I get emails and texts and sometimes I’m stopped in the casinos by people who want to pick my brain about what they are doing at the tables and machines. I’m happy I have a rather large readership; after all, that’s what every writer wants. Also, I have some good videos on the Internet.

I never shoo away people who want a few friendly tips. 

I don’t give tips at the tables because I do not want to take away the game from the dealer and the other players, But if someone asks me a question when I am not playing then I am happy to give my opinion. I keep these conversations short.

I am nice with just about everyone but I don't really want to give extended gambling lessons while I am in the casino to have some fun. Most players know this and are polite and cordial.

Yet, sadly, some are the opposite. 

 

Challenging Situation

Not all the players I run into are gentlemen and ladies. In fact, some few are downright obnoxious. Many seem to be living inside an ongoing argument in their heads and when they talk to you, they suddenly put you on the other side of their internal argument. 

Their first question isn’t a question as such, instead it’s a challenge. 

One guy just walked right up to me and said closely into my face: “Yeah, yeah, you think blackjack is the best game but it isn’t! You can’t just go by the house edge because you can’t do that. There’s more to playing than just the house edge. You should know that!”

At that moment I was just standing alone near the roulette pit waiting for my friend, James Peak, to come down from his room. 

“What do you have to say for yourself?” asked the man. “You are wrong to just look at the house edge at the games. You don’t seem to have a comment and you are supposed to be so brilliant! What do you have to say? Don’t you have any owreds of ointelligence?” 

In my mind I thought the following: If I answer him, I could get into a long, dull conversation with – let me be frank here – an idiotic player. Do I really want that?

“Well, well, Mr. Scobleet, you got nothing to say?”

“It’s Scoblete,” I said. At that moment I knew I should have walked away and ignored this guy. But I answered, correcting him about my darn name. Mistake! Oh, that was a mistake.

“What about this garbage about the house edge? Huh? Huh?” he asked.

“House edge is one element in judging games. But you do have other elements –“ 

“Ah, ha! Now, you admit you are wrong! You admit it!” he said.

 

House Edge ‘Discussion’

I answered him calmly while kicking myself inside that I was entering this conversation. “One of those other elements can be the speed of the game. I mean a house edge of 1.06 percent at the bank bet in mini-baccarat is really, really low. But give that bet almost 200 decisions in an hour and the number of decisions makes that bet more dangerous than the house edge makes it appear.”

“Ah, yes, yes, you now admit that you are wrong!” he exclaimed.

I continued, being careful and controlled. A younger me might have told this bloated blob of blubber-ness to go to … well, to go somewhere and do something to himself which I will refrain from referring to now.

“A game’s speed is an important element. But the strategy that a player uses will dictate, over time, how that player will fare at a game,” I said.

“Strategies? Ha! Ha!”

“You have many bets at craps, some tiny few are good, the rest are not good and those go from bad to awful. Keep betting the awful bets and…”

“Blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t matter what bets you make; if they hit, they hit. If they don’t, they don’t,” he scoffed.

“Now, that isn’t so. Here the house edge along with the speed of the game will give you a very good idea where that player will be over time,” I said. I could see in his puffy, red face and beady eyes that he was only half listening.
 

blackjack chips

 

Continuing the Confusion

“Long run? Long run? There is no long run,” he said. “Everything is the short run. The long run has nothing to do with anything. Nothing to do with anything at all. That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard; the long run. It doesn’t exist. It is nonsense all the way. 

“How do you sell so many books and you seem to know nothing at all about gambling or playing in the casinos? The short run should be played differently than you want us to play. The long run, poo!”

“I’ve been playing for over three decades; I’ve studied the games and the casinos and I’ve written books and articles about just about every game,” I defended myself. “I’ve spent as many as 130 days a year in casinos.” 

Why was I defending myself? This was nonsense. I was in the midst of a conversation (Conversation? No, an argument!) with someone who didn’t care what I had to say to his questions and ideas. Why was I bothering? I felt almost as if I were in fourth grade defending myself against the typical elementary-school blobby bully.

[Please note: I have a section in one of my books, The Virgin Kiss, where I tell the story of what I did to a bully when I was a young kid. I wished I had the guts to do that with this bully. I didn’t. Perhaps, that’s the problem with growing up. You become cautious and understand the consequences of your actions.]

“There is a long run, statistically, but it only gives us an idea of what will probably happen over some length of time,” I said. “You can be sure the bad bets and the house edge on those bets and the speed of the decisions and time will –“

“What are you talking about?” he said strongly. “You make no sense at all. How do you dare to tell us how to play? This long run thing is absolute –“

“I just offer my ideas based on some criteria, math and the like, and my personal experiences in the casinos throughout the –“

“Yeah, yeah, throughout what? The world? Ha! Ha! You still don’t know anything; you don’t know what you are talking about. You big-brain guys aren’t as smart as you think.”

