Chapter 1
Craps, In the Beginning
How the hell does someone decide that it's a good idea to wager a bunch of hard earned money on a dice table? Good question, without a really good answer. Well my old man is convinced he has a "system" to beat Vegas. And I’m real close to perfecting my perpetual motion machine. Then he asks me to do the math to prove his system is a winner winner chicken dinner. Umm, there's this thing called expectation value, and if it aint positive, well let's just say, that aint positive. And no matter how frickin brilliant you are, you aren't going to "beat the system." But he's a frickin stubborn dumbass like all the McC's, and I could not get that simple concept into his thick skull. So, as the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join em. Sure, there must be a way to beat Vegas. Plus my super stud little bro tells me I gotta check this game out.
Lake Charles, and How They Hook You
So I head to Lake Charles (Vegas to Houstonians) with about 700 in fun money to make my fortune. And I call my studly little bro, his name is Joseph but we both pronounce it Yoey, and say Yoey I got my 700$ rent check here in the casino (kidding-it was my mortgage payment-KIDDING!), how the heck can I get rich quick? And he explains optimal betting, a pass bet and 2 comes with full odds. And then he said something strange. "Watch the shooters." and I said, "When I watch the shooters, what am I watching for?" and he said, "Watch for shooters who are confident and who hit points. 2, 3, 4 points. Get a fix on each shooter on the table. Good shooter. Bad shooter. Random shooters. Crazy 7 shooter." my curiosity piqued: "What’s a crazy 7 shooter look like?" "Bombs away. Incoming! Everyone down! Mortars!" Shit, that sounds fun! "Find your shooters. Ride the gravy train of your best shooters. Avoid the choppy shooters. Ride the don'ts on your bad shooters and crazy 7 shooters." Alright. So all I have to do is watch my shooters and I’m going to get rich. I asked him if good shooters have a certain look. He said “Ya, you know what they do in the ghetto for fun from age 3? They play dice. Lots of dice." Alright. I have my strategy. I just have to find someone who looks like he's been shooting dice since he was in diapers. Can’t exactly ask someone if he was wearing Pampers when he was first throwing the bones. Alright let's see what happens.
So I take my paltry 700 down to the tables with my girlfriend of the month who's at least half my age; good thing too. Laws in Louisiana are a little different. Its strictly Napoleonic code there, which means that the law is whatever the hell the cops deem it to be. Find a spot on the table and get busy watching the shooters. Little old lady kind of picks em n heaves em. 7 out line away. Nope. Nervous guy who has his car note on the table. Nope. Guy who does his best Nolan Ryan impersonation. He's that crazy 7 shooter Yoey was telling me about. Nope. Dice come to me. I don’t know how to shoot. I don’t want them. I pass em to Victoria. "Come on sweety. Show ‘em how its done." Make about 15$ on her. Dice keep moving. Eventually they arrive in the hands of Mr. Cool. Rubs his hands on the felt. Sets the dice. Throws. Whoa, backspin! The dice kind of graze the back wall and fall dead, like Schrodinger’s cat after it absorbed too many gamma particles. (It’s radioactive baby..) Hard 6, a 3 3 roll. (Now the shooter wants a 6 before a 7, which is called making a point.) 2 rolls later, shooter rolls 33, hits his point the hard way. (Hard way is same #s on top. Easy 6 is any other two numbers that add to 6.) 1st point. Come out roll, hits 2 7s and a yo 11. (On come out rolls, 7 and 11 are winners.) People start clapping and yelling. Shooter rolls an 8, the new point. 3 rolls later, shooter hits a hard 8 (44). Shooter hits his 2nd point. People start cheering. (Craps tables are the easiest to find; they are always the loudest places in the casino.) I'm looking at this cool brother. not even breaking a sweat, just rhythm and beauty. I look over at him. But instead of a cool cat on the tables, I see this fucking infant in his fucking Pampers, saying, "No mommy, I don't wanna take a nap! Can't you see I’m busy shooting dice?" I’m like, holy fuck; this is the guy Yoey was talking about. That's him! I tell the dealer I wanna put all my money down infront so that I can maximize my bet behind the line because it pays better. (that's called am odds bet.) how much do I need to put down on my line bet? he looks at my chips. "u got 700 there. if u put 33 down for your line bet, u can take max odds of 660 after he hits his point. your going to basically be all in." I follow his instructions. 33$ on the line bet. shooter rolls a hard 8 (44). I look at my girlfriend. Sweetie? she's like, "It's your damn money, don’t ask me.” Well I’m a crazy fuck anyway, so I put 660 behind the line, hoping beyond hope he rolls a frickin 8 before a 7. In my mind, I’m thinking, win, lose, or draw, fuck it, I’m done after this roll, about to have a frickin heart attack. Shooter rolls a 4, a 9, a 6. where the hell is my damn 8? Getting a little nervous. I shout out, "44 shooter!" sonofabitch. the mo fo rolled a frickin 8. 62. I pick my girlfriend up off the floor and we kiss mid-flight. the dealer starts counting out the chips. 33$ for your line bet. odds bet $660 pays $792. I push all my chips in to color up. (coloring up is where you trade your small chips for larger chips to cash out.) Hit the cage with about 1500 of which about 800 is profit. We go hit the steakhouse. Yoey told me about comps; pit boss gave us 2 passes for the steakhouse. Free shit is always good.
Back to School. Math Class Is Now in Session
So after winning a lousy 800 bucks on the dice tables, I thought, boy that was fun. And that, my friends, is how they get you. I want to return to a certain Papa McC’s theory of beating Vegas. And I need to introduce you to some terms: Martingale and Anti-Martingale. Honestly, I don't know who the fuck Martingale was-some genius? some retard?-and why the hell was Mr. Antimartingale so opposed to Mr. Martingale? Maybe Martingale was the HOA president, and Antimartingale was the one that mailed him the dead fish. Smh. Well it turns out papa McC’s perpetual motion machine was a classic martingale scheme, (right up there with a Ponzi scheme IMHO). Let me demonstrate a classic martingale scheme. Let's say I sit down on a roulette table with a table minimum of 3$ and a table maximum of 1000$. I pick one of the bets that is as close as possible to a 50/50 bet. Let’s say red is my favorite color and I decide to bet on red. What if I bet 3$ on red. Black comes up. So what do I do? Well certainly red is due, right? Course. So I bet 6 on red. whoops another black. I’m 9$ in the hole. well shoot if I bet 12 on red, I’m still going to make a profit, right? Sure. So I bet 12 on red. Oops unlucky day. 00 green comes up. and I’m thinking well now red is a sure bet; it's clearly long overdue. I put 24 on red. Gotta hit now for sure. Nope, another black. Damn. I’m outta pocket 45$. Well shit I can't quit now. Where the fuck is my damn red? So I put 48 on red. My palms are getting sweaty. I’m getting kind of agitated. I look around nervously. The dealer spins the wheel. The ball bounces around and lands on RED! I’m over-frickin-joyed. The dealer pays me my 48$, and I sit down to order a big fat margarita. I count my chips. I realize I have 3 more dollars than when I started my little "progression." Wow I almost had a heart attack and I made 3$! I’m rich! that, my friends, is a classic martingale progression. Sounds pretty dumb, especially for 3$, right?
Well what if I’m a baller stud and I say fuck it. I’ll show up with 5 grand and I will cover any damn bet I lose, and fuck the 3$. I’m going to use an aggressive Martingale so I don't stress for a lousy 3$ profit. I want to stress for a real win. so here's the sequence: 5, 12, 30, 80, 200, 500, 1000. And I’m going to give it a name, I’m going to call it Victoria's progression, in honor of my girlfriend at the time. And what if some hypothetical baller had the kahunas to actually do it, someone who clearly just doesn't give a fuck and gets a kick out of everything? How would that work out, I wonder?
Alright so our hypothetical gambler explains his "system" to his friend, let's call him Jack. and Jack says, "Dude that's fucking stupid! You're going to win a little, and win a little, and then, you know what? you're going to lose your shirt." and so our hypothetical gambler says, "Well Jack, if you're so smart, how would you roll?" and Jack says, "Ya I am fucking smart, and I will explain how it's done." And so he does.
