samsloan
2010-11-04 21:52:48 UTC
The Green Felt Jungle
Foreword by Sam Sloan
http://www.amazon.com/dp/4871873269
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/product.aspx?ISBN=4871873269
This is the classic exposé of Las Vegas. It made the best seller lists
when it first came out and has shaped the way the public views Las
Vegas ever since. It is cited as an authoritative in virtually every
subsequent book on the subject.
It is a bit extreme, taking issue over things that one should hardly
find shocking or surprising. For example it makes a big deal over
“skimming”. “Skimming” results when the casino owners take some of the
night's profits themselves and put them into their own pockets, so as
to not to have to pay federal income tax on it. It should not come as
a big surprise that anyone who makes their living from gambling would
also try to avoid paying taxes on their winnings,
Saying that gamblers sometimes cheat on their taxes is a bit like
saying that bears shit in the woods.
This book details a number of murders committed as rivals fought over
control of the casinos. A number of politicians are fingered as
complicit with the mobsters, especially Senator Barry Goldwater of
Arizona who became the Republican Party Candidate for President in
1964, the year after this book was first written. Apparently the
serious charges made in this book did not hurt his political career.
This book did affect my personal life in some ways. When I first read
it in 1966, I was excited by this book and immediately went off to
Nevada to get a job there. As I was a student at the University of
California at Berkeley, I went to Reno, because it was closer. I have
always regretted since then that I did not go to Las Vegas, where the
action seemed bigger and more exciting, although in reality the
casinos in Reno were bigger than those in Las Vegas.
I got a job working for Lincoln Fitzgerald at the Nevada Club in Reno.
Mr. Fitzgerald personally hired me. I have been back relatively
recently and found out that Lincoln Management is the name of a
corporation and Fitzgerald's is the name of a casino. I asked a few of
the employees there and they were not even aware that Lincoln
Fitzgerald was the name of a man. Lincoln was his first name and
Fitzgerald was his last name.
When I applied for the job in June 1966, I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I
was a math major at the University of California at Berkeley. He asked
me what was 17 x 17. I thought for a moment, did the math in my head
and replied with the correct answer, 289. He held up his hand
signaling to his wife who was standing nearby. She called me over and
informed me that I had just been hired to work on the roulette wheel
and to report to work at 3:00 AM the following morning.
I never filled out an employment application or anything like that.
The entire job interview from start to finish lasted less than a
minute. However, recently when I applied for Social Security I found
that the three months I worked for the Nevada Club in Reno in 1964 had
given me two of the 40 quarters I needed to become eligible for Social
Security. Lincoln Fitzgerald had paid his social security taxes and
the two quarters I got for working there have put me over the top and
have made me eligible for Social Security.
After I had been hired by Lincoln Fitzgerald, I soon found out the
reason for his question: What is 17 x 17? When playing roulette, if a
gambler puts a stack of chips on a line connecting two numbers, the
payoff is 17 to one. So, if the gambler bets 17 chips on two numbers
and wins, he must be paid 289 chips.
The most difficult thing I had to learn about the job was first how to
spin the ball. It looks easy but that is because you have never tried
it. It requires a special twist of the wrist to get the ball spinning
in the right way. It took me a long time to learn how to do it.
The second most difficult thing to learn is how to stack and push the
chips. Again, this looks easy until one actually tries to do it. Try
stacking and pushing 289 chips. Remember that there are 20 chips in a
stack. So, one must make 14 stacks of 20 chips each and then put a
short stack of 9 chips on the top. Then one must push all these of
chips together in formation to the gambler so he can start using them
to place more bets.
I had to memorize all of the numbers of winning bets and all the
formations of stacks of chips to be pushed. I am sure you must be
thinking that this is an easy thing to do, so just try it and see what
happens.
After two months of learning all the different formations of stacks of
chips to be pushed, I suddenly came to the realization that applying
my mathematical talents in this way was perhaps not the best use of my
abilities, so I went back to Berkeley.
One thing I could have gotten out of this was that it was said that
anybody who has worked the roulette wheel at the Nevada Club in Reno
can get a job working on any roulette wheel anywhere in the State of
Nevada, because the wheel in the Nevada Club was the most difficult
and demanding to work at, and because Lincoln Fitzgerald was the most
rigorous and demanding employer. As Frank Sinatra might have said, if
you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. The Nevada Club had
the only roulette wheel in the State of Nevada that did not have a 00.
