Skipping Towards Gomorrah (8 page)

“Always assume that the dealer has a ten in the hole,” he said. “His down card, it's a ten card, tell yourself that, it's always a ten card. Now the dealer has to hit until he has seventeen or better, but he has to hold as soon as he gets to seventeen—always remember that. If he has a seven, eight, nine, or ten up, then you assume he's got seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, or twenty. If the dealer has sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, or twenty and you have between twelve and sixteen, you take a card. Always hit.

“But if the dealer has a two, three, four, five, or six card up, assume he's got a ten down and don't take a card. What you want is the dealer to go bust instead. If he's got sixteen, he has to hit until he gets to seventeen. So he'll bust most likely. If you're at thirteen, and he's got fifteen or sixteen, just stay put. Let him take the card.”

This was news to me. I didn't know you could hold at thirteen when the dealer had fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, and not automatically lose. I didn't know the dealer had to keep drawing if his hand was below seventeen but higher than your hand.

“But what if the dealer's down card isn't a ten?” I asked. “What if you held at twelve and the dealer has a five card down and a five card up and then he draws, say, an ace?”

“It's the luck of the draw. This is strategy, just strategy. Remember, it's called gambling, son, and—”

“And not winning,” I said.

“Right. Not winning.”

The other dealer spoke, and I was startled by his voice. Also a smoker, this dealer didn't have as much luck as the old smoker. He appeared to be only about fifty, but his voice box had been removed, and he spoke with the help of a small, handheld amplifier that he held up to his throat. Cancer forced him to retire from dealing. He lived on disability and Social Security payments, but he was dressed like he had someplace to go. The old smoker, who was still dealing, was wearing a sweatshirt; the retired dealer was in a business suit.

“Be consistent,” he said. “Play consistently, decide what your strategy is, and stick to it. People get sixteen and don't hit, and the dealer wins the hand, the next time they get sixteen, they think, ‘I didn't hit the last time I had sixteen, and the dealer won. So I'll take a card this time.' And the dealer wins that hand, too. Now if you'd been playing consistently—always sticking on sixteen, or always staying on sixteen—you would've broken even on those two hands. But if you're always changing the way you play, if you're always playing the last hand you lost, you're going to lose and lose.”

Anything else I need to know?

The bartender took his foot off the beer cooler and leaned on the bar.

“Okay, eighteen-point-six is the average winning hand,” he said. “If you've got sixteen, on average, you're going to lose. And one third of the cards in the deck are ones, twos, threes, fours, and fives. That means, with sixteen, taking a hit gives you a thirty-three percent chance of getting a hand that's close to eighteen-point-six or better. That's a good chance. If you've got nineteen, don't take a hit—ever. Even if the dealer has a ten card up. Statistically speaking, nineteen is a winning hand.”

The bartender had been a dealer once, and the other men deferred to him, even though he was at least twenty years younger. It was something of an honor to get pointers from the bartender, apparently, as the old smoker pointed at my notebook and made a little scribbling motion with his cigarette, letting me know that I needed to get this down. The bartender was once a dealer and a gambler; he would work an eight-hour shift in a riverboat casino in Davenport, Iowa, and then cross the Mississippi River to the Illinois side and play for twelve hours. He made piles of money, lost piles of money, and wound up getting fired when his gambling problem spun out of control. He made up his mind to stop gambling one day, got in his car, and drove to Dubuque where his uncle owned a bar. The bartender works days and does inventory, his uncle works nights. In a few years, the old smoker told me, the bartender's uncle is going to give him the bar.

“You need a strategy for your money as much as you need one for the game,” the bartender said. “More. A lot of people come in, and they've thought about their strategy for the game, but not for their money. And the money is what you're there for, right? So think about the money. Say you put a five-dollar chip on the table. You win that hand. Now you've got ten dollars on the table, two five-dollar chips. Leave the ten on the table. You win another hand. Now you've got twenty dollars, four chips. Take five dollars off the table, and leave the fifteen dollars. How much have you got invested in that fifteen dollar bet? Nothing. Now you're playing with the casino's money. If you win another hand, you'll have thirty dollars, six chips. Leave twenty dollars on the table, take the rest, and you've got fifteen dollars in your hand. You've made ten dollars. You've tripled your money. You're not risking anything on the next hand. You're playing the casino's money. Even if you lose the next hand, you didn't lose twenty dollars, you made ten dollars. And then start over again, with a new five-dollar bet—and you're still playing with the casino's money.”

