvation Army.
The William Booth hostel had a number of different types of men living in it, crazies, drunks, gamblers and of course the odd transvestite would run out of money and start banging their head against the wall. Working with these men could give one a feeling of superiority, if you continually hear the stories of broken windows, terminal illnesses and gambling debts, but one has to understand that there are many ways to break a man psychologically, it doesn’t have to be self inflicted. Putting a man on tilt is about finding the buttons to press and then to press them with the correct.
Timing is very important when you are trying to upset an individual and the bigger the man the harder they fall. This includes upsetting men that have a lot of money, an important position, or a trophy wife. Putting people on tilt comes naturally to some cunning humans. My two favourite individuals that put people on tilt are: Michael Moore, the academy award winning documentary filmmaker, and Judge Judy, for her ability to control people and help them to lose the plot. Personally, I find in poker that putting a person on tilt is great for short term gains and for getting beaten up, but that gradual fleecing of an individual’s life savings is more convenient and sustainable. Many of the casino industry executives are yet to realise this.
Do the casinos put people on tilt with cheap booze and unbeatable games? Yes.
It seems far more profitable to the bottom line to get all of the punters’ cash in one session and to leave it to the Salvation Army to pick up the pieces. Professional Blackjack players make some small inroads into the profit of the casino, not just via their wins, but more importantly by the amount and cost of their surveillance. As professional gamblers, casinos have to act like card sharks, if they are in an intimate city like Auckland or San Jose, they have to be seen to be friendly and concerned for their customers. In Vegas or Moscow however, there is too much competition and an individual poker player or casino can preserve their anonymity and go for the jugular.
The vast majority of people that decide to take up research into gambling in order to minimise their losses will become so obsessed with the games that the amount of time spent on them will inevitably get their cash, no matter how small the casino’s edge. If one just sticks to poker for example, sure ten percent of players will not lose, but only five percent will make an award wage, some a bit more, but all will find an unproductive way to spend it.
If you don’t end up on the rail yourself, your neighbour just might end up singing songs and banging tambourines, or if they find Karma, end up with the Hare Krishnas.
Hustlers, Hookers and Hamburgers
2.4 Finding a Great Gambling Conversation
So the food’s no good and its sometimes hard to get a good night’s sleep when you’re a gambler, who can you relate to when women don’t give you the time of day? Well quite simply it’s other gamblers, and there’s plenty of them out there, all nations, all creeds and all night long. Be prepared for hustlers that bait you into wagering on fixed coin tosses, magic darts and obvious card tricks. Bars and strip joints might be a place to start, but these can get expensive when you’re starting out.
My favourite place to find out where the action is is at the local Gamblers Anonymous. Popping into their meetings is a good way to find out where the local illegal card rooms, pool halls and dog fights are held. Just take care to avoid the Christian types that run these groups. Apparently, for a carpenter, Jesus didn’t go much for games. Being brave and being able to hold one’s own in a group therapy session is good practice just in case you catch that run of cold cards, have your stake lifted or get ripped off by a bookie and go broke, finding yourself staying with the Salvos.
As a retired semi-professional pool shark, I like to hang around pool halls to get the low down on track meets, card games and nude bars. On my last visit to Adelaide, I ran into Loose Lewi, Exaggerator, Leo The Mechanic, Wombat, Gopher Glen, Whinger, Car Stereo, Torch, Mad Dog Mario and Ice Cream Jack. That brings me to handles and what kind of handle that you might take on now that you’re throwing yourself in the deep end. I’ve gone by many names including “Basic Strategy” on account of my Blackjack Background, “Mad Mick” on account of my florid fervour for a flutter and “The Cunt” on account of my mercenary approach to cards. My official poker handle is “Saint Mick” on account of my patience and charity work, but you may have to hang around with these sorts of guys for quite a while for them to establish a handle that you can hang yourself on.
Hang around these type of negative individuals for too long and you’ll be looking for a tree to sling your noose.
Cyborgs and the Future of Gaming
3.1 There Was Gold in Them Thar Hills
There are billions and billions of dollars currently being made in online gambling by the professional poker player, the basic strategy blackjack players, the small-time hustler and of course, by the casinos. The provision of Internet gambling is illegal in the United States of Australia, but the use of Internet casinos isn’t. These days many Internet casinos do their business in Central America, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. These are the places where your winnings will come from if you read this piece, understand it and have the discipline to carry it out.