It only had a 0. This means that the odds favoring the house were only
1 in 35 or 2.9% , whereas on a wheel with 00 the odds favoring the
house is 2 in 35 or 5.7%, as the payoff is 35 to one in either case.
The Nevada Club in Reno had the highest betting limits of any casino
in the State of Nevada at that time. It was the only casino where the
gambler could bet $30 on a number or $1000 on an even bet like red or
black. Since roulette pays 35 to 1, a $30 bet on a number results in a
payout of $1050 if the number hits.
The Nevada Club was a ratty looking casino. It even had holes in the
carpet, but the much larger and gleaming casinos next door, Harold's
and Harrah's, were to scared to take a bet of $30 on a number.
This was because Lincoln Fitzgerald was, at that time, the richest man
in the State of Nevada. His net worth was said to be more than $100
million dollars. He could afford to take the chance of allowing
somebody to bet $30 on a number.
He is dead now and the Nevada Club is closed, but his company lives on
and has bought up many of the other casinos all around Nevada. Since
his company is non-public, who knows but he might still be the biggest
in terms of bankroll in Nevada.
Oh, by the way, where did he get the money from? He was an old time
mobster and his money came from the Purple Gang, the mob in Detroit.
Many of his pit bosses, my direct supervisors, had been his pit bosses
in Detroit too and had come with him to Nevada when he opened the
first big casino in the State of Nevada in 1946.
In 1966, I had just turned 21 years old, so I went out and got a job
working for Lincoln Fitzgerald in the Nevada Club in Reno as a
roulette croupier. When I applied for the job, Lincoln Fitzgerald did
not ask me to fill out an application form. Instead, he asked me just
one question. What is 17 times 17? I thought about it and did the math
in my head, an ability I have from blindfold chess. I gave the correct
answer: 289. Lincoln Fitzgerald raised his hand and signaled to his
wife. That was the signal that I had been hired.
At the Nevada Club, the players often bet huge piles of chips. The
players liked to build little mountains and make interesting
formations with their chips too. When they won, I had to figure out
the correct payment, with the pit boss standing behind me to make sure
I made the correct payoff. Then I had to put the chips into the
correct formation and push them to the winner. You almost had to be a
math major at the University of California at Berkeley to figure out
how to do this.
I worked two months at the Nevada Club and I learned from Lincoln
Fitzgerald a lot about business. Fitzgerald was the richest man in
Nevada and his club had the biggest bankroll in Nevada. The club was
small and run-down, but it had the biggest money behind it. It was the
only club anywhere in Nevada at the time where a player could bet one
thousand dollars on a number. One thousand dollars meant nothing to
Lincoln Fitzgerald. His net worth was more than one hundred million
dollars. Other clubs, bigger in size, operated on a shoestring.
Lincoln Fitzgerald had been shot twice in Reno and the Mayo Clinic had
saved his life each time, so he lived inside a led encased cubicle up
above and behind the cashiers box. He almost never left the casino.
The other employees said that it would not be worth $100,000,000 if
you had to live in a box all the time and could never go out and
breathe the fresh air.
The first time Fitzgerald had been shot was on November 19, 1949. He
was shot with a shotgun at his home. The shotgun blast should have
killed him, but the Mayo Clinic patched him up and put tubes in his
abdomen to keep his intestines working.
It was after this that he built a led encased cubicle inside and above
the cashiers box. He lived with his wife in there. She was a nice
lady. They almost never went out of the casino, except for when she
would drive him to his other casino at Lake Tahoe.
Nevertheless he was shot a second time about five years later. The
second shooting was by a man with a rifle with a telescopic sight on
the top of the Riverside Hotel, who shot Fitzgerald as he was standing
in front of the Nevada Club.
Fortunately, Fitzgerald was shot in the abdomen in the same place as
the first shooting and the Mayo Clinic was able to save his life and
patch him up a second time. The employees still talked about this
while I was working there.
Neither shooting was ever solved. While I was working at the Nevada
Club, one time Fitzgerald had to be taken to a doctor and have his
tubes cleaned out. This was apparently a routine procedure that often
had to be done.
The other employees believed that Fitzgerald was being shot by his old
associates from the Purple Gang. “He stole the gang's money”, they
said.
Yet, every morning he came down from the cubicle where he slept inside
the club behind the cashier's box and counted the slot machine
nickels. This taught me a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. If
you want to have one hundred million dollars, you have to count the
nickels.