And Jack says, "Alright listen up. I sit myself down on the same table as you. but you're over married to fucking red and you're not watching the board. You don't have a clue what's hot. Odds? High numbers? Black? I’m going to bet with the board. I’m going to put down 20$ down on the best 50/50 bet on the table. If I hit, my next bet ups to 25. If I hit again, I go up to 30. If I miss, I drop down to say 15. If I miss again, I drop down to like 8. that way I’m making money when I’m hot, and when I’m not, I’m not losing too much. unlike you, dumbass. You're going to lose your shirt." Our gambler is not convinced.
What Jack explained is called the Anti-Martingale system. So who is right?
Chapter 2
Vegas, Baby. The Fakest City on Earth
So the following New Years, (crazy I was still dating the same gal), Victoria and I headed west, to the city of Sin. Cobbled together a respectable bankroll of about 3,500. Got a rec. for the El Cortez from papa McC, so that's where I went. Great hotel, great service, great frickin food; the tempura shrimp is to die for. Got in plenty of fucking, sightseeing for the gal. With my little piece of shit 3,500 bankroll, we got treated like royalty. Everything was comped, Porterhouse steak every night. They moved us into one of the newly renovated suites; the only thing we paid was tips: lotsa ones. Always had 40$ in ones. Left my bankroll as front money at the cage. Picked it up on the way to the tables, dropped it off on the way back. Had lots of small wins. 300, 200, 400, that kind of shit, mainly on dice, but we mixed in some roulette too. My girlfriend liked blackjack, so I’d give her a 100 bucks and told her to go have fun. She actually came back with a profit a couple of times. I was like, "Good job sweety!" and I’d kiss her like she just won the lottery.
I Learned How to Shoot: Trial by Fire
It happened one particular afternoon, like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. I’m on a good table. Confident shooters, everyone in a groove. hi fives, yelling and screaming. Then something changed. 7 out, line away. 7 out, line away. 7 out, line away. Good shooters looking at the dice like they had a damn hex on em. I’m smh. smmfh. I stop betting. I just wait for the dice to get to me. I have no plan. I’m not a good shooter. Honestly, I don't know how to shoot. But I wait, and it comes. "You going to shoot?" "Yup." "You need a line bet down." Deliberately, I put my min bet down, 5$. I start playing with the dice, turning them around, analyzing the numbers. I focus on the 7s. I think, "what if I set the 7s to the sides, and throw kind of soft, right down the middle of the table?" and that's what I did. threw a 6. take full odds. 50. 2 rolls. hit a 6. 1st point. pays 65. I remember what my little bro told me. pass n 2 comes, full odds, press the action on a hot shooter. I press my flat bet to 10$. throw a 4. I take 10X odds on the 4 (100$ bet.). 10$ to the come. Throw a 9. Take full odds, 100 on the 9. Another come bet for 10$. Throw a 6 and take full odds. 100 on the 6. Throw a 4. 2nd point. pays 210. People start clapping. Come out bet, press to my Pass Line bet to 15. "I want everything working on the come out." "Alright, everything working on the Come Out." (that means I really don't want to see a 7 even though a 7 is usually good on the come out.) He put an On marker on my chips.
Throw a 9. pays 160. Bets start flying all over the table. I start blocking everything out. Perfect set. Perfect set, perfect throw. That's all that's going through my mind. I press my flat bets up to 20. 200 odds. I push to a pass and 3 come bets instead of 2. Hit another point. The pit boss gets on my case for rolling short. "Shooter, both dice to the back wall!" I sorta acknowledge him. I heard the dealers go easy on you if you tip em, so I start throwing tips at the dealers to shut em up. I keep rolling. I press my flat bets to 50. Full odds 500 each. The table is now going nuts. Hit another point. 4th in a row. it was an 8. paid 650 on the spot. The pit boss is getting really agitated. "Both dice to the back wall!" he bellows. I’m like, "I’m trying." Well I’m not really trying. what I’m really trying is to not 7 out. That's all I’m trying to do. Another point. I think it was a 10. Paid a 1000 on my 500 odds bet plus 50 flat. utter. fucking. mayhem. there are stacks of black chips (100$) all over the table. the pit boss stares me down. "the last time I’m going to say it. both dice to the back wall." I got $ on every number on the table, all 500 odds bets. I take 2 reds, push em to the dealer. "I wanna press my 6." Pass him a black. "full odds." "100 odds on the 6. puts you at 60 flat, 600 odds on the 6." (Some casinos let you press your bet like this, and others don’t. Ask the pit boss if you’re not sure.)I push 2 more reds to him. "Press my 8." "Pressing the 8." I push a another black in. "Make my 8 odds look like 600.." "Bringing it to 600 odds on the 8." People all around the table start throwing blacks down. "300 place the 6, 300 place the 8." I look at the dice. you could hear a pin drop. I set 44 on top, 22 behind, 7s to the sides. throw. perfect throw. dealer calls it. "Hard 8!" I literally pick my girlfriend up and we do like 3 360's. dealer pays me 780 on my flat and odds bet on the 8. the dealers pay out what looked like 15k on that one roll. pit boss stands up and points at me: "Shooter you are disqualified! I told you for the last time, both dice to the back wall! Pass the dice!"
Well shit I got like 3k sitting out there on the table and I’m thinking I’m about to get fucked by some shitty shooter so I bark out, "All bets down." Well the pit boss explains, "You can take all your odds down but your flat bets are staying up." "All odds down." The dealer hands me about 3k of odds bets back, and I resign to wait to see all my flat bets creamed, and then something astonishing happens. somebody yells to the guy to my left:” Shooter, pass the dice!" and he does. And so does the next person. And the next. They're trying to get the dice back to me, the hot shooter on the table. I’m thinking in the back of my mind, if this works, is he even going to let me shoot? Well I never found out, because some dumbass grabbed the dice and rolls. "7 out, line away! Take the line, pay the don’ts!" Brilliant, fucking brilliant!
One word. Color. i push in stacks after stacks. rails and rails of red (5), green (25), black (100), plus the odd couple of purple (500). The obligatory count commences. 7,200, give or take a few. I'm getting ready to drop off pretty much the whole bankroll at the cage and leaving it as front money. and Victoria says, "why don't we play a little roulette?" i'm like, "you sure you want to play roulette? don't you wanna go sightseeing on the strip baby?" "nope, i want to play roulette." i'm a little uncomfortable. "well how long do you want to play for?" i'm looking for a tangible out. maybe we can sit down for 15 minutes and Victoria can get her little roulette fix. "let's just go with the flow." go with the flow. those words echo in eternity. "let's just go with the flow." Ha.
Russian Roulette
So i cancel my trip to the cage and instead we amble over to the roulette table, 5 to 1000. i nestle in. i pull out my chips from the dice game. honestly, it looked ridiculous. no one on earth sits down at a roulette table at the El Cortez with over 7000 in chips. the bosses kind of murmur among themselves, like who the hell is this nutjob? we've never seen this much money on a roulette table, well practically ever.
and we sink into the rhythm of the game. I'm running a straight Martingale, Victoria's progression. well i never told her i named a roulette betting progression in her honor. she might have thought that was a little strange. i'm playing contra to the table: when reds are hitting, i'm betting black. when odds are hitting, i'm betting evens. things get pretty exciting. have some progressions that get as high as 500 before i finally hit. i should have noticed thunderclouds on the horizon.
but i'm trucking along, making 15 here, 30 there, 160 on the more exciting runs. well i'm watching the board and i notice a string of blacks. i figure red is overdue. i put 5 on red. 28 black comes up. 12$ on red. 34 black hits. 30 on red. green single 0 hits. 80 on red. green 00 hits. god i hate those fucking greens. are you kidding me? 200 red. 4 black hits. 500 on red. 00 again. fucking greens. you gotta be kidding me! 1000 on red. 6 black comes up. now i have a conundrum. i'm at the table limit. my bankroll is still able to back up my bets, but there isn't a 2000 bet on the table. i improvise. 1000 on red, 1000 on odd. black 16 comes up. i curse. now i have a double problem. i'm up against the table limit and my bankroll limit. i say, fuck it. all in. 1000 odd, 1000 red, 1000 high numbers (19-36). if i hit at least 2 out of 3 bets, i resolve to call it a day, count my losses, and regroup tomorrow. the dealer spins. i practically can't even watch. at least in dice, as a shooter, i have some say in my destiny. here, i am at the whim and caprice of the malevolent gods of fortune. and at this table, they have not been kind. time slowed down. the universe collapsed into this spinning orb. i grit my teeth, and await my fate. 00. again. oh, u gotta love those greens. u really gotta love those greens.
martingale should be shot.
well Victoria and i made it into springtime. when she went mia on spring break when i finally had time off work, that was the end of us.
but i was not deterred. lesson learned. never fight the table. i should have been betting greens the whole time! who knew? course, it was so simple.