One of the first Internet casinos was set up around the turn of the millennium in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia, linked with the local Lassiters Casino. The federal government in co-ordination with the Green Party decided to outlaw the practice except for horse racing, costing Lassiters a potential squllion in profit. The United States do not allow brick and mortar casinos to have on-line brothers, the government is also looking at banning players because so many of them have gone broke. Nowadays online gaming is so competitive that some people setting up Internet casinos are somehow starting to lose money, while the professionals find ways of making more and more money from buying rights to the software written by others.
The industry is super competitive, so tough that the complimentary odds and ends that some casinos offer their players are so enticing as to be profitable for the advantage gambler. There are tenfold more casinos online now compared to the hundred or so in Las Vegas, so it should be much tougher to attract the business. The problem is solved by the fact that anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card could become a customer of theirs, logging on while playing in bed or escaping the missus in your ‘Workroom’. This results in enormous turnover and action and means you will have to find a new way to hide things on your desktop, I suggest putting the links in with your porn collection.
Because the market is so competitive and lucrative in Las Vegas, many casinos offer food, money and rooms for new and loyal customers. Online casinos cannot offer food or rooms to their customers, so instead they offer cold hard cash. This can be quite a lot of cash, sometimes thousands of US dollars just for opening a high roller account. They do this of course because the vast majority of these high rollers will lose the lot. They needn’t lose it all, there are some games available that minimise one’s losses, but since there is no card counting (the computer dealer shuffles after every hand), none that can be beaten.
The stipulations for getting a ‘hundred for a hundred’ buy in at an Internet casino are sometimes a bit loose, sometimes a bit stringent, but almost always beatable with determination, knowledge, and most importantly discipline. The average site will say that one has to wager two thousand dollars worth of any game to be able to cash out the two hundred in your bankroll (after your hundred buy-in and match bonus). We will use this typical site as a model for our approach to fleecing casinos like it. The solution to this problem is to find a game that has less than a ten percent losing average, and then to follow through with the wagering at a low level, negating big swings in your bankroll.
Most sites eliminate roulette and craps from your options in the small print and some eliminate blackjack and jacks or better power poker, but the smart ones let you play whatever you like. Chances are that you will find a game that you think you enjoy and you will lose the one hundred bonus plus the one hundred buy-in, possibly going back to your credit card to see if you can fund your new passion for online scratch cards.
Purchasing chips to an online casino on your credit card can be a sobering experience when you receive your statement from you bank in the mail. The hundred here and the hundred there certainly add up, and if you’re an advantage player, it can give you an excellent record on how much you are actually winning. Poker enthusiasts that think they are pretty much a break-even player, will find that they actually lose quite a lot of money at the game when they get their statements. Software involved in gambling online means that the average player loses much, much faster than in a physical casino.
Security in online transactions is another consideration for the computer player, but is usually unnecessarily overly concerning for most people for one simple reason. There is more money available to a casino that conducts itself legally and fairly, than one set up to rip off all of its players. The obviously well built online casino can be trusted as much as the physical casino, it’s just bad business to rip off people in transactions, when they can do it with one armed bandits. Personally, I have played on well over a hundred online casinos, cashing out in the positive about seventy percent of the time, breaking even twenty percent of the time and losing my bonus, original buy-in and sometimes more ten percent of the time. I have been misbilled once, which was corrected, and I have only been very suspicious of the software on one casino where I lost a significant amount of money. We all get a little paranoid when we lose though.
Opening a paypal account used to be the best way to gamble online. You used to be able to take a thousand off of your card into paypal, put a hundred in to play at a few different casinos at a time and then to bring back your buy-ins to the paypal account when you win. The problem is that most people that did this lost and were maxing out their credit cards due to gambling, causing paypal a lot of concern, business and in the end money. These days, neteller will let you buy chips at a few casinos if you put a thousand dollars into one of their accounts. Putting a thousand dollars into a neteller account with your credit card means that you won’t have to go back to your card and then the Internet casinos will not have access to your credit card number. It’s also a good idea to get a deposit only credit card before you think about going through these steps. I didn’t and the banks made a lot of money in transactions and interest from me.
The way to win as often as I did is merely through playing the minimum conditions in the bonus clause. To do this, one needs to find a game where the casino house edge is well under ten percent. Doing this with such a regular win rate is achieved by limiting one’s play to two games in particular that have a low house edge and very low variability in results, Blackjack and Jacks or Better Poker.
In our example, we needed to wager two thousand dollars to cash out the hundred bonus and we might do this by using basic strategy blackjack. Basic strategy blackjack and its pitfalls will be addressed later in this book, but you will have to take my word for it that the majority of software used in online casinos has a maximum of a one percent edge for the house. Therefore if we keep track of our wagering we should lose twenty dollars on average of our two thousand dollars of action, keeping eighty percent of the bonus, cashing out and becoming a winning gambler.