After two months of working at the Nevada Club, I decided to play in
the US Open Chess Championship in Seattle, so I took a bus to Seattle,
Washington. I started well in the tournament, winning my first few
games, and my first round win was published. However, then I ran into
Peter Cleghorn who trounced me thoroughly. Cleghorn followed up his
victory over me by defeating Grandmaster Pal Benko. I then went
downhill, losing even to Robert Erkes when I overlooked an easy mate
that I had, so I finished with a bare plus score in the 13 round
tournament.
I never went back to Reno except to visit because eventually I
realized that the casinos were really small-time operations. Even
Harold's Club, the largest casino in the state in physical size, as
opposed to the Nevada Club, the largest casino in the state in money,
was scared to let a gambler bet a thousand dollars on an even money
bet, so these are small time operations as compared to Wall Street,
which is where I went next.
I suspect that the authors of The Green Felt Jungle never lived in
Nevada and did not know that much about it, because there are some
things that they do not seem to know that every resident would
probably know. For example, the casinos sometimes cheat the players
and that was well known.
Perhaps the most notorious example of this was the Riverside Hotel in
Reno. When I was there, the players would never win a single bet. For
example, the Riverside Hotel has a bus that came everyday from
Chinatown in San Francisco. The bus only cost $15 and anybody could
get on the bus as long as they were Chinese. (This is kind of like the
way that Henry Ford used to say, “The American people can buy a car in
any color they like, as long as that color is black.”)
These Chinese people paid $15 to get on the bus and for that they got
a round-trip ticket to the Riverside Hotel in Reno plus gambling chips
worth $15.
I used to watch them when they got off the bus. They would walk into
the Riverside Hotel Casino with their chips that could only be used to
bet on blackjack or 21. They would line up at the black jack tables
and bet. In theory, if they won a bet they would get a different kind
of chip that they could cash in at the cashier's window. However, this
never happened because they never won a bet. They never won even a
single bet.
You can work out the odds. What are the odds assuming a 50-50 chance
of winning that a gambler bets 100 times and loses every bet? The
chance of that happening is something like one to the number of
electrons in the universe.
I used to try to figure out exactly how they did this. The key is the
blackjack dealer holds his cards in a certain way. When the cards are
held, the dealer's forefinger comes across the front edge of the deck
of cards. The thumb is on top. The other fingers are around the sides,
except the little finger is curled around the back of the deck. This
is a very difficult and unnatural way to hold a deck of cards. I
cannot even do it myself, but that is because I never trained as a
blackjack dealer. I can deal roulette but I cannot deal blackjack.
Every blackjack dealer in the State of Nevada held the cards in
exactly this way. The reason is that the forefinger across the front
edge of the deck can hide what the dealer is doing. The vast majority
of the dealers in Nevada were honest and had no idea why they were
trained to hold the deck of cards in this peculiar war. There were
probably less than one in a thousand dealers who even knew how to
cheat. Here is how those who did know did it.
Let us say that the player is holding two cards, a 10 and a 5. The
dealer holds a 10. Basic strategy requires the player to take a hit.
This is because otherwise, if the dealer holds a 7 or better as his
second card, the player will automatically lose unless he takes a hit.
Now suppose the dealer knows that the top card is a 6. He therefore
knows that if he deals that card, the player will get 21 and will
probably win or at least get a push. Therefore, the dealer deals a
“second”. This means that he does not deal the top card. Instead he
deals the second card. He may not know what the second card is, but he
knows that it is worse than the top card. In order to deal the second,
he pulls back the top card with his thumb, and deals the second card,
with his forefinger positioned in such a way as to prevent the third
card from coming out and to conceal all this from the player.
A skilled dealer can do this in such a way that the player will never
see it. It happens so quickly that it is impossible to spot.
This still does not explain why the dealers at the Riverside Hotel
never lost. Being able to deal seconds gives the house a huge
advantage but still the player should be able to win at least one bet
some of the time.
There was one particular dealer at the Riverside Hotel that I used to
watch. He was a heavyset man, about 40. He was one of those blackjack
dealers who never lost. I used to watch him to try to figure out how
he was doing it. I could see that when he peeked at his hole card, he
turned the deck upside down in his hand so that he could see the
bottom card. It was possible that he was dealing bottoms but I could
not be sure. I knew that dealers sometimes wore a ring that had a
small mirror enabling them to see the bottom card, but I was sure that
this particular dealer would never do something so obvious.