“That's right,” said the man with the voice synthesizer, “take risks with the casino's money.”

So you can do something stupid, so long as it's the casino's money.

“Yeah, you can do something stupid,” said the ancient smoker. “But when you're playing your own money, you want to be smart, you want to be conservative.”

“But what you've got to remember is this,” said the bartender. “If the cards aren't falling your way, the best strategy is to get up and go. If they're not falling your way, tip the dealer and get the hell out of the casino.”

“This is the hard part,” said the old smoker.

“You'll see a guy go in, and pretty soon he's down a hundred,” the bartender continued. “So he says, ‘I'll just keep gambling until I'm even.' The casino loves it when people think that way. So he gambles and gambles, and keeps losing, and pretty soon he's down fifteen hundred dollars. To make back a hundred bucks, he lost fifteen hundred dollars. That's not smart. If the cards aren't coming, leave. Come back another night. It cost me one career and two marriages to learn that little lesson.”

The bartender wasn't the only one who developed a problem with gambling after Iowa legalized riverboat casinos. Between 1989 and 1995, “problem gambling increased in Iowa from 1.7 percent of the population to 5.4 percent,” according to the Iowa Department of Human Services.

“Gambling is all about greed,” said the bartender. “Everyone wants something for nothing. And some people are foolish enough to think they can actually get something for nothing.”

I might have deferred to the bartender's experience and insight, I suppose, and taken his word for why people gamble; they're greedy, so they gamble. But I couldn't understand why someone who was greedy would do something so foolish as to gamble. The house always wins, the gamblers always lose, and that's why casinos are a business and not a charity. If someone loves money, why would he take the almost certain risk of losing it by playing slots or craps or blackjack?

“People aren't that smart,” said the old smoker.

“People don't think that far ahead,” said the man with the voice synthesizer.

“No,” said the bartender, “that's not it at all. People who gamble think they're special. They think Jesus or fate or luck or the odds or some supernatural something or other is going to smile on them and frown on the poor bastards sitting on either side of them. To be a gambler, you have to be greedy—”

“But not all greedy people are gamblers,” I said.

“Are you going to let me finish?” the bartender asked.

I nodded. The bartender paused, and he looked at me for a long time. I covered my mouth with my left hand.

“People gamble because they're greedy, first and foremost, but not all greedy people are gamblers. You're right. But all gamblers are greedy people who think they're special. They're full of themselves. Winning or losing, gamblers are deluded.”

“That's right, he's right,” said the old smoker, laughing. “When you're winning, you're special. Luck is smiling on you. And when you're losing, luck is picking on you, singling you out.” He slapped the bar. “Win or lose, you're still special!”

I was about to get a deck of cards I'd been carrying around in my pocket when the bartender pulled one from a drawer under the cash register. He tossed the deck onto the bar, and the retired dealer picked it up, pulled the rubber band off it, and started shuffling the cards. Above the back bar was a wire rack with clips that held twenty or thirty small bags of pretzels, and the bartender yanked down three bags, tore them open, and dumped them on the bar.

“On you,” he said, indicating the pile of pretzels, which he divided into four smaller piles, one pile for the old smoker, one pile for the man with the voice synthesizer, one for me, and one for himself. Then we played blackjack, all cards faceup, and slowly but surely something miraculous happened. The pile of pretzels in front of me on the bar grew. I was winning. It wasn't money, but it was something.