Variance is our problem, with two hundred dollars, we can’t bet two thousand at a time, we actually should play one thousand two dollar hands. Blackjack is not quite a coin toss, we only win forty five percent of the time and some more from blackjacks and double downs, but it approximates it. If you play one thousand hands of blackjack with basic strategy you will rarely waver more than fifty bucks either way of your one eighty (expected return), but most can’t control themselves and go for the swings.
Blackjack has a low house edge when one plays perfect basic strategy and has confidence in that strategy. When you read the next chapter on the game, hopefully I will convince you to trust the computer simulations, and to learn basic strategy using it online to become a winning gambler. Variance refers to the amount your two hundred bankroll (that cost you a hundred) will fluctuate, and Blackjack has a small variance game compared to most other games. In Blackjack, you win over forty percent of the time and the most you can lose online is usually four bets, when you are allowed to split and double down on one hand.
If you need to play two thousand dollars worth of Blackjack online to qualify for your bonus, I suggest that you play the minimum stakes, which is usually two dollars a hand. You will then need to play a thousand bets (which is around nine hundred hands) at this level before you are allowed to cash out a profit. Nine hundred hands sounds like a lot, and it is, but for your first couple of wins its imperative that you get a feel for basic strategy blackjack and learn to trust it and see its results. Nine hundred hands for the novice will take around five hours, for the experienced player around two. It varies again depending on the speed of the software and your computer.
When I’d cashed out in the positive on my first couple of web sites, it was now possible to up the ante and increase my hourly win rate as an Internet casino hustler. You do this by playing four sites on the same day that offer a hundred for a hundred, and play eight dollars a hand on each. You will need to once again play nine hundred hands that day and you will get sick and tired of typing in your particulars for the cheques to be sent to, but it’s worth it. Since so many of the casinos are identical and use the same software and bonuses, this is easy. It will take you around the same amount of time as your first casino, but now you’ll make four times as much. You have increased your variance however, so you might lose on one of the four casinos, cashing out say zero, one fifty, two fifty and three hundred.
With so many hands to be played and so many qualifications on the sites, you can never expect on average to cash out the full bonus, but you should aim to cash out on average half of the bonuses and aim for three quarters of them. If you are a winning live poker player and limit yourself to low action, you can expect to cash out the full bonus almost every time. If you are allowed to play roulette in bonus play, then simply place two thousand dollars evenly on all thirty seven numbers. This will take you about ten spins and will cost you most of the bonus anyway. It will cost you half the hypothetical bonuses if you only have one zero, as in European roulette.
Variance will be increased if blackjack and roulette are unavailable to you. In this case, I usually turn to Jacks or Better poker. Similarly to blackjack, this also has a house edge of less than one percent if played correctly. Since you need a royal flush every now and then to compensate for the regular losses in this game, the variance is often too high to be able to grind out reliable wins in online Jacks or better poker. If it is possible to play power poker, that is three or ten hands at a time with the high payout, then its much easier to regularly cash out most of the bonus when you are forced to use this game.
Craps is another game that is usually unavailable to the bonus freeloader in internet casinos, due to its small percentage on the come bets. To be able to cashout most of the bonus, you really have to stick at these games. Even if the slots are paying up to ninety nine percent, the variance in results for this game can put a hole in your Visa card. I recommend sticking to basic strategy blackjack for the first dozen casinos that you rip off. There are thousands and thousands of dollars to be made from using systems similar to this, I just wish I could design a robot to do the wagering for me.
Friends of mine have made money the same way, but they usually train their kids to do the wagering for them and pay them two dollars an hour. Hey that’s business.
Cyborgs and the Future of Gaming
3.2 Deeper Blue Was a Great Bluffer
All Internet casinos have special sections in the small print that warrant interest in those of you familiar with the Turing test, blade runner and online nineball. Personally I am a bad chess player, but a winning gambler and have experience in what we are about to cover. What we will explore means that this book has a shelf live of less than ten years, programs will be winning money online, and when they let cyborgs play poker in live card rooms, I’m out of there.
In Nineteen Ninety seven, a historical event took place that is yet to gain its legend. The IBM company designed a computer, Deeper Blue, one of a string of ever improving computers, to take on the best chess grandmaster at the time, Garry Kasparov. My friend and I had an argument about the game of chess and the intuitivity, computational knowledge and creativity involved in the game. As your usual arts graduate, my compadre rationed that computers could never beat humans and that the pc would have a nervous breakdown. Kasparov had lost one game out of five to Deep Blue, the inferior predecessor of the new software, so I felt that IBM’s computers were starting to be able to out compute the human brain and that Deeper Blue had a good chance. Of course the science graduate won the twenty dollar bet, and let me tell you that was a sweet bill.