Anyway, I never solved it. I never figured out exactly how he was
cheating but I was sure that he was cheating.
Now, we are asked to believe that the Gaming Control Board did not
know that there was cheating going on at the Riverside Hotel, when
even a kid like I was at the time could plainly see that the players
were being cheated. The simple mathematical improbability of the
players losing at blackjack every single time, hundreds of times in a
row, was enough to prove that the players were being cheated.
In fact, the Riverside Hotel was closed the following year, 1967, but
for cheating at dice, not at blackjack.
Cheating the player was a stupid way to do business. As soon as these
Chinese players lost their $15 in special chips that they were given
for taking the bus from Chinatown in San Francisco to Reno, they just
went to other casinos. They obviously must have realized what was
going on and were not going to bet real money there. The Riverside
Hotel was always empty except for when these busloads of Chinese
arrived. It eventually closed down and is now an apartment building.
The big reputable casinos like like Harold's, Harrah's and the Nevada
Club would never employ a cheating dealer on a regular basis. This was
not because of their high moral standards. This was because any dealer
who can cheat a player can also cheat the house. The casino pit bosses
were constantly watching their own dealers. This is one of the main
reasons that casino games are organized into pits. The pit bosses
stand behind the dealers and watch. Let us say that the dealer has a
friend. The friend comes in and bets one thousand dollars. The friend
wins. What can the casino do? This is one of the reasons that no
casino in Nevada except for the Nevada Club where I worked would allow
a bet of one thousand dollars. The natural odds might favor the
casino, but the chance for collusion between the dealer and the player
was too great.
While I was living in Reno I learned that there was a way to stack the
deck of cards such that no matter where the deck was cut the dealer
would win every hand against any reasonable play, except that if it
was cut in one particular place, the player would win the first bet
but the dealer would win all the rest. I do not remember the entire
sequence but I remember it started with 10 10 8 10 10 9.
It was something like this: 10 10 8 10 10 9 4 A 7 6 5 2 3.
This sequence is repeated 4 times so that all 52 cards in the deck are
in this order. Try it and you will see that no matter where the cards
are cut the dealer always wins (except that I cannot remember the
exact order of the last 7 cards).
Although the big reputable clubs would never employ a cheating dealer
on a regular basis, I had the same experience that Edward Thorpe had
as described in his book “Beat the Dealer”. When I practiced at home
using Thorpe's methods of counting tens and non-tens and betting big
when the deck was rich with tens, I always won big practice money.
However, when I went to a casino and bet real money against a real
dealer, this almost never happened.
I believe that the cheating dealers waited at home to be called. When
the house was consistently losing to a particular player, a “knockout-
dealer” would be called by telephone. He would come into the casino,
put on the uniform of the casino and look just like a regular casino
employee. Then he would wipe out the player.
In my own case, once I figured out what was really going on, I just
decided that there were better ways to make a living (like writing
books about it). Ever since, the card counters and the casino pit
bosses have been waging a never ending game to get the best of each
other.
One interesting question concerns the identity of the authors, Ed Reid
and Ovid Demaris. Both Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris became famous writing
books about the Mafia. Ed Reid wrote three books, each about the
Mafia. Ovid Demaris was a professional book writer but the only thing
they wrote about was either the Mafia or people like Frank Sinatra,
Judith Exner and J. Edgar Hoover who had dealings with the Mafia.
One reviewer of this book says that it is amazing that the authors of
this book have not been killed in view of the revelations contained in
this book.
I am now working on the theory that the names Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris
are pseudonyms. They were not killed because that was not their real
names. I cannot find a birth or a death date for either of them. I do
have dates for a person with a name similar to Ovid Demaris. I assumed
for a long time that it was the same person, but I now believe that it
was not the same person. The dust jacket says that Ed Reid has won the
Pulitzer Prize. The dust jacket to another book on the Mafia by Ed
Reid says that Ed Reid won the Pulitzer Prize for the Brooklyn Eagle.
I looked it up and in 1951 the Brooklyn Eagle won the Pulitzer Prize
for crime reporting in 1950. However, the neither the name of Ed Reid
nor any other reporter is mentioned. As a result, I am listing this
work as pseudonymous, until I can establish the existence of Ed Reid
and Ovid Demaris under those names.