Chapter 3
Rory’s Adventure and the Pimp Shoes
So the 2nd night we're in the City of Sin, I text my nephew to help me decide if I should stay up or crash out. never heard back. got the full scoop from Rory the following day.
Rory begins, "so I’m hopping from one casino to the next looking for a good table. finally ended up at the MGM. got my favorite shooting spot, 2 right of stick. dropped my 1500 down to get some chips. table was a pretty high roller table, 20$ min, 100k max flat, 3/4/5x odds.
it was a funny table. there was a huge black guy on the other side of the table with stacks of chips. must've had 500k easy there. next to him is this pimpin brother. black and white pinstripe suit, dressed to the nines.
table was ok, but a little choppy. guys would hit a point, then 7 out. when the dice came to me, I just put a min bet down to try to get a feel for the table. it felt right. I hit my first point on my 3rd roll. ended up hitting 2 more points before sevening out. the dice took a bad hop in the money, so I wasn't too upset. I was definitely in the groove.
next time dice came to me, I just focused on taking my time and throwing perfectly. was using a hardways set (a hardways set is where all the numbers are paired on the dice), 3s on top, 5s behind. I was setting hardways and hitting hardways. hit a hard 6 (33), hard 8 (44), plus a bunch of easy ways. I started out at table minimums with full odds, and after I started hitting numbers, the huge black guy on the other side of the table with the monster chip stack started making monster bets. he was doing like 10k flat bets with full odds (30,000 on 10 or 4, 40000 on the 5 or 9, and 50,000 on the 6 or 8). I tried not to pay attention to how much money he was throwing down there. I just focused on hitting my numbers. the pit boss was really cool. he let me take all the time in the world before shooting. didn't rush me at all. by the time I hit my 4th point, the table was going apeshit. the huge black guy started upping his flat bets to 100k, with full odds. I couldn't even look at his bets, because it would have distracted me so much. I just focused on setting right and throwing perfectly. it was almost mindless. I was totally in the zone.
I start my 6th roll. (meaning he had hit 5 points already.) come out roll was a 6. I’m getting ready to get set, and the huge black guy motions to me. I’m like, wtf? he walks around the table over to me and sticks a 5000 chip on my odds bet and a 1000 chip on my flat bet. he says, 'now you're playing with some money.' I barely mumbled out,’ thank you sir.' so there I am with 6000 in front of me, and I’m trying to hit the 6. well I got down to business. set 33 on top and 55 behind. hit an easy 8 first, I think it was a 53. close. I think the big dude had like 120k on the 8, so he was stoked. I tried again. took forever to set. the throw. both dice traveled in unison. perfect throw. I look up. the dealer barks out: '6 the hard way.' 33. Jesus f'ing Christ. works for me! dealer counts out 7000, puts it next to my bets. I pick it up and put it in my rails. drop another 1000 down, took full odds. rolled for another half hour before finally sevening out. counted my chips. 35,000 frickin greenbacks. the black dude made probably a million bucks on that one roll."
so I’m listening to this, slack jawed. I look over at D. Her eyes are bugging outta her face. I interject:” So you colored up, right?"
"yup I colored up."
"and you got the hell outta there, right?"
and he gives me this funny look. I know there's more to this.
"so the dealer counts out my chips. it came to like 35,500, give or take. I thank everyone. been real nice doin bidnez whicha.” (sorry this is an inside joke between Rory and me.) I thank the huge black guy and ask him what his name is. he says 'Marcus. Marcus Washington. and I play football.' and I said 'thank you Marcus.' I throw the dealer a purple (500 chip) and wave to everyone as I cram the 35k into my pocket."
"what happened then?," I interjected.
"so I’m walking towards the cage and I turn around and there's this dude running towards me. not threatening, I mean there was security everywhere, but like he's got something important to tell me. I realize it was the pimped out brother standing next to Marcus at the table. I stop and he comes up to me, wearing the most pimped out black n white pinstriped suit with some natty-ass matching shoes. and he says,"Hey bro, what's your name?" and Rory tells him his name. and this pimped out brother says,”Hey listen Rory, your the best shooter on the table. we really need your ass to keep shootin." and Rory says, "what's your name bro?" and this guy says his name is Deon. and Rory says,” listen Deon, I appreciate the compliment, but I just won almost 35,000, and I am done. retired. going home. calling it a day. but thanks for the compliment!"
and Deon is clearly getting flustered, because he can see Rory's having none of it. he's like,” I’m begging you." and my nephew just shakes his head.
so Deon is like,” I will do anything man if u just come back to the table and keep shooting."
my nephew is not impressed.
so Deon pleads,” tell you what Rory. if you come back to the table, I will give you the shoes off my feet, my 1000$ custom tailored alligator-skin Fellini shoes."
and my nephew looks at Deon and says,” all I have to do is come back and shoot and you are going to give me your alligator shoes?"
"that’s right," replies Deon earnestly.
Rory continues, while D and I listen, utterly transfixed, in the McDonald's food court.
"So here I am with 35,000 in chips in my pocket and a pimped out brother practically begging me to come back to the tables. I’m totally not impressed. then the dude offers me the shoes off his feet. literally. he takes off the most pimped out black and white alligator shoes I’ve ever seen and hands 'em to me. 'here you go.' and I thought well who the hell am I to rain on his parade? so we walk back to the table, him wearing only black socks on his feet, and me carrying his awesome pimp shoes. it was fucking crazy. when I get back to the table, the whole table erupts in cheers. I get my old spot back, 2 right of stick, and Deon moves back to his spot next to Marcus Washington, the former starting linebacker for the Redskins. I glance over at Marcus' chipstack. fucking ridiculous, I’d guess 2M."
I interject, " well I’m guessing you shot again, huh?"
"course. so dice come around to me."
I interrupt. my nephew knows what a crazy fuck I am, so I know he'll get my humor. "you went all in on the don't, right?"
he laughs. "almost. no I went all in on the do's."
D and I look at each other, with our jaws agape.
I reply, "oh my god, you are not kidding me, are you?"
he looks me straight in the eyes. "No."
So Rory has 36,000 in bets spread across 3 numbers, the 5, 6 and 8, and 100$ in his rails. He set the dice. Took forever. As quiet as inside a church. The throw. A good throw, but far from perfect. One of the dice got tangled up in the air. It tried its mightiest to clear the chipstacks at the far end of the table, like an F-18 trying to clear the deck for a perfect carrier landing. Instead, it came down nose first at an awkward pitch. Time slowed down. A fraction of a second became an eternity. The obscene stack of greens, leaning sideways, lurked below. As to that idiot who made that bet, the kindest thing I can say about him is if he had a brain, he'd be dangerous. The landing was not pretty. Greens flew everywhere. Rory could not bring himself to look. He ran a hand through his hair and waited for the call, resigned to his fate, whatever it might be.
"Seven out! Line away. Take the Line. Pay the Don'ts," the stickman barked peremptorily, unceremoniously.
I'm shaking my damn head. I look over at Denise. She's shaking her damn head. Then, out of the corner of my mouth, I barely crack a smile. "Well at least you got a decent pair of pimp shoes, huh?"
Rory nods and smiles wryly and points at the shoes. I got a full grin on my face now. But I don't like beating around the bush, so I come straight to the point. "So how much you got in your pockets right now?", fully expecting him to say nada a damn red cent.
"400 bucks," he offers without emotion.
"400 bucks? Hell you quadrupled up! That's a helluva accomplishment!"
"Nope. I lost my last 100. The 400 was all tips from other players."
It's 3 in the afternoon. I had texted Rory around midnight the previous night to see what I should do. "What the hell time did you go bust?"
"Around 3 am."
"When did you leave the frickin tables?"
"Ten minutes ago."