Chess is just a game, like poker, baccarat and paigow, but quite a lot more complex. It is also played for money. I’ve played for cash both online, in tournaments and in New York’s Washington Square. The issue is that computers are now stronger than players, I can’t even beat some hand sized chess games these days. Finding an online site where members plays chess for cash gives one the opportunity to use that software to do the work for you. Chances are that your opponent also owns the same, so then it comes down to the best pc, you put money on your pony, sit back and barrack for moves that are too complex for you to understand. But I don’t play horses, the only thing that excites me is gambling on my own actions, cards, golf and tiddlywinks.
The Internet casinos that we were referring to in the last chapter, the ones that we were hustling for bonuses, will not let you use a program to do your wagering for you. How they would find out is beyond me. When none of the games are beatable once your bonus is gone, letting a computer gamble will still lose you money and be about as entertaining as actually setting light to your hundred dollar bills.
In the future, profitable software play will be limited to poker sites, and other sites where people are playing against other people and a growing number of suspicious sounding programs calling themselves Roger. At the lower levels, poker tends to be won by the patient and mathematically correct play, so if you can program well enough to get a pc playing holdem and opening with a pair of tens or better go your hardest, put your slave on the twenty four seven shift and watch the cash compound.
I also recommend that you design Roger to be able to type the odd vulgarity in the chat box when he loses a pot, that should be plenty to convince his customers that he’s just the motorcycle riding coalminer from Liverpool he says he is
Cyborgs and the Future of Gaming
3.3 The Mindset of the Croupier
Refereeing events that people are insanely passionate about is a very difficult and often unrewarding job. Years of experience in umpiring baseball games and refereeing boxing bouts in my younger days gave me all the excuses I needed to avoid being a casino croupier. I would rather be a coal miner. Dealing cards is like dealing drugs, unhappy work with unhappy people.
The problems lie within the punters’ profession that dealing cards is an easy job and a job that should be done perfectly every time. The fallacy lies with the gambling bum assuming that humans are perfect. He thinks his imperfect blackjack and poker play are fair form. He loses his money, so, in his opinion, he can do what he wants, including insulting the dealers, blowing smoke on the pit boss and passing wind in the direction of his fellow patrons.
Tipping the dealer in the United States makes dealing a potentially very financially rewarding occupation. This lends itself to a much higher level of friendliness, accommodation and higher proportion of big breasted blondes behind the tables. They are aware that they might be in line to get a twenty dollar tip if the high roller makes a big hand. Dealers ensure they are focussed on what is happening in that hand, offering a smile, win, lose or draw.
Friends, more problems lie at this juncture. As winning gamblers, we are not allowed to ensure the dealers’ twenty dollar a hour wage. Garnishing our earnings from blackjack, poker and slot hustling means that each dollar to the dealers’ hourly rate is a dollar off ours. In other parts of the world it may be in your favour to fire up and confuse the dealer, in Vegas however, we need to find appropriate tipping strategies.
A professional poker player is one who has the ability to earn at least the minimum wage from their game, say five dollars an hour from a low stakes stud. If she tips the dealer two dollars every pot and averages two pots per hour, she is really winning nine an hour. To avoid humiliation, she should tip fifty cents a pot and earn a more sensible eight dollars an hour, about the same wage as a Subway sandwich artist.
“Don’t kick a man when he’s down” I once said to a croupier at the beginning of my career, playing three six Texas holdem in Reno. The dealer had given me an extremely dirty look after tipping only one quarter dollar in a twenty dollar pot. “Why not, you’re kicking me” he rightly said in return. It was a losing night of a small stakes experience which was overall netting ten dollars an hour. It should have been eight dollars an hour; I was so cheap when it came to tipping. Naturally, the dealers were barracking for other players to win the pots; they would get a few dollars on a hundred dollar pot from Daisy from Dallas, but just fifty cents for the same pot if Michael from Mars won it. He just wasn’t on the same planet as everyone else.
Playing roulette is foreign to me, I don’t understand how people can put their money into action, knowing that nearly five percent of it will be eaten away on average every spin. Their bank rolls deplete like freshly exploded uranium ore. Years of experience dealing the game can give the croupier the same confusion of interest in the sport; they see the unskilled junkie watching their own personal stock market crash. The roulette dealer knows that the house collects on most spins, often every number gets filled by the half dozen gamblers, where the house will win money no matter what slot the ball slips into.
