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BGonline.org Forums
New Interview
Posted By: Jake Jacobs In Response To: New Interview (Keene)
Date: Tuesday, 16 December 2014, at 3:44 a.m.
Is it cheating?
No, I don't think so. At least not then.
Ethics and casino games are an uneasy pairing at best. Stepping away from the casino floor for a moment contrast the hyper-legalistic game of bridge with the laissez faire world of poker. Bridge players are expected to maintain the highest standards of ethical behavior, and police themselves harshly. We all know of lapses; there have been some infamous cheating scandals at the highest levels. But for the most part, it works the way it is supposed to. Most players are quick to say they accidentally caught a glimpse of a card when their partner was picking his up, or for similar infractions. Poker, on the other hand, is (or was - I haven't followed the game in years) the sort of game where peeking at one's opponent's cards is considered clever play. Where the card rooms in California were notorious for collusion. A friend of mine was whipsawed by two other players until the pot was full, and then one said "I fold" and flung his hand across the table. Jim had good reflexes, but the edge of one of the cards touched one of his cards. "Dead hand!" Ruled the dealer. And players actually were quick to fail to meet those lax standards! The old Dunes poker room, home to the world's best and most famous players, was a place where those players bribed dealers to cheat for them, and for a really big scam paid the floormen to swap in marked decks.
If poker and its players were the pits (pun intended) among casino games, blackjack players, for the most part, were the summit. I knew teams that operated for years, handling millions of dollars in cash, on trust. But these same players sometimes viewed themselves as Robin Hoods taking off evil casinos. They truly hated the casinos (with reason), and felt that all was fair.
When I started, I found myself asking (myself) whether it was right to get comps for airline tickets? In those days you could buy a pair of first class tickets, meanwhile fly in on coach (or even drive in from, say, California even though you had tickets originating across the country in New York), then present them for reimbursement to your host. Not just once: I knew players, including a famous backgammon player who most people don't know played blackjack, who would stay at four or five casinos, and get the tickets comped at each. And then return them for a refund, naturally.
Or how about hole cards? It seemed to me that front loading and first basing were okay, as long as no special equipment was used. But spooking (spotting the card from a table across the pit) didn't feel right. The Nevada Supreme Court, in a case involving a former teammate, Einderbinder versus Imperial Palace, agreed with me on the former, and later rulings agreed about the latter.
What about overpayment? When I was a kid I found a silver dollar, one of the old ones, on the playground at Central School. I turned it in to the principal, because the way I was raised if it didn't belong to me it was wrong to keep it. (Virtue was rewarded when no one claimed it, and it was later given to me.) A quarter century later I found fifty dollars in loose bills on the street corner near my video store, and after checking with the closest business to see if anyone had lost them, turned them in to the police. (And two months later, received them back.) I bring this up not to pat myself on the back, because I expect everyone reading this would do the same, but because when playing blackjack you will, if you play a lot, receive overpayments. Do you keep them? Your teammates expect you to, and I did, but it bothered me.
The fact that you will deal with that sort of question, and possibly get it wrong, is a good reason to not become a gambler. But I know of evangelical Christians who considered beating the casinos a divine mission. The head of one family was legendary for schemes involving some of the most sophisticated electronic and photographic equipment imaginable. Real Mission Impossible stuff, and of course totally illegal.
Which brings us to the memory game. In 1985 Nevada passed a law dealing with the use of equipment when playing. It was so broad that in theory a calculator wristwatch (remember them?) could get you ten years. An amateur provided the test case. He bought a pair of magic shoes advertised in a blackjack publication, went to Vegas, and - I think it was at the Westward Ho - was busted, and busted hard.
Eventually most states copied Nevada, but when I went to A.C. in January of 1988 New Jersey had not. The casinos there, having lost the right to bar patrons for counting, took what I believe was the proper approach. The bosses were much better trained than the Neanderthals stalking the pits in Vegas. They protected the games by knowing how games were beaten, and what to look for. If they found someone using a computer, they stopped them from playing, for instance by shuffling every hand. (A friend who was one of the two most arrested players in Atlantic City history, was in the high rollers pit at Tropworld, wonging in whenever the count went up, causing the bosses to shuffle up. Payback for all those arrests. The lone player got so pissed he asked the bosses for the pit phone, and from his seat, called Philly to try to arrange a hit on Richard. Then he decided he didn't want to wait, so he dived across the table and began strangling him!)
So when I played Harrahs, the bosses, if they decided I was up to something, had countermeasures (indeed, "counter" measures) to employ.
The funny thing was, they were sure I was up to something. IT was by far the most intense heat I ever encountered. Among other things, I had used a fake name and address while checking in without ID. ("Oops, I left my drivers license in New York!") It was clear that they had checked, and knew this, but didn't want to let on that they knew. And I had an apparently unlimited supply of orange chips in my pockets. Where did I get all of those? They aren't the sort of things most players ever even see, let alone acquire. And everything about my play was odd. Whether the fact that Anita, my sixty something "companion" and I were running up to the room all of the time, which Bill hoped would have them thinking strange things about my sex life, added to the suspicion is an unanswered question.
So there were two bosses permanently assigned to my table. And every time things heated up, when the triple five thousands came out, or the shoe where I went from twenty-three thousand down to twenty-three thousand up on a random run of good cards, more bosses would flood the pit, and there would be a phalanx of six of them, from the casino manager on down, forming a wall directly behind the dealer, all glaring at me.
Today, the game would be illegal, because of the pager. But if I were able to memorize the entire first hand, and figure out on the fly how to play it when it came up, it would be entirely legal. I couldn't do it, and don't know anyone who could (and I know most of the candidates). What I did then, much simpler, sounds easy enough: remember two sets of two cards at a time, and one ten-digit number. And the first few hours, it was easy. But after two hours you have memorized six or eight sets of cards, and three or four ten-digit numbers, all while betting thousands of dollars a hand, and having six bosses glaring at you, trying to figure out your secrets. After four hours you have memorized more than a dozen sets of cards, more than half a dozen ten-digit numbers, and while you try to keep them straight, and only remember the latest sets, fatigue begins to crush you. After the fifth hour (I played for eight) every time I went to the suite the others would be buzzing excitedly (there were about fifteen people up there) and I would lie on the floor with my eyes closed until they shook me and said it was time to go back down.
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