Sometimes you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys in Nevada. The July 20, 1998 issue of the New York Post reported that former Gambling Control Board Agent Ron Harris was arrested for rigging slot machines. He was sentenced to seven years in state prison.During one trip to Atlantic City, I paused at a roped-off bank of 5$ machines. A typical cleaning-lady type-I don’t know anv,’filler way to describe her-was pumping two $5 tokens, in tandem, into each of two $5 machines simultaneously, and at breakneck speed! I calculated the fast money she was pumping into the two machines was definitely enough to classify her as a Slot Machine High Roller. A player betting a black chip or two at a blackjack table in the baccarat pit couldn’t match the rapid-fire four-coin totals she was feeding the two machines in an identical time span.

The reckless abandonment with which she was feeding her huge pile of $5 tokens into the machines led me to believe that she must be some sort of minor civil service functionary, probably from New York City, who had stumbled onto a crack in the proverbial floorboards where she could siphon off governmental money without getting caught. This was all speculation, of course, but I couldn’t help speculating.

ou know what I’m talking about. Every now and then you read about the civil servant who managed to funnel some city or state funds through loose controls. Like the parking metermaid who discovered a complete set of keys for all the parking meters in Manhattan. She systematically emptied as many of the meters as she could during her off-hours. When the authorities finally caught her, they found 29,000 quarters in a row of cans lined up in the back of her minivan. She was all ready for-you guessed it-her regular weekly run to Atlantic City, where she turned the quarters into folding money at casino coin cashiers’ booths.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the Megabucks slots are rigged and “timed” so that the jackpots are electronically spaced out and can be hit only at certain intervals. That lie was put to rest on Sunday, October 23, 1994 at Caesars in Atlantic City. At 2:30 in the afternoon a couple hit the Quartermania for $1.5 million. Six hours later a guy walked over to the same bank of slot machines and hit the Quartermania again-this time for $407,505.

I’ve shown how rogue dealers can cheat players and how players (usually in cahoots with dishonest dealers) can cheat casinos. But wait-there’s more (or less). Casino cashiers can give you a “fast count.” Be on the alert when cashing in your chips, and don’t get shorted.

Finally, casinos-in the person of pit bosses and casino executives-can steal money directly from their patrons. This isn’t hearsay or suspicion. I know. I was cheated. My chips were stolen from me right before my eyes. I’ll not bandy words. Two casino executives screwed me for the benefit of the goddam casino, and they did it brazenly, right in front me, apparently with no fear of being nailed by the Eye in the Sky videotaping mandated by the Casino Control Commission. The following section is devoted to this episode, which I hope will serve as a warning to you.

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The game commenced. The dealer dealt a few $100 hands before Scarne announced a $10,000 bet on the next hand (which was not unusual in 1958 Havana). Scarne reached for the two cards, held them face down for a few beats, then neatly turned them over, showing a 9 and a picture card—a natural 9.

The dealer paid off the bet and dropped the cards into the discard slot with his shovel. Before the next hand could be dealt, Scarne stopped the game. He asked the dealer to retrieve the discards from the previous hand. The cards were fished out of the pail, and to the casino owners' astonishment and dismay they discovered that in between the standard Bicycle-backed casino cards were two different-backed cards that Scarne had switched into the game!

In his definitive book On Baccarat, Lyle Stuart relates how a baccarat shoe was stacked right in front of his eyes. After much shuffling and cutting, the dealer orchestrated a run of baccarat hands for Stuart, telling him in advance exactly what the hand would be! Even when being dealt baccarat, be alert at all times.

With the computer age, cheating has become sophisticated and high-tech. This was brought to public attention in October of 1998, when the New York Daily News reported that Jorge Torres of Las Vegas was arrested at Bally's Park Place Casino in Atlantic City after playing at a Caribbean Stud Poker table. New to American casinos, Caribbean Stud isn't a new card game at all,- it was introduced long ago on cruise ships that visited the islands. Although it's called poker, it is played only against the dealer, not against other players. It features a progressive jackpot that can reach $300,000 or more.
As the official complaint charged, Torres was arrested "for using cheating techniques." Exactly how he was allegedly beating the house the police refused to say, "because the investigation is ongoing," but the cops confiscated a micro-mini camera that Torres had tucked into his jacket sleeve.