I'm amazed. Rory and I are both action players. We want the dice. We want our own table. We're both fine with a crowd watching and every frickin pit boss in joint shitting bricks while we're in a zone. But neither of us is going to sit at a table and watch after we went bust. So I know there's more to the story.
"Who in the fuck was making your line bets?"
"Marcus. Ya he said he would keep making my line bets until I couldn't raise my arm anymore. I made him around 8 million."
"Holy smokes!", I exclaimed. "Damn I really wish you woulda texted me back!" I look over at Denise, then back to Rory. "Ya Denise and I were arguing again, so I couldn't even get some smoking hot black booty as my consolation prize."
Rory flashes me a smirk, while Denise rolls her eyes and gives me this what the fuck ever look. I wink at her. "Just because you're a bitch doesn't make your booty any less of a masterpiece." She cracks a smile and shakes her damn head.
I'm just in shock. "So you go bust at the MGM after going up by 36,000 and retired Redskins Pro-bowler Marcus Washington is making your line bets? Insanity. Total frickin insanity."
Rory nodded his head and laughed. "Yes it was, all that and more."
I'm still shaking my damn head. "You shoulda texted me back. If I was there, it woulda been a tug of war. Future Navy Seal (him) and general purpose crazy mo fo (me) versus the pimp (Deon) and the Monster (Marcus). They would not have stood a chance." (Footnote in the interest of full disclosure. My versus pimp record is not too good; I stand 0-1 as of this writing, by unanimous decision on the judges' score cards. But there was neither a KO nor a tap out, in my defense.)
Rory's grin stretched ear to ear, while Denise is laughing. I'm describing the 4 man tug-o-war in the middle of the casino floor at the MGM, two wiry honkies, one pimp in his pinstripe black and white suit with matching shoes and an NFL linebacker with millions in chips falling out of his pockets all over the casino floor. While we're wrestling, I query Deon: "What in the hell is a Navy Seal going to do with your damn igga pimp shoes? He's shows up for black ops wearing those shoes, he's going to be the laughing stock of his whole Seal Team!"
The Pimp Shoes, Roger The Bum, and the Gods of Fortune
So that night, I said aight, we're taking your damn igga pimp shoes with us to the casinos, and I'll be damned if those igga pimp shoes don't bring us fortune. Rory agreed. The shoes were too small for his feet, so he asked me to try 'em on. I told him I'd be honored. They fit well, and when I looked in the full length mirror, I saw an igga pimp staring back at me. "Shoes are proper," I told Rory and Denise. Denise was like, "If you wear those shoes, I'm not going to act like I know you." I reply, "Fine. Stay in the hotel. Isn't that why you came to Vegas, after all?"
Even though the shoes fit, I figured that walking on the strip and shooting dice for hours in these igga pimp shoes might damn near do my feet in. So told Rory I was going to bring my comfy sneaks for a backup. At the appointed hour, after a steak and shrimp meal at the MGM Grand courtesy of Rory's comps, we prepared to embark. "You ready to rock-n-roll?", I queried Rory. "Yup, good to go." "Aight, let's go seek our fortune." We bid Denise a warm goodbye, and headed out to find our fortune, igga pimp shoes proudly adorning my feet.
So Rory and I headed out to try our luck at the dice tables, with me wearing his hard-earned pimp shoes. And it wasn't but 10 to 15 minutes after walking on the Strip before my feet started to hurt. So I asked Rory to hold up a minute while I changed into my comfy sneaks, and after that I carried the pimp shoes in my hand.
We passed a bum on the street. All of a sudden Rory stops me, and he's got this weird look on his face. I look right at him, some gears turn in my brain, and I bust out in a ridiculous grin. I speak first, but I'm laughing so hard I can barely get the words out: "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" He's like, "No way." I nod my head. "Yup, let's do it."
We turn around and start heading back the way we came. When we get back to the homeless guy, I extend my hand. I said, "My name is px, this is my nephew Rory, and we noticed that your shoes are a little old."
And he extends his grimy hand and says, "My name is Roger, and you're right about that, my shoes have seen better days."
And I said, "Well Roger this is your lucky day, because you are about to get a pair of $1,000 Fellini alligator skin (pimp-<hmm might have left that out>) shoes. You have no idea what my nephew had to go through to get these shoes."
And tears start streaming down Roger's face. He gives Rory and me big hugs, and out of the blue, starts quoting Scripture. The Sermon on the Mount, with the full Beatitudes. Then he moves on to the 23rd Psalm: "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil: for though art with me..." Well I don't what it is about the 23rd Psalm, but something about Roger the Bum reciting the 23rd Psalm on the Las Vegas Strip in the City of Sin, with tears running down his cheeks after receiving the igga pimp shoes, that got to be a little much for me, and I had to bid him a fond farewell before becoming an emotional basket case myself. As we walked away, Rory and I hi-fived each other.
That night, the gods of fortune did indeed smile on us. We shot the fuck out of the casinos. I tripled up, 1500 to 4500, and Rory quadrupled up, 400 to 1600. He never made it back to 36,000, but after that night of dice, he was +100 for the trip. Not bad, considering he had lost his last $100 on the dice tables the night before, and it was only the kindness of the other players that accounted for his $400 bankroll. As to my personal opinion? Ya, the shoes brought us good fortune. It was definitely the shoes.
As we were walking back to the hotel as the sun was coming up, Rory asked me if I played Texas Hold 'Em. I said nope, only dice. He asked me if I would play Hold Em. I said nope, that I would probably blow my dice winnings on Hold Em. He replied: "I tell you what. I'm going to give you a 60$ bankroll from my dice winnings and all you gotta do is sit down and play." "Well heck, if you're going to give me free money to play Hold 'Em, you got a deal." Then I added, "Have you ever heard the concept of playing Hold 'Em as a team?" He said no. So as we made our way up the elevators to our room, I explained the concept of team Hold 'Em. When we got back to the room, Denise was just getting up while we were drawing the blinds, like a couple of vampires.
Team Texas Hold ‘Em
So the next day we formulate a plan. Rory would sit down first on one side of the table, and I would grab a spot on the other side of the table a couple minutes later. I came down about 15 minutes after him. There were a lot of players there. I got my chips and tried to get a read on the table.
When it comes to gambling styles, everyone has their own style. You have your very conservative, conservative, moderate, moderately aggressive, aggressive, very aggressive, and finally kamikaze. My style leans toward kamikaze.
I had a hand that was pretty decent. Pocket queens. A guy who raised aggressively before the flop was probably planning on taking down the pot before the flop. Nope. I'm all in. Before the flop. He folded. Everyone folded. I took down the pot. Ok so now I know I'm the craziest guy at the table. Good to know. Built up a decent little chip stack from that.
Two hands later, I'm dealt 9,2. Garbage cards. I manage to make it to the flop without spending too much. No one is showing much early strength. The flop comes: queen, 9,8. I pair my 9s. I'm worried about the over card queen. Decide to test the waters. Lead with an early big bet. Everyone folds or calls. No one raises. So either no one has the queen, or someone is laying a trap. I follow my instincts that my 9s are good. The turn comes a 5. Big sigh of relief. At least not another over card. Bet comes to me. I push my entire chipstack in. "All in." Fold. Fold. Fold. Rory is already out of the hand. The guy next to him turns over his cards, without watching my reaction. He's got a 7,6 unsuited. I keep smiling, like egging him on, but I know I'm fucked big time. Dude's got a straight already, and I'm hopelessly behind in the hand. Rory springs into action. He turns to the guy on his left and says, "He's got you beat. He's got the jack 10 straight. Look at him, he looks like the cat that ate the canary! You should fold." I keep smiling, like egging him on to call. After like 5 agonizing minutes (for both of us, actually), he mucks his cards. I could not frickin believe it. The last player left at the table besides me says, "I call." I was stoked because somehow I knew I had him beat. I stand up and flip my 9s. He flips his cards. He's got the 8s. I tell him that he's got nuts of steel to call with 2 overcards on the board. He said after the guy with the straight folded, he had to play it out! I was like ya me too, seeing as I'm already all in. We both stand up and wait for the river. I'm thinking no 8, no 4 (his 2nd card is a 4.) Came up ace. The chip stack that came my way was just obscene. I called no action and counted my chips. 420 bucks. Seven times upped. I throw the dealer a 10, get up, stuff my pockets, wish everyone good luck, and headed to the cage. Rory told me later that after I left, one of the other players asked, "Who the hell was that guy?" Rory replied with a straight face,” I think I saw him in the World Series of Poker." Lmfao.
