Saturday, October 6, 2007

Winners and Losers

The Biography Channel is rerunning the series, Breaking Vegas, which was a run of hour-long shows produced a few years ago for, I believe, The History Channel. Or maybe, since it rarely had Hitler in it, it was The Discovery Channel. Anyway, they did a little more than a dozen episodes that profiled people who came up with ways, legal or otherwise, to "beat the system" in the casinos.

The shows tell their story via a combination of conversations with the actual people involved and dramatizations featuring actors who portray those people. It's occasionally a little puzzling to switch between an interview with the real person and an interview of the actor playing him but for the most part, the form works. The dramatizations look like they were done on a budget of about eleven dollars, and that included catering. Someone seems to have made the decision not to bother with getting the period right...so even though an episode is set in 1961, the props and much of the background ambience is obviously current. They don't even use the right money. Because of the subject matter, there are a lot of shots of cash being counted out and fondled...and it's always in new bills that have the designs instituted in 1990. This is a minor distraction since the stories being told are often quite intriguing.

On Sunday, they're rerunning an episode called "Professor Blackjack," which is the story of Dr. Edward O. Thorp, the math prof who invented Card Counting. Any time you see a system of tracking the cards that are played in 21 and adjusting your wagers and game play based on which cards have already been played, that system is built on Doc Thorp's research and calculations. He did it with a computer but also with an awful lot of personal smarts.

In the early sixties, Thorp made a legendary assault on the casinos of Reno, Nevada. He was bankrolled by a wealthy gambler and businessman with, as they say, "mob connections." This man, who for years Thorp would only identify as "Mr. X," watched in both anger and delight as Thorp beat casino after casino...and each casino responded by ejecting him. They didn't toss him out for Card Counting. They didn't know what that was. They just knew the guy was winning at an unnatural rate and this, they could not allow.

The whole game of Blackjack changed forever that week...though not as much as some people expected. When word of Thorp's discovery got around, many in the gaming industry predicted that it was the end of Blackjack. They tried to make Card Counting more difficult and less potent by going to multiple decks but some assumed that it was just a matter of time before the Card Counters would be able to outsmart that system, and that the game itself would have to be withdrawn. This view was especially strong after Thorp published Beat the Dealer, the first book to ever explain Card Counting and how to do it. (The books is still in print and can be ordered here.)

They assumed that the casinos would be flooded by people who, like Thorp, could actually win most of the time. There were some but there were also a lot more who now thought they could...and couldn't. As it turned out, Thorp's system was the best thing that ever happened to the Blackjack business. The fact that he'd shown you could "Beat the Dealer" attracted so many more players to the game that it became more profitable than ever. For every one player who learned how to win, there were hundreds who either didn't bother to learn how to Card Count, or tried and didn't do it well, and those people lost more than enough money to make up for the occasional Ed Thorp. One prominent "insider" book on the casino business cited this as an example of something that gaming execs too often forget; that if you want people to play at all, they have to believe that the games are winnable. That means that from time to time, someone has to win.

Thorp's "Mr. X" died in 1986 and his identity finally became public knowledge. He was Manny Kimmel, one of the owners of the New York-based Kinney Parking Lot business. Historians of the comic book business will be intrigued at the connection. Kinney Parking Lots began diversifying in the late sixties and one of the businesses they acquired was one that owned Independent News (the largest distributor of magazines in the world) and DC Comics. Not long after, the corporation also bought Warner Brothers and after a few name changes and a lot more acquisitions and mergers, it all became the entity we now know as Time-Warner.

The "Professor Blackjack" episode of Breaking Vegas reruns on Sunday on The Biography Channel.

• Posted at 10:34 AM · LINK

Pinned

The worst thing some people can find to say about Barack Obama these days is that there's something wrong with his patriotism, as proven by the fact that he doesn't wear an American flag pin on his lapel. This is three notches below Ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with wearing one of those pins but a gesture that small should never be confused with actually doing something meaningful. It's like the folks who, after 9/11, spent three dollars for a plastic flag, stuck it on their cars and then acted like they'd made a substantive contribution to The War on Terror. Putting a flag on your car or your coat is just about the dictionary definition of The Least You Can Do.

Actually, I say there's nothing wrong with it but I have to admit that when I see one of those pins on someone's lapel, it makes me suspicious of their patriotism. The first thing I think of is how Richard Nixon's crew made a premeditated effort to equate the wearing of a flag pin with support for Richard Nixon. They were really selling the idea that being a good American and backing Nixon were one and the same thing, and the flag could therefore denote both. I thought it showed zero respect for the flag to use it to promote one person or party. The flag belongs equally to everyone.

And the second thing I think of is something my father told me. He worked (reluctantly) for the Internal Revenue Service and he dealt with a steady stream of very wealthy people who were doing everything in their power — much of it quite illegal — to not pay anything resembling their fair share of taxes to the government. This was during the Vietnam Era and some of these were prominent men who were quite vocal that the U.S. had to spend every nickel necessary to build every conceivable weapon with which to defeat the Dirty Commies...but God Forbid it should be their nickels. Every one of these people, he said, had an American flag in their lapel and thought that the mere wearing of it made them a Good American.

Is Barack Obama a Good American? He's just like anyone else. If he genuinely defends the Constitution and the principles on which this nation was founded and is willing to sacrifice for those principles then he's a good American, regardless of what's in his buttonhole. And if he works against those principles, he's not...and it wouldn't matter if he had a flag, the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, Plymouth Rock and John Wayne on his lapel.

• Posted at 9:39 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This morning, we can't do any better than offer you around six minutes of Wenceslao Moreno, better known to all as the great ventriloquist, Señor Wences. When I was a kid, I loved watching him perform. I never understood what he was doing or even what he was saying...but you could just tell he did it with enormous skill. Whatever it was.

• Posted at 12:04 AM · LINK