Sam Sloan
Bronx NY
November 4, 2010
http://www.amazon.com/dp/4871873269
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/product.aspx?ISBN=4871873269
Foreword by Sam Sloan
http://www.amazon.com/dp/4871873269
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/product.aspx?ISBN=4871873269
This is the classic exposé of Las Vegas. It made the best seller lists
when it first came out and has shaped the way the public views Las
Vegas ever since. It is cited as an authoritative in virtually every
subsequent book on the subject.
It is a bit extreme, taking issue over things that one should hardly
find shocking or surprising. For example it makes a big deal over
“skimming”. “Skimming” results when the casino owners take some of the
night's profits themselves and put them into their own pockets, so as
to not to have to pay federal income tax on it. It should not come as
a big surprise that anyone who makes their living from gambling would
also try to avoid paying taxes on their winnings,
Saying that gamblers sometimes cheat on their taxes is a bit like
saying that bears shit in the woods.
This book details a number of murders committed as rivals fought over
control of the casinos. A number of politicians are fingered as
complicit with the mobsters, especially Senator Barry Goldwater of
Arizona who became the Republican Party Candidate for President in
1964, the year after this book was first written. Apparently the
serious charges made in this book did not hurt his political career.
This book did affect my personal life in some ways. When I first read
it in 1966, I was excited by this book and immediately went off to
Nevada to get a job there. As I was a student at the University of
California at Berkeley, I went to Reno, because it was closer. I have
always regretted since then that I did not go to Las Vegas, where the
action seemed bigger and more exciting, although in reality the
casinos in Reno were bigger than those in Las Vegas.
I got a job working for Lincoln Fitzgerald at the Nevada Club in Reno.
Mr. Fitzgerald personally hired me. I have been back relatively
recently and found out that Lincoln Management is the name of a
corporation and Fitzgerald's is the name of a casino. I asked a few of
the employees there and they were not even aware that Lincoln
Fitzgerald was the name of a man. Lincoln was his first name and
Fitzgerald was his last name.
When I applied for the job in June 1966, I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I
was a math major at the University of California at Berkeley. He asked
me what was 17 x 17. I thought for a moment, did the math in my head
and replied with the correct answer, 289. He held up his hand
signaling to his wife who was standing nearby. She called me over and
informed me that I had just been hired to work on the roulette wheel
and to report to work at 3:00 AM the following morning.
I never filled out an employment application or anything like that.
The entire job interview from start to finish lasted less than a
minute. However, recently when I applied for Social Security I found
that the three months I worked for the Nevada Club in Reno in 1964 had
given me two of the 40 quarters I needed to become eligible for Social
Security. Lincoln Fitzgerald had paid his social security taxes and
the two quarters I got for working there have put me over the top and
have made me eligible for Social Security.
After I had been hired by Lincoln Fitzgerald, I soon found out the
reason for his question: What is 17 x 17? When playing roulette, if a
gambler puts a stack of chips on a line connecting two numbers, the
payoff is 17 to one. So, if the gambler bets 17 chips on two numbers
and wins, he must be paid 289 chips.
The most difficult thing I had to learn about the job was first how to
spin the ball. It looks easy but that is because you have never tried
it. It requires a special twist of the wrist to get the ball spinning
in the right way. It took me a long time to learn how to do it.
The second most difficult thing to learn is how to stack and push the
chips. Again, this looks easy until one actually tries to do it. Try
stacking and pushing 289 chips. Remember that there are 20 chips in a
stack. So, one must make 14 stacks of 20 chips each and then put a
short stack of 9 chips on the top. Then one must push all these of
chips together in formation to the gambler so he can start using them
to place more bets.
I had to memorize all of the numbers of winning bets and all the
formations of stacks of chips to be pushed. I am sure you must be
thinking that this is an easy thing to do, so just try it and see what
happens.
After two months of learning all the different formations of stacks of
chips to be pushed, I suddenly came to the realization that applying
my mathematical talents in this way was perhaps not the best use of my
abilities, so I went back to Berkeley.
One thing I could have gotten out of this was that it was said that
anybody who has worked the roulette wheel at the Nevada Club in Reno
can get a job working on any roulette wheel anywhere in the State of
Nevada, because the wheel in the Nevada Club was the most difficult
and demanding to work at, and because Lincoln Fitzgerald was the most
rigorous and demanding employer. As Frank Sinatra might have said, if
you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. The Nevada Club had
the only roulette wheel in the State of Nevada that did not have a 00.