I owed Rory big time. I bought him a 5 lb. bag of ghost chili peppers. He's addicted too.
I had told him that team Hold 'Em was fun, and he was dubious. Now he's a believer!
The Great Race
The only other cool thing that happened on that trip among my crazy Vegas adventures was The Great Race. (Was that not the greatest movie ever?) So Denise is telling us about her great track and field exploits in high school, TX 5A. She won district this, and placed in state that, etc. etc. Well she's built like a cheetah, so I had no reason to doubt her tales of conquest. And Rory is telling us some of the crazy shit he did to get ready for hell week: ran an ultra marathon (125 miles), did an Iron man Triathlon, 26.2 mile obstacle course, etc. etc.
So after hearing these tales of epic athleticism by these 2 fitness freaks, the wheels start turning in my mind. "How bout we find out who really is the greatest athlete warrior?" They both nod their heads in agreement. So after wandering through one hotel after another, at about 2 in the morning, we stumble across the perfect venue. It's a downward moving escalator, an upward moving escalator, and some stairs at the Bellagio. There's no one around, so it's perfect for the showdown. Ebony track star vs. ivory Navy Seal. I bet Denise 1$ that she would lose, because I am partial to my tribe and Denise and I spent more time arguing than anything else, including booty worship. Lol.
I design the course. Stage 1 is down a flight of stairs. Stage 2 is up an escalator going backwards (opposite to the direction of the escalator.) Stage 3 is down an escalator going backwards. Runners are on board. I'm judge and jury. The runners take their positions on the starting blocks. I await them at the finish.
"On your marks. Get set. Go!" I fire the starting gun. They both take off flying. Rory is descending like 5 steps at a time. He looked like a mountain goat coming down a steep mountainside. Denise was flying too, but was only taking 3 steps at a time. Rory had a small lead coming round the turn. As he ascended the backwards moving escalator, Denise was only an arms length back. They were both killing themselves going up this escalator. Rory was only taking 2 steps at a time, and Denise only 1.
As they round the turn into stage 3, now Rory is leading by a good 6 feet. He starts Stage 3 the upwards moving escalator taking 3 steps at a time, while Denise can only take 2. In a desperate attempt to close the gap, Denise takes a huge leap down, loses her footing, and collapses on the escalator, which is now moving her away from the finish line. Rory crosses the finish line and I high five him, then we both point at and laugh at Denise, who by now is at the top of the escalator. In the ultimate act of surrender, she gives up and walks down the stairs. I congratulate her on her last place finish and demand my booty. (No not that kind of booty. Lol.)
Next morning, the paper's lead: Ivory Navy Seal Destroys Ebony Track Star in Obstacle Course at the Bellagio!
Stay tuned for the next chapter, Taylor's Mayhem...
Chapter 4
“Bin Real Nice Doin Bidnez Whicha”: Hoppin the Big Red and the Second Craziest Dice Adventure of All Time
Part I: The Warmup
Cool thing about Pulp Fiction: the movie is presented in non-sequential scenes. I had to watch it 3 times to actually figure out the temporal sequencing. So yes we’ll get to Taylor’s Mayhem-the first and only time I unloaded an entire can of bear spray on anyone or anything-and Lady Luck and the Craziest Adventure of All Time eventually, but New Years 2020/2021 just happened, and it was the Second Craziest Adventure of All Time. So before I forget everything, I thought maybe I’ll keep going Pulp Fiction and write this shit down before I forget it, asynchronously. For some reason, Rory asked me to leave the chicks behind. I figured he had his reasons, so no worries I told him. I left my hot ebony peeps in h-town. I told him I came up with a new progression based on the hop, a modification of a crazy progression called the Big Red, honoring the main bet of the progression. I also told him I'd bring my old Compaq laptop to model it on Excel. He said great. He also said he'd be bringing a "significant" bankroll.
As far as my bankroll went, first I paid off all my December and January bills, then I set aside the max i thought i'd have to pay in gas, hotels, and food. What was left became my bankroll, which was close to 1000 bucks, so i rounded it to an even 1000, and got 40 in ones for tip money. (If you get comped by a casino, they pay for everything except for tips.)
So Rory gave me his flight info, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I drove to Vegas and was able to pick him up at the airport?” Well I watched this video of a commencement speech by one Admiral McRaven, who I think is one of the baddest motherfuckers on the planet. (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBuIGBCF9jc). [Admiral McRaven was the guy who ran the Bin Ladin operation, among many other accomplishments.] And he explained how important it is to make your bed when you get up in the morning, because if you have a shitty day at the office or whatever, when you get home, heck at least your bed is made. And I sort of get where he is coming from, because nothing sucks worse than losing a bunch of money in Vegas or Lake Charles and then coming home to a messy house. So of course, before I left, I had to do months worth of laundry, weeks worth of dishes, plus of course, I had to make my damn bed. The life of a bachelor..
Having done all of that, I had earlier remembered to check with my pharmacy whether my doc had called in a couple of scripts. The only one I cared about was basically extended-release amphetamine, Adderall-the other two i called in were basically well fuck as long as I have insurance..-and my doc had not called that shit in. (Honestly, I think he’s pissed because my insurance company is not properly compensating him for his Dr. Fauci-compliant telephone consults, more evidence that our healthcare system is really just one big clusterfuck.) Well, when I’m in Vegas, I know I’ll be vamping. That’s the syndrome where you stay up all night, sleep all day-up to 12 hours hopefully-and generally disregard any vestiges of circadian rhythms that the human body has evolved over at least the last 5 million years. And when you’re vamping, you damn well better be on your A-game after the sun goes down.
So now I have a puzzle to solve. I text a couple of my gals who I think may be able to help, and they all come up short. So I gotta figure this shit out, and quick. So I go on List Crawler-Website of Champions-and type in a couple of key words along the lines of “rocket fuel.”
My texts went something like this: “Hi sweety. Saw your ad on LC. Do you have any rocket fuel by chance?” "No." "Nope." "What are you, a cop?" Finally got a taker and she hooked me the heck up. Way the fuck up.
So I was supposed to leave for Vegas in the early afternoon to be able to get a night of rest on the road and still be able to make it in time to pick Rory up at the airport. Well, between all my cleaning and packing, I finally walked out the door at 12:50am. Practically no way I’d be able to make it to Vegas by 10PM on the same day. Oh well, I guess Rory can always grab an uber..
Backstory, two years prior I had rented a car to visit mi familia on the west coast and ended up being able to upgrade to a Nissan Altima for no extra cost, so I jumped at the chance. I noticed that the speedometer went up to 150. Wow, great sign. Once I got that thing out on the road, I quickly discovered that Nissan had copied the suspension from the old 240sx-my favorite car ever-and pasted it into the Altima, but added a monster of an engine. The cruise control was the only thing that saved my lead foot from racking up a whole bunch of tickets on that trip. So when my Camry went caput, I grabbed a 2019 Altima that had literally sat in the car lot for a whole year and still had 12 miles on it, so I got a great deal. Thing was pimped to the nines, leather interior, Dolby Surround, deep maroon color, just fucking gorgeous. I figured that since I needed to file Chapter 7 to get out of paying 30k in legal fees for a silly HOA lawsuit, I should buy a car that could last me around 10 years, since my credit will be shot for a full 10 years..
As I’m driving out of town, I start hitting the buttons for Cruise Control on my steering wheel. For some reason, it wasn’t coming on though. Finally, I pulled over to figure out what the problem was. Turned all my lights on and started hitting buttons. Still wasn’t working. Pull out the Owner's Manual and start thumbing through it. Get to the Cruise section. Match up the buttons with my steering wheel. Wait the thing that looks like a speedometer isn’t on on my steering wheel. I notice in the Owner’s Manual that it says "Cruise Control, if Equipped." I start swearing when I realize that my brand new Altima SL with the leather seats, Dolby Surround Sound, and sunroof doesn't frickin have cruise control. I'm thinking, the way I drive, no cruise control and no fuzzbuster? Wow I'm seriously fucked. Eventually, I got in and got back on I-10 west, shaking my damn head. (Through some miracle, I got no tickets on this trip, although I did hit 150 a couple of times..)