Inside his pickup truck in the casino parking lot were a satellite dish, transmitting equipment, and monitors. Police sources speculated that the suspect was actually just testing the equipment for later use by his Las Vegas gang that had already hit a number of Nevada casinos.
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Lyle Stuart said it best in one of his invaluable books on gambling: To entice a "whale" into a casino, the casino would supply him with baked human being if that was what he wanted. Of course, Lyle was being facetious, but his point was well taken. Not just for whales though—the casinos will go to all lengths to rope in players.

To entice Asian High Rollers, one Strip casino imported an entire Chinese opera company to perform in their show room— just to lure this small segment of players into their casino.
Casinos will go to great lengths to corral a gambler and his or her bankroll. They sponsor the endless line of subsidized buses (mostly filled with slot-machine-addicted women), and chartering jets all the way from Hong Kong and Tokyo to bring in whales.

With new casinos opening in so many states, the casinos in Puerto Rico are hurting.
A friend recently showed me his invitation to a Puerto Rican junket. The invitation offered not just a comped round-trip airfare, but also included a non-transferable $500 chip as a bonus. When every casino would take each other's chips, a downtown casino can1$fjp with an impressive-looking new 25$ chip. It was a bright green; and in fact looked so impressive that some Strip casinos unwit-tinglyl\paid them off, when played, as "quarters" ($25 chips). The word got around quickly when a dealer at a craps table took a real good look at one of them.

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Yes, it appeared that some blackjack dealers knew when the catwalks were unmonitored. I was once at the Desert Inn playing open blackjack. The dealer was a whizz—man, was he fast! The cards were skillfully snapped off the top of the decks (it was a hand-held two-deck game.) The cards and his hands went faster and faster. Not a rapid calculator, I had the feeling that the five or six little cards I was dealt totaled more than 21, but he paid me and swiftly swept the cards away. Now I was alerted, and damned if the next string of small cards he put in front of me didn't total 22, and yet I was paid again!
Maybe I did the wrong thing, but for one of only two times in my life I tipped the dealer before leaving the table. I threw the bastard a bone because it goes against my nature to get something for nothing. But it was most uncomfortable for me to be the unwitting "winner," boxed into being an accomplice!

A big-time baccarat scam was perpetrated on the Atlantic City casinos a few years back. A planeload of whales from Hong Kong descended on the town and in a series of lightning moves shot from casino-to-casino, making major killings at the baccarat tables.
It was their version of Hit and Run. Once they had their bounty, they got back on the plane to Hong Kong. Wags joked that it was surprising the plane could get off the ground, it was so loaded down with casino money.

The casinos were stunned. They knew something was wrong, but they couldn't put their finger on it. They went back and played and replayed the videotapes of the Asian contingent in action. The first thing they noticed was that at every casino just one of the Chinese players seemed to be the "lucky" one, and when he got the shoe, all the other players would bet heavily with him.

Finally, after endless rerunning of the videotapes someone noticed something—an unusual hand motion used by the "lucky" player with the shoe. As far as I know that's as far as the casino people got in their investigations, and I haven't heard that they ever got any money back.

In one of John Scarne's classic books on casino gambling, he relates an episode at the baccarat table in the Mafia-run Sevilla Baltimore in pre-Castro Havana. The mobster/owners scoffed at Scarne's claim that a player could cheat the casino in baccarat. Scarne bet $500 that he could do it, and with all the boys watching. Scarne asked for—and got—$10,000 in chips for the purpose of testing his boast.

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Does cheating go on in the casinos? You're goddam right it does— by both the dealers and the players.

From the 1940s through the early 1960s, when the mob ran the Las Vegas casinos, often there would be a High Roller who was running a little too lucky at blackjack and apparently was on his way to breaking the bank. Then the casino would bring in a "mechanic"—a cardshark who could control the hand-held deck and grind the hotshot down to size. Today, with most casinos using shoes with multiple decks of cards, it is difficult—but not impossible—to scam the players. More about that later.