It only had a 0. This means that the odds favoring the house were only
1 in 35 or 2.9% , whereas on a wheel with 00 the odds favoring the
house is 2 in 35 or 5.7%, as the payoff is 35 to one in either case.
The Nevada Club in Reno had the highest betting limits of any casino
in the State of Nevada at that time. It was the only casino where the
gambler could bet $30 on a number or $1000 on an even bet like red or
black. Since roulette pays 35 to 1, a $30 bet on a number results in a
payout of $1050 if the number hits.
The Nevada Club was a ratty looking casino. It even had holes in the
carpet, but the much larger and gleaming casinos next door, Harold's
and Harrah's, were to scared to take a bet of $30 on a number.
This was because Lincoln Fitzgerald was, at that time, the richest man
in the State of Nevada. His net worth was said to be more than $100
million dollars. He could afford to take the chance of allowing
somebody to bet $30 on a number.
He is dead now and the Nevada Club is closed, but his company lives on
and has bought up many of the other casinos all around Nevada. Since
his company is non-public, who knows but he might still be the biggest
in terms of bankroll in Nevada.
Oh, by the way, where did he get the money from? He was an old time
mobster and his money came from the Purple Gang, the mob in Detroit.
Many of his pit bosses, my direct supervisors, had been his pit bosses
in Detroit too and had come with him to Nevada when he opened the
first big casino in the State of Nevada in 1946.
In 1966, I had just turned 21 years old, so I went out and got a job
working for Lincoln Fitzgerald in the Nevada Club in Reno as a
roulette croupier. When I applied for the job, Lincoln Fitzgerald did
not ask me to fill out an application form. Instead, he asked me just
one question. What is 17 times 17? I thought about it and did the math
in my head, an ability I have from blindfold chess. I gave the correct
answer: 289. Lincoln Fitzgerald raised his hand and signaled to his
wife. That was the signal that I had been hired.
At the Nevada Club, the players often bet huge piles of chips. The
players liked to build little mountains and make interesting
formations with their chips too. When they won, I had to figure out
the correct payment, with the pit boss standing behind me to make sure
I made the correct payoff. Then I had to put the chips into the
correct formation and push them to the winner. You almost had to be a
math major at the University of California at Berkeley to figure out
how to do this.
I worked two months at the Nevada Club and I learned from Lincoln
Fitzgerald a lot about business. Fitzgerald was the richest man in
Nevada and his club had the biggest bankroll in Nevada. The club was
small and run-down, but it had the biggest money behind it. It was the
only club anywhere in Nevada at the time where a player could bet one
thousand dollars on a number. One thousand dollars meant nothing to
Lincoln Fitzgerald. His net worth was more than one hundred million
dollars. Other clubs, bigger in size, operated on a shoestring.
Lincoln Fitzgerald had been shot twice in Reno and the Mayo Clinic had
saved his life each time, so he lived inside a led encased cubicle up
above and behind the cashiers box. He almost never left the casino.
The other employees said that it would not be worth $100,000,000 if
you had to live in a box all the time and could never go out and
breathe the fresh air.
The first time Fitzgerald had been shot was on November 19, 1949. He
was shot with a shotgun at his home. The shotgun blast should have
killed him, but the Mayo Clinic patched him up and put tubes in his
abdomen to keep his intestines working.
It was after this that he built a led encased cubicle inside and above
the cashiers box. He lived with his wife in there. She was a nice
lady. They almost never went out of the casino, except for when she
would drive him to his other casino at Lake Tahoe.
Nevertheless he was shot a second time about five years later. The
second shooting was by a man with a rifle with a telescopic sight on
the top of the Riverside Hotel, who shot Fitzgerald as he was standing
in front of the Nevada Club.
Fortunately, Fitzgerald was shot in the abdomen in the same place as
the first shooting and the Mayo Clinic was able to save his life and
patch him up a second time. The employees still talked about this
while I was working there.
Neither shooting was ever solved. While I was working at the Nevada
Club, one time Fitzgerald had to be taken to a doctor and have his
tubes cleaned out. This was apparently a routine procedure that often
had to be done.
The other employees believed that Fitzgerald was being shot by his old
associates from the Purple Gang. “He stole the gang's money”, they
said.
Yet, every morning he came down from the cubicle where he slept inside
the club behind the cashier's box and counted the slot machine
nickels. This taught me a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. If
you want to have one hundred million dollars, you have to count the
nickels.