Anyway, I was way behind schedule-by like 12 hours lol-so I did what I needed to to make up time. I figured, who needs sleep, as I floored it. Whenever I got into an area that had no shoulder, just two lanes with cement barriers on either side, I flew like a bat out of hell, the only times on the trip when I hit 150. (Think about it.) I stayed in the left lane with my left blinker on so hopefully no 18 wheelers would pull out in front of me at 60 mph, killing me instantly. Luckily, I didn't die, which is always a pretty good omen for gambling in Vegas..
I made such good time in my sleek rocketship that by the time I got to Phoenix-the valley of the sun where I grew up-I would beat Rory's flight arrival time by about 5 hours. So I decided to stop and climb a mountain in Phoenix that used to be Squaw Peak but now was called Piscataway Peak or some crazy shit like that. It's a pretty easy mountain as mountains go, but I'm about 20 pounds over my fighting weight, so I was curious to see if it was going to be easy or hard. Failure was not an option; death would certainly have been preferred. Although many fitter peeps passed me up, I made it-I would describe the hike as medium difficulty-and did the obligatory selfie at the summit with the city of Phoenix in the background, with an orange pink sunset. Gorgeous.
Got back in the car and zipped along to Vegas. Even with the mountain climb stop, I made it to Vegas with an hour or so to spare before Rory's arrival time. Considered my options. Finally decided to gps "casino near me" and it took me to one of the Main Street Station affiliated casinos, Sunset Station. Being closer to the airport than the Strip, there was plenty of free parking available right next to the casino. After easily finding parking, I headed in to see what the action looked like. The betting limits were 3 to 1000 with max 10 times odds. (Those odds are much better than anything you would see on the strip, which are usually 3,4, and 5 times odds. Also, you would never see 3$ bets for Pass and Don’ts on the Strip.) They had 2 tables; one was filled with hot shooters and the other one had nothing but cold shooters. You can make money on either, you just can't make money on a choppy table (up and down), and in fact you will, more likely than not, lose money.
It turns out that in the Hoppin the Big Red progression, the count-defined as how many times a shooter rolls before rolling a 7-is a big deal. Like, a really big deal, on the order of life and death. So on the cold table, I started to do the counts. And in the hour I sat there, the highest the count ever got to was 9. This table would be perfect for a Hoppin the Big Red progression. The other table was way too dangerous to try it, even with a massive bankroll.
Suddenly, my phone vibrated. I looked at it and Rory had sent me a text. "Hey we're about to land. Should I grab an Uber to the Excalibur?"
I texted back, "Negative. I'm on my way." He replied, "What's your eta?" "15 minutes." He replied, "Copy that." Once a navy man, always a navy man..
So I got up to the airport waiting area and the security guard told me to circle back around. So second time, I just huddled near the front and told him to text me his location when he got to the pickup zone. That plan worked fine and dandy.
We set the gps to the Excalibur and headed out. We caught up on family news and chit-chatted on the way. I noticed that even though his stomach wasn't hell week ready, I could tell he was doing something to stay in shape. I found out later he's taken up lawn chair flying with eagles, with basically a big fan contraption on his back. On the ground, the thing weighs like 90 pounds, so that's why he looked like he'd been pumping iron, carrying this huge fan around until he got airborne. Anyway, we found the parking garage and headed in. I just brought a couple of necessities from the car, as I always tend to overpack on these trips.
Every time I went everywhere, I forgot my co-vid mask. It was fucking ridiculous. By the end of the trip, I had accumulated 20-something masks. Anyway, after returning to the car to get my mask, we got in line in the lobby, and because it was close to New Years-it was December 30th-it took a while to check in. The room was in his name but I was on the reservation too. Wow, big honcho! go me.. We had it for 2 nights and the plan was to move to the El Cortez after New Years. Usually, people staying downtown are too lowbrow for the Strip, but here we were, on the Strip, hoping to move downtown to the Fremont Street Experience..
The room we got was nothing special. Once we were settled in, it was time to talk business. Rory asked me what my bankroll was. I said a lousy thousand bucks. Then I asked him, "So you said you'd be bringing a 'significant' bankroll. How do you define significant?" I'm thinking 5 grand tops.
He smiled. "50gs." (So the backstory is Rory got a good-sized inheritance from his maternal grandfather, and unlike his siblings, who squandered everything, he invested it all in land and other good investments and had made 200k look like about 1 million.) I thought about his comment to leave the hoes home. That was 100% the right call. All you have to do is read some of my Fuck No reviews of some of my (formerly) favorite gals. I have no idea what I would've done if I had one of my fine ass ebonies with me. pure. fucking. disaster.
"50 gs?" I looked right at him. He nodded. "Did you have that shit in your carry-on?" We both busted out laughing. "Nope." "You going to pick it up here?", I asked as a legit question. "Nope." And he drops an oversize Chase bank bag on the bed and points at it. "50 gs." Holy crap. Now this is serious shit. I'm his uncle. This is my oldest brother's youngest son. I feel responsible for whatever happens to that 50gs.
So I said, "Let me see that shit." He throws out a large Chase bag stuffed to the brim. And he opens it up and starts throwing down these thick stacks of hundreds, bank-labeled and taped, by 5000s. Well it's not the craziest thing I've been personally involved in in the dice game, but it's certainly the second craziest, and crazier by about 24gs than the third craziest.
So I said, "Well I got my bear spray on me. And I got my peacemaker in the car under the seat. We don't go anywhere with that bag without bear spray. And we do no walking anywhere with that bag once anyone has seen your bankroll. "Agreed?" "Agreed."
"Ok so I told you I've been studying the hop bet. I think by hopping the 7s, we can get better odds on a Big Red progression, and have a much safer time of it than that crazy shit we did last year at the Cortez when the dude 7ed out just as we hit our bankroll limit. I brought my laptop so I can model it on Excel. I see you brought some dice. That's good. We can throw dice on the bed for some trial runs. So I know your bankroll. I just need to know the low and high table limits for the hop and the big red."
Rory replied, "You know I had more fun running that Big Red last year than any other time ever at the dice table?"
"Ya it was pretty crazy. When we got to the last bet, we were both like 'Geronimo!' and it fucking hit! And you know what else, every time I've ever chickened out on the last bet on a Big Red progression, every damn time, shooter 7ed out on the next roll. Anyway, you want to go scope out the tables and act like we're a couple of clowns-well hell we are a couple of clowns so that shouldn't be hard-and see if we can find out the low and high bets on the Hop and Big Red?"
And Rory said sure. So I said, "Why don't you park your cash in the safe and we can both bring 50 bucks in case it comes in handy in our 'couple of clowns' schtick."
He said that sounds good, and packed up his 50gs in the safe, and we headed down to the tables, each with about 50 bucks of fun money. We got down to the tables and found one that was kinda empty. The table limits were 25 to 10,000, with 3, 4, and 5× odds. (This means that for the two main bets, the Pass and the Don't Pass, you can bet flat anything from 25 to $10,000, and the odds bets, which pay true odds, you can bet 3× your flat bet on the 4 and 10, 4× on the 5 and 9, and 5× on the 6 and 8.)
So we amble up to the table like a couple of clowns, and I said, "So how does this game work?" And the pit boss starts explaining the Pass bet (the bulls of Wall Street) and the Don't Pass bet (the bears of Wall Street), and I turn to Rory and say, loudly, "Do you feel lucky, punk?" And Rory doesn't miss a beat: "Hell I was born lucky."
So I retorted, "Aight lets do the damn thing," and I whip out my 50 bucks and throw it on the table " and proclaim, "I wanna bet 50 on the gentleman in the green shirt." And the pit boss can barely stifle a giggle, cause that aint proper dice etiquette whatsodamnever. But the dealer gives me 2 greens, and I say, "Now where do I put these if I wanna bet on Mr. Greenshirt?" And he tells me the Pass Line. So that's what I do.
Well on his come out roll, Mr. Greenshirt rolled a 7, and the stickman barks out, "Winner front line! Pay the line, take the Don'ts." And the dealer puts 2 greens next to my green chips. And I loudly proclaim, "Did ya see that? 1 roll and I already doubled my money! Who da man?" And the dealers are all giggling at this buffoon, me.