I thanked the old dealers and the bartender, and offered to pay for their beers, which they refused to let me do. I settled up—$6.75 for four beers and three bags of pretzels—and walked out the door a little unsteady on my feet, thanks to the four beers I downed in the two hours I'd spent with my coaches. No one else came into the bar during my coaching session in deserted, downtown Dubuque. Later on, back at my hotel room, I realized that I hadn't introduced myself by name to my coaches, nor had I thought to ask their names.

“One more thing,” said the old smoker when he was standing in the door of the bar, saying good-bye. “You know the only thing worse than losing big the first time you go into a casino?”

“No,” I said. “What?”

“Winning big.”

 

L
ater that night I headed to the
Diamond Jo,
after I slept off a rare midday hangover at the Julien Inn. I got three hundred dollars out of the cash machine, checked my coat, and found an empty table. It was my regular dealer's night off, so I got a fresh start with a brand-new dealer, a younger guy, a dealer who didn't look at me, didn't smile, and didn't think of me as a total, hopeless, helpless loser. I did my best to play basic strategy, I was conservative with my money and stupid with the casino's money. I double-downed, and I always held on sixteen, and I played the dealer's hand, always assuming the dealer's down card was a ten. When he had five up and I had twelve in my hand, I held, hoping he would bust trying to get to seventeen, which he often did. When he had ten up and I had fifteen in my hand, I took a card, hoping I would get closer to 18.6.

I doubled my money—I more than doubled my money.

Two hours after I walked into the
Diamond Jo,
a week after I got to Dubuque, years after my first trip to Las Vegas, for the first time in my life, I walked out of a casino with more money than I walked in with—a lot more money. I sat down with $300, and I got up with $710. At one point, I had to remind myself to stop gambling. One of the dealers in the bar had warned me about people who gamble, get up a few hundred dollars, and then figure they're either geniuses or that their luck can't change. They'll keep gambling, fall back down to the money they came with, and they'll feel like they're in the hole, when they're actually breaking even. So they'll keep on gambling, trying to get back up to where they were, to their new “break-even” point, and they'll wind up losing all they came in the door with.

“I see people who could get up with three months' worth of rent in their pocket,” the dealer-turned-bartender warned me, “or a half a year's worth of car payments. They get greedy, and then they blow it. You should decide before you go into the casino at what point you're going to be satisfied with your winnings. If it's double your money, then make yourself get up and get out when you've doubled your money.”

I could hear his voice in my head after I doubled my money, but I played a few more hands. I went up some more, but I knew I was pressing my luck, and I didn't want to get greedy. I gathered up my chips. The other players at the table—three men had joined me, since I was winning, and gamblers like to sit next to winners—couldn't believe I would just get up and leave in the middle of a winning streak. But I had more than doubled my money—I won more than enough money to pay my bill at the Julien—so I cashed out and left the casino.

I wanted to rush back to the bar and buy a round of Hamm's for my coaching staff, but it was almost midnight when I got out of the
Diamond Jo
. Walking across the parking lot and over the bridge that connects the casino to downtown Dubuque was difficult; I was paying attention, I was playing basic strategy, and I was winning—and it was difficult not to attribute my little winning streak to an innate, freshly tapped skill, a heretofore undiscovered knack for playing blackjack. After spending one afternoon being coached by three card dealers, I was suddenly a card shark, if not a whale. That couldn't just be luck, right? I mean, with the tools they gave me, I was able to build a small fortune, right? I did that—I won $410! Me! And if it was an innate skill, some sort of gift, that turned my $300 into $710, why shouldn't I keep playing? And winning? Walking into the lobby of the Julien, I thought, Shit, they're just giving money away on that boat. Why shouldn't I go back and take some more from them?

When I walked into my room, I flopped down on the couch to watch Angie Harmon work over a girl gangbanger on
Law & Order,
fully intending to head back to the casino when the culprit was safely behind bars. By the time the show was over, though, my moment of hubris seemed to have passed. In the hour I had to calm down, I remembered what my coaching staff tried to impress on me: The cards were just falling my way; I wasn't skilled, just lucky; and getting up from the table when I was up by $410 was the smart thing to do. I was ahead.