After two months of working at the Nevada Club, I decided to play in
the US Open Chess Championship in Seattle, so I took a bus to Seattle,
Washington. I started well in the tournament, winning my first few
games, and my first round win was published. However, then I ran into
Peter Cleghorn who trounced me thoroughly. Cleghorn followed up his
victory over me by defeating Grandmaster Pal Benko. I then went
downhill, losing even to Robert Erkes when I overlooked an easy mate
that I had, so I finished with a bare plus score in the 13 round
tournament.
I never went back to Reno except to visit because eventually I
realized that the casinos were really small-time operations. Even
Harold's Club, the largest casino in the state in physical size, as
opposed to the Nevada Club, the largest casino in the state in money,
was scared to let a gambler bet a thousand dollars on an even money
bet, so these are small time operations as compared to Wall Street,
which is where I went next.
I suspect that the authors of The Green Felt Jungle never lived in
Nevada and did not know that much about it, because there are some
things that they do not seem to know that every resident would
probably know. For example, the casinos sometimes cheat the players
and that was well known.
Perhaps the most notorious example of this was the Riverside Hotel in
Reno. When I was there, the players would never win a single bet. For
example, the Riverside Hotel has a bus that came everyday from
Chinatown in San Francisco. The bus only cost $15 and anybody could
get on the bus as long as they were Chinese. (This is kind of like the
way that Henry Ford used to say, “The American people can buy a car in
any color they like, as long as that color is black.”)
These Chinese people paid $15 to get on the bus and for that they got
a round-trip ticket to the Riverside Hotel in Reno plus gambling chips
worth $15.
I used to watch them when they got off the bus. They would walk into
the Riverside Hotel Casino with their chips that could only be used to
bet on blackjack or 21. They would line up at the black jack tables
and bet. In theory, if they won a bet they would get a different kind
of chip that they could cash in at the cashier's window. However, this
never happened because they never won a bet. They never won even a
single bet.
You can work out the odds. What are the odds assuming a 50-50 chance
of winning that a gambler bets 100 times and loses every bet? The
chance of that happening is something like one to the number of
electrons in the universe.
I used to try to figure out exactly how they did this. The key is the
blackjack dealer holds his cards in a certain way. When the cards are
held, the dealer's forefinger comes across the front edge of the deck
of cards. The thumb is on top. The other fingers are around the sides,
except the little finger is curled around the back of the deck. This
is a very difficult and unnatural way to hold a deck of cards. I
cannot even do it myself, but that is because I never trained as a
blackjack dealer. I can deal roulette but I cannot deal blackjack.
Every blackjack dealer in the State of Nevada held the cards in
exactly this way. The reason is that the forefinger across the front
edge of the deck can hide what the dealer is doing. The vast majority
of the dealers in Nevada were honest and had no idea why they were
trained to hold the deck of cards in this peculiar war. There were
probably less than one in a thousand dealers who even knew how to
cheat. Here is how those who did know did it.
Let us say that the player is holding two cards, a 10 and a 5. The
dealer holds a 10. Basic strategy requires the player to take a hit.
This is because otherwise, if the dealer holds a 7 or better as his
second card, the player will automatically lose unless he takes a hit.
Now suppose the dealer knows that the top card is a 6. He therefore
knows that if he deals that card, the player will get 21 and will
probably win or at least get a push. Therefore, the dealer deals a
“second”. This means that he does not deal the top card. Instead he
deals the second card. He may not know what the second card is, but he
knows that it is worse than the top card. In order to deal the second,
he pulls back the top card with his thumb, and deals the second card,
with his forefinger positioned in such a way as to prevent the third
card from coming out and to conceal all this from the player.
A skilled dealer can do this in such a way that the player will never
see it. It happens so quickly that it is impossible to spot.
This still does not explain why the dealers at the Riverside Hotel
never lost. Being able to deal seconds gives the house a huge
advantage but still the player should be able to win at least one bet
some of the time.
There was one particular dealer at the Riverside Hotel that I used to
watch. He was a heavyset man, about 40. He was one of those blackjack
dealers who never lost. I used to watch him to try to figure out how
he was doing it. I could see that when he peeked at his hole card, he
turned the deck upside down in his hand so that he could see the
bottom card. It was possible that he was dealing bottoms but I could
not be sure. I knew that dealers sometimes wore a ring that had a
small mirror enabling them to see the bottom card, but I was sure that
this particular dealer would never do something so obvious.
