![]() ![]() There’d be plenty of whiskey and girls around and a private poker game. Charles Angellini was the “steerer.” He mingled among guests on the plane to Las Vegas, making friends and asking if they would be interested in coming to a party up in Morris’ suite. Solomon Abdo was a card “mechanic” who could false shuffle, trick deal, stack the deck, or perform whatever sleight of hand was necessary to control which player got which cards. Morris brought two confederates with him on these junkets. It made a fine setting for his private high-stakes poker game, a game that was crooked. This was fine with the hotels since Morris was known as a “good player,” that is, a high roller, and Morris, for his part, had private reasons for wanting to stay in such splendor. He liked to go to the Hilton or the MGM Grand where he always took a large and luxurious suite of rooms. Morris, was a frequent visitor to Las Vegas, often as a guest on one of the free junkets mentioned earlier. Starting in late 1973 and carrying on through most of 1974, three gamblers from San Antonio, according to information that would later come out in court, had a sweet deal going. Texans have been successful at all three methods, but let’s begin with cheating. The third is to become very good at a game like poker or blackjack where skillful play can tip the percentages in his favor. The worst, from the point of view of ethics if not of profits, is to cheat. The best way is to run the game himself so he has the advantage of the house percentage. Most people at a casino start with a bankroll that is only a tiny fraction of the casino’s, so their chances are smaller still.Įvery successful gambler has taken this lesson to heart and learned how to place himself on the long end of the odds. One starting with one-tenth the casino’s money will be ruined 99 times. In casino craps, where the basic percentage against the player is only 1.4 per cent, a gambler starting with a bankroll one-quarter the casino’s will be ruined 92 times out of 100. The formula for figuring all this out is extremely complicated, involving exponential variables and other computational headaches, but the results derived from the formula are deadly clear. The advantages in odds and money needn’t be very large to make the ruin of the gambler on the short end virtually a sure thing. Now if the odds, instead of being even, favor one gambler over the other, or if one gambler starts out with more money than the other, it becomes possible to predict not only that one gambler will be wiped out, but also which one is likely to win: it’s the man with money and odds. He has just lost his million a dollar at a time. This is good for mathematicians but bad for the gambler who bet on the wrong side of the coin. For example, after a huge number of tosses, billions and billions and billions of them, a deviation of one million from a 50-50 split would be an extremely small percentage of the total number of tosses. What really happens is this: as the number of tosses becomes very large, the deviation from a precise 50-50 split becomes very small percentagewise but very large in actual number. This is true even though the odds in this game are absolutely even and one might therefore assume that the longer the men played, the more likely it would be for each man to stay about even. It is a certainty, not a probability but a certainty, that if the game goes on long enough, one of the gamblers will win all the other’s money. Suppose two gamblers, each with a million dollars, decide to flip a coin at a dollar a toss. ![]() Which brings us to an uncomfortable concept called “gambler’s ruin.” Mathematicians have analyzed gambling in great depth and if the psychology of gambling is still a puzzle, the mathematics are not. There are ways to win-we shall come to them in a moment-but generally speaking it is mathematically foreordained that a gambler must lose. ![]() Of the three, gambling is the most severe test since it is the only one that places the testee in conflict with absolute and universal laws.
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