Do players cheat the casino? You're damn right they do. In most cases, however, they need the help of dishonest casino employees to pull off their scams. In the old days, if a dealer was tipped off that there were no "Eye in the Sky"—security men on catwalks peering down on the action with telescopic lenses—he might pay off an accomplice/player on every hand, no matter what the cards totaled. Later they'd get together and split the take. Today they have high-fidelity video cameras in operation all the time, and trained on most (but apparently not all) of the tables.

Let me tell you some personal experiences.
During the 1960s on the graveyard shift—the post-midnight hours—I was at the Horseshoe in downtown Vegas shooting craps. It was just me and another player, I at one end of the table, the shooter at the other end. The point was 6. I was playing the Pass Line with a black chip, backing up my bet all the way. The shooter shot wildly, sending one of the cubes spinning off into that little dark corner on the side of the dice box. The die on the table was a 3. The other die, out of sight of everyone except the stickman and me, was a 4, for a total of 7, a loser.

"Hard 6, pay the line," intoned the stickman as he deftly scooped up the out-of-sight die and put it back into play. As fast as I was paid off, that's how fast I hightailed it out of the casino. Evidently the stickman knew that no Eye-in-the-Sky was monitoring the table, or perhaps he was in cahoots with the security man on the catwalk and he was trying to enlist me in the scam for a series of hefty tips. Either way, I wanted no part of it. Scamming casinos isn't my style, and going into business with dishonest stick-men isn't for me either.

That wasn't the only time I was approached on a scam. I was sitting alone at the Sahara's casino bar on the Strip, nursing a beer, when a stranger took the stool next to me.
"You don't know me, but I know you," he began. "I'm a blackjack dealer on the graveyard shift at the Four Queens downtown and I've had you in action at my table. You look like a savvy guy who's with it, so maybe we can make some extra bucks together." I listened as he went on to outline a plan for us to work together on a 50-50 basis. He said he knew exactly when the Eye-in-the-Sky wasn't in operation. Before he could elaborate on his plan, I gulped the rest of my beer and started for the men's room.
"Thanks, but rip-offs aren't my bag," were my parting words to him.

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A Las Vegas cab driver related the following story while taking me from the downtown Four Queens up to Caesars Palace on the Strip. A couple of high school sweethearts in Encino, California, got engaged and planned to marry right after graduation. Something happened between them and they broke up, each eventually marrying someone else.

Twenty years passed. The fellow was a widower now and he was a city bus driver in Las Vegas. On a regular run, he chanced to overhear a conversation between two women sitting directly behind him. They were discussing a mutual friend, and he suddenly realized that they were talking about his old flame. He questioned them and was delighted to learn that she was also now a resident of Las Vegas, and recently widowed.
Of course, he promptly looked her up. Sparks flew and the flame rekindled, as they picked up where they had left off two decades before in high school. Once again, they made plans to get married.

Stopping for a drink at the then newly opened Four Queens, the fellow filled out two sweepstake tickets for a $500,000 prize. The tickets had been dropped off by the waitress along with their drinks, an opening- month promotion for the new casino. As a gesture of his devotion and love, he put his betrothed's name on both tickets.
Of course she won the half-million. And the first thing she did was dump the bus driver.

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Through the four decades of my casino hopping I accumulated a box full of casino chips from all over the world. Visiting Monte Carlo and London, I made it my business to save a chip or two for souvenirs. In Virginia City, Nevada, I couldn't resist the colorful $5 chip used in the Bucket of Blood Saloon casino. When I won a couple hundred dollars there, I took my winnings all in their $5 chips to use for presents. Frankly, from other casinos I just accumulated them, and never gave them a second thought. Then, opening up my Sunday News of October 18, 1998, to my astonishment, there blazing across the front page of the Fall Casino Guide, was IN THE CHIPS: THE COLLECTING CRAZE THAT'S PAYING OUT.

The full-page feature article inside told of the fast-growing 2,000 strong National Casino Chip & Gaming Token Collectors Club (P.O. Box 63, Brick NJ 08923) that had a website and holds an annual convention in Las Vegas.