Anyway, I never solved it. I never figured out exactly how he was
cheating but I was sure that he was cheating.
Now, we are asked to believe that the Gaming Control Board did not
know that there was cheating going on at the Riverside Hotel, when
even a kid like I was at the time could plainly see that the players
were being cheated. The simple mathematical improbability of the
players losing at blackjack every single time, hundreds of times in a
row, was enough to prove that the players were being cheated.
In fact, the Riverside Hotel was closed the following year, 1967, but
for cheating at dice, not at blackjack.
Cheating the player was a stupid way to do business. As soon as these
Chinese players lost their $15 in special chips that they were given
for taking the bus from Chinatown in San Francisco to Reno, they just
went to other casinos. They obviously must have realized what was
going on and were not going to bet real money there. The Riverside
Hotel was always empty except for when these busloads of Chinese
arrived. It eventually closed down and is now an apartment building.
The big reputable casinos like like Harold's, Harrah's and the Nevada
Club would never employ a cheating dealer on a regular basis. This was
not because of their high moral standards. This was because any dealer
who can cheat a player can also cheat the house. The casino pit bosses
were constantly watching their own dealers. This is one of the main
reasons that casino games are organized into pits. The pit bosses
stand behind the dealers and watch. Let us say that the dealer has a
friend. The friend comes in and bets one thousand dollars. The friend
wins. What can the casino do? This is one of the reasons that no
casino in Nevada except for the Nevada Club where I worked would allow
a bet of one thousand dollars. The natural odds might favor the
casino, but the chance for collusion between the dealer and the player
was too great.
While I was living in Reno I learned that there was a way to stack the
deck of cards such that no matter where the deck was cut the dealer
would win every hand against any reasonable play, except that if it
was cut in one particular place, the player would win the first bet
but the dealer would win all the rest. I do not remember the entire
sequence but I remember it started with 10 10 8 10 10 9.
It was something like this: 10 10 8 10 10 9 4 A 7 6 5 2 3.
This sequence is repeated 4 times so that all 52 cards in the deck are
in this order. Try it and you will see that no matter where the cards
are cut the dealer always wins (except that I cannot remember the
exact order of the last 7 cards).
Although the big reputable clubs would never employ a cheating dealer
on a regular basis, I had the same experience that Edward Thorpe had
as described in his book “Beat the Dealer”. When I practiced at home
using Thorpe's methods of counting tens and non-tens and betting big
when the deck was rich with tens, I always won big practice money.
However, when I went to a casino and bet real money against a real
dealer, this almost never happened.
I believe that the cheating dealers waited at home to be called. When
the house was consistently losing to a particular player, a “knockout-
dealer” would be called by telephone. He would come into the casino,
put on the uniform of the casino and look just like a regular casino
employee. Then he would wipe out the player.
In my own case, once I figured out what was really going on, I just
decided that there were better ways to make a living (like writing
books about it). Ever since, the card counters and the casino pit
bosses have been waging a never ending game to get the best of each
other.
One interesting question concerns the identity of the authors, Ed Reid
and Ovid Demaris. Both Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris became famous writing
books about the Mafia. Ed Reid wrote three books, each about the
Mafia. Ovid Demaris was a professional book writer but the only thing
they wrote about was either the Mafia or people like Frank Sinatra,
Judith Exner and J. Edgar Hoover who had dealings with the Mafia.
One reviewer of this book says that it is amazing that the authors of
this book have not been killed in view of the revelations contained in
this book.
I am now working on the theory that the names Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris
are pseudonyms. They were not killed because that was not their real
names. I cannot find a birth or a death date for either of them. I do
have dates for a person with a name similar to Ovid Demaris. I assumed
for a long time that it was the same person, but I now believe that it
was not the same person. The dust jacket says that Ed Reid has won the
Pulitzer Prize. The dust jacket to another book on the Mafia by Ed
Reid says that Ed Reid won the Pulitzer Prize for the Brooklyn Eagle.
I looked it up and in 1951 the Brooklyn Eagle won the Pulitzer Prize
for crime reporting in 1950. However, the neither the name of Ed Reid
nor any other reporter is mentioned. As a result, I am listing this
work as pseudonymous, until I can establish the existence of Ed Reid
and Ovid Demaris under those names.
Sam Sloan
Bronx NY
November 4, 2010
http://www.amazon.com/dp/4871873269
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/product.aspx?ISBN=4871873269