So i say, "C'mon Rory. If you was born lucky, lets see if ya can top that." And Rory rolls his eyes and throws his 50 bucks on the table and says, "Ya lemme show ya how it's done," while the dealers are snickering under their breath at these couple of fools, especially me.
Well this clownshow goes on for a while until I point to the stuff in the middle of the table and say, " What are those bets?"
And the dealer explains those are 1 roll bets. Either you hit em and win or you lose your money. Then I said, "How bout that Any 7 bet? How does that work?" And the dealer explains that it's a 1 roll bet on the 7. If the shooter rolls a 7, you win. Otherwise you lose. So I said, "That seems kinda risky. What's the smallest bet you can make on that Any 7 bet?" And the dealer said, "1 dollar." And I turn to Rory and say, loudly, "Did ya hear that? A dolla. That's my kind of bet!" And then I said, "If some rich dude wanted to max out on that bet, how much could he bet?" And the dealer said that the table limit on the Any 7 was 1000 for 5000. (This is some casino fuckery that even had confused me previously. The Any 7, which I call the Big Red, is the single worst bet on the table, with a 16.7% house advantage. It pays 4 to 1, so if you bet a thousand, you win 4000. But casinos say 1 pays 5 because the 5th dollar you can have back. You always get your bet back when you win on other bets, so this is super misleading. I think casinos are trying to encourage fools to bet more on the Any 7. And being the fool that I am, I was happy to oblige.)
Then I said, "What are those bets above the Any 7?" And the dealer said, "Those are called Hop Bets. The way hop bets work is they are 1 roll bets. Pick the numbers you think will come up, bet 'em, and if it hits, it pays 15 to 1 on what are called easy way hops, and 30 to 1 on what are called the hardway hops."
And I said, "What's the littlest bet I can make on a hop and the biggest bet that some rich dude can make?"
And the dealer said, "1 dolla. And for the easy way hop, highest bet is 500, and for the hardway hops, highest bet is 250."
So now I had what I came for. Just clowning around, I had made my 50 look like 150, and Rory had done about the same. Eventually, the dice came around to me. And I said, "Rory, since you was babbling on about how you was born lucky, I'm going to see if you're right, or just blowing smoke up my ass. Hand 'em to the kid."
And the stickman pushes the dice to Rory. And I said, "Kid, show em how its dun." And I watch him. And before he shoots, he asks the stickman, "So let me get this straight. If I bet the Pass, I lose on a 7 with all that seven out business. If I bet the Don't Pass, and I seven out, I win?" And the stickman said, "That's right." So I interjected, "So if you lose, you win, and if you win, you lose. Sorta." And the dealer is trying not to giggle at this uneducated country bumpkin. And Rory turns to me and says, "What do you think about betting on the 7?" And I said, "You askin me? Wait, I thought it was you saying you was born lucky. Go with what feels lucky, kid. I have no frickin idea." And the dealers are snickering under their breath at this shitshow.
So Rory takes his whole chipstack of 150 and puts it on the Don't Pass. And I say, "Hode up dog. Gimme a second." And I say to the dealer, "Suppose I wanted you to give me some ones for a couple of these here green chips. How wood I go about doin that?" And the dealer said, "Put your 2 greens on the Come Bar, and say, Check Change ones or check change and the color of the chip you want."
So I motion Rory to hold up a minute, while the stickman pulls the dice back, and I put my 2 greens on the Come Bar, and asked for 50 whites, or ones in case that mighta been perceived as possibly a racially-charged type of request. And then I said, "Now i aint the sharpest tool in the shed, not by a long shot, but when he first starts shootin dem dice, he don wanna see a 7. Do i got that right?"
And the stickman says, "Yes sir. If he rolls a 7 on the Come Out roll, he will lose his bet. Same with the 11. But if he hits a 2 or 3 on the Come Out, he wins. And the 12 is a tie, cause the casino has to pay the light bill somehow."
So I put 100 on the Don't Pass. Then i said, "Hode up 1 more second dog." And the dealers are literally trying their damndest to stifle their giggles, and Rory looks at me like what the fuck now, you moronic retard. And I said, "Well seems to me he's going to roll a 2 or a 3, since that means he's going to duble up. And you said with the hop, i can bet numbers. Any dam numbers. So kin I bet 1 dolla that he rolls a 2, n 1 dolla that he rolls a 3, using that hop bet thingy you was talkin bout?" And the stickman said i could, so i put 2 dollars on the Come Bar and I pulled some ballin Captain Jean Luc Picard shit: "Make it so," in my best Mississippi twang.
So the Stickman pushed the dice back to Rory, and he said, "Any more questions?" (you fourth grade flunkie, he might as well added.) And I said, "No sir." So he rolled the dice, and it came up 9. And I said to the dealer, "So now we wants the 7 befores the 9, right?" And the dealer affirmed. And then I said, "I wanna bet a dolla on that Any 7 bet. And can i bet a dolla on dat hop 7 too?" And he said I could, but then he asked me, "You want the 61, the 52, or the 43?" And I said that if it was ok with him, I'd prefer to have all 3, like a kid in a candy store who just decides to buy one of each instead of having to make a tough decision. So he said sure, throw me 2 more dollars. So I did, and before Rory rolled again, I said, "Ok Mr. Lucky Man, i got a bet on the 7 there (pointing to my Don't Pass bet), and another over there (pointing to my Any 7 bet), and then for good measure, i gots me 3 more bets on the 7, no matter which way it cums, the 61, the 52, or the 43. so mr. the lucky, jis roll me a dam 7."
And Rory shook the dice up real good, and threw sorta crazy-the dice knocked over a couple of the dealer's chipstacks-and pretty much came careening back like a richocheting bullet, and the dice came up 5. And I said, "Were in da bezeezus u learn to shoot like dat? Dang dat shit was like da pinball wizard." And Rory looked at me-imbecile that I am-and just shook his head. So I interjected, "Naw good try, good try. Yu going to hit the 7 rite here, i feels it."
So I counted out 8 dollars, and put them in the Come Bar and said, "same bits, but i wanna duble everything." So the dealer put 2 dollars on the Any 7, and 2 dollars on the 61, 2 dollars on the 52, and 2 dollars on the 43. And I said, "Aight shoota. u got dis licked. lez see dat 7." And Rory shook up the dice all crazy like, and then he just delivered an incoming mortar bomb daisy cutter type throw, and the stickman called out a 4. Not a 7, but if we just add 3, then we'd be good to go.
The pit boss said, "I know this is probably your first time playing, but slow it down just a little, shooter." And I encouraged Rory. "Yu doin good mr. lucky. i bit u gots da 7 right hea." And i threw down 16 dollars and said, "Dis kid say he lucky, and I believes it. so i wanna duble ivery dang bit."
So the dealer put 4 dollars down on the Any 7, 4 dollars on the 61, 4 on the 52, and 4 on the 43. And Rory slowed it down a bit, and it came up 10.
So if I tried to double again, I didn't have enough chips left to double down. But I reached down into my wallet, and realized I had like 40 bucks-all in ones!-of tip money for the trip. So I throw all 40 ones down and tell the dealer I wanted to double all my bets and get the rest as change. This part is funny because they have to literally stop the game to count out every single dollar. This is bad juju if you're on the Pass, but great shit if you're on the don't. Eventually, as in practically forever, they convert my 40 ones into 32 in chips for my bets and give me 8 change.
So I say, "C'mon shuta, how bout Any Seven? i don care witch, any ol 7 wil due nice." And before Rory got ready to shoot, i said, "Hode up a sec dog." Rory looks at me like I'm a clinical case by now and should probably be institutionalized. I got the attention of the stickman and I said, "Can i bet a dolla on the 7 fer ya'll?"
And they said I could, although technically I could only do a dealer bet at that point on the Any 7 or one of the hop bets, but of course I didn't admit I knew that.
So I said, "How do I do it then?" And the dealer across from me said to put my bet next to my Don't Pass bet. So I put a dollar next to my Don't Pass bet. Then I said, "Boyz, what are we rootin fer?" And they all kind of threw up their hands and said, "Seven." And I said, "U betcha. So now mr. the lucky, show us yu was realy bourne lucky."