The most experienced casino staff will have seen red numbers come up fifteen times in a row, but most will know that the wheels are very evenly balanced, with five consecutive eights just being something that happens sometimes. The dexterous workers in the game have to concede to pursuing the collection of the losing chips and the payout of the winnings in an efficient and friendly way. Once their brains had learnt to do this automatically, their conscious minds are set free to daydream about that Caribbean trip, or that young Russian that works at the buffet.
Experienced staff tell me they switch to autopilot and rarely make mistakes, often dreading going to work, sometimes deciding to find something more fulfilling. They often get stuck in the job, trying to pay their mortgage; the darker ones take pleasure in watching people do their dough. They know monkeys could do their job, and the clever ones know that robots and other machines are already doing their jobs online, and will inevitably take their positions in the brick and mortar casinos.
Most casino people have realised that these machines don’t make mistakes, and in the last thirty years have replaced many of their table games with acres of slot machines and computer assisted roulette. What’s more, casino executives and other lazy business people know that there are huge amounts of money in providing fully automated gambling opportunities for people at home, and in the last ten years have opened thousand of on-line casinos. They buy the software off the young e-geeks, the license off the Central American governments, and fleece the suckers out of their credit card limits. They do all this with a the aid of their cyborg slave dealers, the new generation of shufflers, all under twenty one, all perfect deliveries, and only a few having day dreams of electric sheep.
Providing a graphic of a Lara Croft look alike dealing your Omaha game might arouse the poker player a little. Meanwhile, you might be getting ripped by four cooperating teenagers in Finland. If that’s what you like in your entertainment and that’s the kind of fantasy you need in your life, then go ahead. As you dream of Lara’s smile, you will also pay for the teenagers that wrote the software, the mafia executive who bribed the Honduran government and the quarter ounce of pot for the four Finnish thieves. Enjoy your escape to this reality, but understand all of its inherent problems.
One problem remains to frustrate when switching from live action to internet play. If you’re sitting in the first seat in on-line Omaha, you can’t look down the dealer’s top when she leans in to pull in the chips.
Dracula’s Favourite Game
4.1 Why People Don’t Get It
Blackjack is probably the most talked about, studied and played table game at casinos around the world. Only roulette’s play and losses compete with the forms of blackjack available to the gambler worldwide. Blackjack exploded half way through the last century, especially popular with the gangs of New York City, and its baby brother Atlantic City. These days the average punter will lose between zero and twelve percent of his money bet on this game, depending on how drunk he is and how much time and money he is prepared to fritter away.
The game is also a game that some people can squeeze money out of. Those that write books on how to count cards, those who actually do count cards for profit and of course the casinos make money out of this game. Everyone else is a loser. The most beatable form of the game that I have seen was in a few California card rooms, a game where the players play against each other, with the casino getting two percent of the action. It is much easier to rip off the average punter than it is to rip off a casino. This game is very beatable if you have five bad players with you, and of course it doesn’t matter if you count cards, the casino will still get two percent of the action. They don’t care who plays, as long as someone does.
Last chapter taught us how to make a living from basic strategy blackjack combined with casino bonuses. This chapter will teach you why basic strategy makes sense, why counting cards is relatively easy, and why most people give the game away after a relatively short career. Personally, I play blackjack solely for the mental exercise these days. Counting cards is like getting my brain to do three sets of one hundred and eighty pounds on the bench press. Because I’m I small timer with not a lot money, I can’t play very profitably as I have no bankroll to damage the casino. Not until this book is published of course, then I can try kicking the casinos in the guts with your money.
Learning to play basic Strategy is like getting in the boxing ring with someone that has twenty pounds and two inches on you. You are going to lose over fifteen rounds, but if you learn to defend for most the time and combine it with some opportunistic body blows, it might keep you from being knocked out. Your coach stands at the side of the ring with a basic strategy table and your bankroll allows you to be dressed appropriately in knee high boots and strapped on gloves, which might give you the confidence to get into the ring.
At the beginning of the blackjack hand, you have two cards available to you while the dealer has one card up and one in the hole (one in the shoe in Europe). It is up to you to make a decision. You can hit, stand, take insurance if the dealer has an ace, double your bet for one more card, split if your hand consists of a pair and sometimes surrender your hand for half a loss. You must vary your play in basic strategy from aggressive to defensive behaviour because you will only win about forty five percent of the hands, and when you do win it is great to have two bets out there or preferably two very large bets if you’re counting cards.
One method of playing blackjack is to play exactly like the house, hit everything until you get to seventeen and never split and double down. When you first think about it, this might pay more than even money because you get one and a half bets for blackjack but the casino only gets one bet off you if they score two card twenty one. It’s only when you lose a few hundred like I did that you’ll realise that the one time in ten that both you and the house bust, the casino gets your money. If you bust first, they take your chips and then bust themse