"Collecting chips has a plus factor that most other collectibles do not have," said Archie Black, president of the club. "Whenever you want to cash in your chips you can at face value." And if the casino no longer exists, your chips will be a hot property and of considerable interest to collectors.
A $100 chip from the Flamingo of 1946 and 1947, when Bugsy Siegel ran the joint, recently sold for $3,500, and even a $100 chip from the Brighton Casino (now the Sands) in Atlantic City sells for thousands of dollars today.

Now how should you start your collection? My suggestion is to save a couple of $1 chips from each casino where you win. If the casino has 25$. chips, you can become The Last of the Big-Time Spenders as you pocket a half-dozen of them. (I even have some 10<t chips from the "sawdust joints" of downtown Vegas that catered to Low Rollers in the 1960s and '70s.)
If you made a nice score at certain casinos you might even save a $5 chip or two from there. If you're not a High Roller 1 urge you not to save any $25 or $100 chips—yet.

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There are actually books on gambling that'll give you tips and secrets for getting complimentary meals, lodgings, and shows, all courtesy of your friendly casino. Ditto the many junkets you can sign up for to casinos everywhere.
With a couple of exceptions, I have passed on 'em all. No thank you. I've done this for several reasons, but primary among them is that I don't want my gambling monitored. Being "rated" is the term they use at the tables, the translation of which is that the pit boss is feeding a computer on how much you're betting, how often you're betting, and exactly how you're doing.

I don't care how much of a cool cat you are, or how much you insist that it won't affect your play. It will! When you're concentrating on your action you need to focus 100 percent on what you're doing. You shouldn't be looking over your shoulder at the pit boss, wondering, "Am I 'rated' enough to get us comped at the show tonight?" Frankly, pal, if you're betting green or black chips at the table, just a couple of wins in even one or two hands will be enough dough for you and your wife to handsomely "toke" the maitre d' for ringside in the showroom, and that way you'll be your own man at the tables.
Outside of the run I had at the Sahara, where the casino executive handed me a suite on an open-end basis, I've passed on the comps. I did, just once in the mid-1970s, accept a casino's offer of a gambling weekend at Lake Tahoe. It was an offer that I just couldn't refuse. Checking my mail at home, I found a tall and impressively ornate special delivery package awaiting me, hand-addressed in the manner of a scribe of old to "Sir Arnold of Levy."

Intrigued, I opened it and found a parchment proclamation, announcing that Sir Nathan of Jacobson would like to have the Extreme Honor & Pleasure of the presence of the (aforementioned) Sir Arnold of Levy and His Lady at the gala opening of Kings Castle Casino at Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

What really got my attention was that the Proclamation said our first-class round-trip air fare would be paid. I was sold, and off to Reno we went. (No airports in Tahoe back then.)
Arriving at Reno, we found that the only way to get to Kings Castle was by cab over the mountain roads. Frankly, except for my two years in Korea during the war, I was never so scared in my life as traversing those narrow and treacherous lanes. When we checked in, we had to cool our heels outside our room,- the carpenters were still inside hammering away.
We couldn't even go to the casino to play a few hands of blackjack or even play the slots,- Kings Castle's gambling license wasn't valid until the next day.

Tuckered out from the long plane ride and hazardous trip across the mountains, we were happy just to finally hit the sack. Sleeping soundly, we were jolted awake at 6:00 A.M. by the incessant ringing of a fire alarm. The lame excuse we got later was that they had to test it, but I suspect the real reason was to get the hotel full of freeloaders out of the sack and into the casino so they could start to get a return on their investment.
In the casino I gazed upon as many movie stars as I've ever seen in one place. Present were Lana Turner, Ray Bolger, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Jack Benny, and many more. But it wasn't Lana Turner or Ray Bolger … it was Lady Lana of Turner and Sir Ray of Bolger. Some of the pagings were quaint and some rather comical: Sir Pat of Kelly, Sir Abe of Cohen, Sir Groucho of Marx.

The weekend was colorful and diverting, but gambling-wise nothing to write home about. The real excitement for me was the three months of Indian wrestling I had to go through—including letters to both the Nevada Governor and the Casino Control Commission—before I was reimbursed for our first-class air fare. So, as a general rule, be your own person and resist all the tempting comps proffered. When you walk away from the tables a winner on your own terms, you'll be happy you followed my advice and kept your gambling independence.

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