 

Lesson Learned & Supernatural Powers

I was ready to stop. I said, “Well, I guess…” But then I felt a tug on my shoulder. I thought it was Peak, but no. It was a skinny, sallow-faced woman, definitely a big smoker. You could smell the smoke on her.

“He got you, didn’t he?” she said. “I knew he would.”

“Ah,” I responded. Ah is a word I use when I have no idea what word I should use.

“He’s been coming to this casino for a while now to teach you a lesson about casino gambling. He heard this is one of the casinos where you like to play. Has he bent your ear, Mr. Scobleet?” (Scoblete, Scoblete for crying out loud.) “My husband has strong and wrong ideas about gambling. You talk to him and you find out about that.”

“Ah, I said.

“I didn’t bend nobody’s ear,” he said. “I’m not a nut like you,”

“I play the slots,” she said, ignoring her husband. “I have a method.”

“Oh, here we go!” he said. “The lady with the method, ha! ha!”

“I use my psychic powers to pick the proper machines to play,” she said. 

(Oh, no, I thought. Please no!)

“You see machines have a kind of intelligence, well, more like a kind of consciousness,” she continued. “They send out signals if they are willing to pay off. Almost no one knows this and that is why I am so successful at the slots.”

“You haven’t won anything,” he said. “You go broke almost every trip we make.”

“You haven’t won nothing either,” she countered. “All your stupid ideas and you haven’t won nothing! You go ahead and brag about nothing. You are so full of it. My method is solid.”

“Yeah, okay, know it all, but I don’t pretend to have psychic abilities where I can talk to the machines. Don’t you think that is stupid Mr. Scobleet?”

(Mr. Scobleet is not being drawn into this conversation.)

“Ah,” I said.

“I can do this at times with roulette, a game you write about a lot, and that’s because the wheel is a computer in some ways. It speaks to me at times. What do you think of that?”

“Ah,” I said.

“Don’t bother answering her,” he said. “You can’t talk to a woman like this. I found that out in thirty-five years of marriage. You can’t talk to her about anything. She always thinks she’s right. Mrs. Right! The roulette wheel talking to her? You got to be kidding me. This is so stupid. Why even talk about such stupid things?” 

“Why don’t you,” she replied to her husband in a dignified way, “just shut up your big mouth and stop talking about things you know nothing about. Have you done the necessary mental conditioning to understand the desires of machines? No, you haven’t Mister-Smarter-than- Anyone-Else. You know nothing. The real world that I live in is not the same silly world you live in.”

“Well, I’ve got to go,” I said.

“But you haven’t addressed my question,” she said.

 

More Questions Than Answers

“Oh man, oh man, oh man,” he said. “I’m talking to him about serious stuff and you’re going to waste his time with dopey things. Why don’t you go to a haunted house. You know on vacations she wants to visit what she calls haunted houses. Can you believe that?””

“Can a person understand the desires of a machine? Especially a machine that talks to you? A computer? Do you think that is possible?” she asked me again. 

“Well, I ah, don’t think any studies have been done on such a thing,” I said trying to wiggle my way out of this conversation.

“Ha!” laughed the man. “Are those studies like the studies that give you your ideas of how to play the table games? The serious games in the casino? Huh?”

Then I saw a head behind and above these two. It was James Peak’s head. He’s 6-foot, 5-inches tall and he towered over these two.

“Hey, hey, Peak!” I said, about as happy as I’d been that whole day in the casino. “At last!”

“I’m early,” he said. He and I share the idea that people should be on time for their appointments. Yes, sometimes, something might happen to make you late but those are exceptions.

“Let’s go get a drink,” I said.

He looked over the roulette table and saw that the even-money bets I like to make had a free seat right in front of their area of the table. He pointed. I shook my head and took his arm and headed him to the lounge.

“Whoa! Whoa! Hey! Hey!” said the man. “Can the two of us join you?”

“Ah, ah,” I said. Then I recovered. “We have some serious business to discuss. Sorry. But it was” (here I lied!) “a good conversation we all had.”

In the lounge I told Peak about the conversation of the man and his insistence that the short run was not the long run and his implication that different rules apply. How could that be? I also mentioned how obnoxious it was to talk to this guy.

“Why didn’t you just be nice, say hello, and leave the guy?” he asked. 

“Then the wife came over and discussed that she can talk to the machines; that they tell her when they are going to pay off,” I said.

“I saved you!” he said.

“Yes, you did!”

All the best in and out of the casinos!

Frank Scoblete grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He spent the ‘60s getting an education; the ‘70s in editing, writing and publishing; the ‘80s in theatre, and the ‘90s and the 2000s in casino gambling.

Along the way he taught English for 33 years. He has authored 35 books; his most recent publisher is Triumph Books, a division of Random House. He lives in Long Island. Frank wrote the Ultimate Roulette Strategy Guide and he's a well known casino specialist.