And Rory kind of took a moment or two before shooting. And when he shot, I knew it was nothing but net, or maybe a backboard-shatterer would be a better analogy? The dice hit the side wall by the down-the-table opposite side dealer, bounced off the back wall, richoted to the stickman's wall, bounced back across the table, only to knock over the near side dealer's chipstack, and then did a funny bounce on the bet of a player on our side of the table, knocking over his chips as well. See, the 7 is all about mayhem, which happens to be one of my specialties..
The pit boss barked out, "Call it!"
The stickman was barely a syllable behind him. "Seven out. Line away. Take the line, pay the don'ts." Sixty frickin one. Our fuck you, get-the-lay-of-the land fun money actually had raised my pulse just a bit. I knew right then it was going to be a good trip, cause there are gods who rule over dice, and if they like you, you got the hookup. And if they don't like you, well then you're completely fucked, and should just run away as fast as you can and get as far away as possible from any casino. I would highly recommend Antartica, as there are definitely no casinos nearby, last time I was there, at least. I hear Siberia is also a pretty righteous destination when you realize the gods of dice have it in for you..
First they paid out the line bets. Rory got 150 for his Don't Pass bet, I got 100, and the dealers got a buck from my dealer tip bet. Then they moved to the more "mathy" bets in the middle. The dealers asked me if I'd like to keep up my winning Big Red and winning hop bet-the 61-and i said, "Boy that's a hard call, but gosh maybe I'm good for right now;" you know when someone is trying to sell you something that you want about as much as a hole in the head, but you don't want to hurt their feelings? Ya it was sorta like that.
Then they got to the center bets. The stickman called it out. "Ok Any 7 we got 40 and down. 61 hopping pays 15 to 1, thats 120 plus 8 coming down. Hopping 61 we got 128, any 7 we got 40, so pay this man 168. The dealer counted it out and pushed a big stack of chips toward me. Kind of loudly I said, "Rory you almost good?" And Rory said he was. I had a really messy chipstack in front of me; Rory's wasn't as messy but was still pretty sizable with a black (100) and a nice set of greens (25s).
I said, "Hey is there any way ya'll could sorta put these chips all together before i go cash out so this shit don't be fallin outta my pockets?" And they said they could. They said it's called coloring up, and all I had to do was put my chips in the middle, tell the dealer I'm coloring up, and they'd count em up and give me a smaller stack of chips I could take to the cage without everything all falling out of my pockets and then some vultures swooping in. They counted up like 379. Not bad for a 50 dollar buy-in and the 32 bucks rescue I stole from my tip money. Rory got an even 300 for his 50 dollar buy in. I threw a couple bucks to the dealers and said, "Bin real nice doin bidnez whicha." I knew this was going to be a fun trip, so long as we didn't commit any of the 7 Deadly Sins. (Yes, those 7 Deadly Sins. Turns out, between the 2 of us, we committed 1 and a half Deadly Sins, a full one for wrath (Rory) and a half a one for me (lust). It only counted as a half because it didn't happen during table play.) In the cashout at the cage, I asked for and got 40 ones to replace my tip money and the rest in large bills to be added to my bankroll. Never short your hardworking peeps, cause karma's inexorable, and an inexorable bitch at that. She will come for you when you least expect it, so treat your fellow peeps as you would like to be treated.
Part II: Prelude to Showtime
So we went upstairs, and chatted about how our intel mission was actually pretty damn fun. So I said that I had gotten the numbers I needed to build a model that I could run in Excel: the low and high bets on the hop and the Big Red, and Rory’s bankroll of 50 k. So I pull out my super old Compaq computer which I like more the new Microsoft Acer I had just purchased, where you can’t even own a CD to install MS Excel but have to get like a bullshit subscription or some shit. Wtf? I asked Rory how high of a count-the number of rolls before a 7 appears-he was willing to accept before his entire 50k bankroll would go bust. He said, “Lets start with 22.” This is a pretty conservative number. The chance of this happening based on just math alone is (5/6)^22, or 1.8%. Both Rory and I have had rolls in our dice career where we passed 22 rolls, both in real casinos and on my Vegas-grade home dice table which I bought after my first hit in Vegas, when I arrived with 10gs and I left with 18. I omitted that year from the thread, and the years immediately after-which included the Greatest Dice Adventure of All Time-cause I got tired of losers who can’t ferret out fact from fiction. I get Russ the early doubter-that shit was funny-but after enough evidence stacks up, if you can’t separate fact from fiction, you're just dumb. And annoying. (Total aside, but did ya’ll know there is a hobbyist on this board who is worth close to a billion dollars? I’m an expert at seeing shit and gleaning stuff that other people miss. And when he started writing some of his adventures on both Boards, he got tired of trolls and haters on this site so just stop posting here, but I think he still posts on the other site. I’m not going to ever disclose even his handle, cause that’s some private shit right there. He can disclose what he’s worth if he wants under his handle-although he won’t-but I aint saying shit, other than saying he is a legit multimillionaire or possibly even a billionaire imo and comes across just like a regular hobbyist, even to the point of asking about donations lol.) But Rory is a super skilled shooter, and I’m not as good a shooter as he is, but when I get in the zone, which happens occasionally, I am a super dangerous shooter too. I have had at least 4 Jesus rolls in real casinos where I blew way past 22 rolls without a 7. Those will get their own Chapters or sections in the story eventually, asynchronously. The idea behind the Hoppin Big Red progression is you never do it on a hot shooter, or even a shooter who looks like he could get hot. This is a shitty shooter or super shitty table progression only, and only with a monster bankroll that you are actually willing to risk, which means that you should be pretty rich.
As I start crunching the numbers, I told Rory to grab his dice and start shooting at the bed and start doing some counts. As I’m building the model, I’m tabulating the profits occurring when the shooter 7s out on the n-th roll, and how much bankroll has been exposed up until that time. So I’m already getting data outputs as he starts doing the counts. “Ok I sevened out on the 5th roll. How much did I make?” And I look it up, and I’m like, “40 bucks.” And he’d write it down. And I kept having to tweak the model a bit because say I busted at the 21st roll instead of the 22nd roll. But it was working and we sat there for a good 3 hours doing this, and the closest he got to busting his bankroll was like the 16th roll, and that only happened like once in the whole 3 hours. We tallied up his profits at the end of 3 hours of continuous shooting, and it was like 24 grand.
Basically, the progression is pretty simple. There are 3 ways (that I know of so far lol) to instantaneously bet on the 7: the Big Red, the Hop, and the Lays Behind. The Big Red has a 16.7% house advantage and is in fact the worst bet on the table. The hop has an 11.1% house advantage, which is not much better. And the lay behind has a 5% house advantage, the same as a field bet, which I affectionately call “a slow bleed,” because that’s what it does to your bankroll. So how do you take these 3 bad bets and somehow expect to turn a profit? Well that’s a pretty good question. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?
Some other numbers to pay attention to, though, are the payout ratios. The Big Red pays 4 to 1 (bet a dollar to win 4), the Hop pays 15 to 1 (bet a dollar to win 15), and the lays behind pay badly: on the 6 and 8, you have to bet 6 to win 5; on the 5 and 9, you have to bet 3 to win 2; and on the 4 and 10, you have to bet 2 to win 1, on top of the 5% vig you have to pay upfront just for the privilege of making those poorly-paying bets. Another thing to consider is that the Big Red and the Hop are both 1 roll bets; the lays behind stay up until a 7 hits-you win-or the number that that bet is against comes up-you lose.
Then when you look at those numbers, clearly the Hop is way way better than the other 2, right? Remember the old saying, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is? Well that’s the case here too. There is no free lunch. The Hop is a better bet than the Big Red, but not by much. To bet on the 7 using the Hop, you actually have to make 3 bets: 1 for the 61, 1 for the 52, and 1 for the 43. If a 7 comes up, only one of those 3 bets will win; the other two will lose. So now we find out that actually you have to bet 3 dollars to win that 15 bucks when the 7 comes up. So 3 pays 15, which we could say is the same as 1 pays 5. So now we find out that for our purposes, the Hop pays 5 to 1. Better than the Big Red’s 4 to 1, but not as good as it looked at first blush.
Some other stuff to consider is that if you are betting on a shitty shooter, there is a better chance that they will seven out when the count is low than when the count is high. So you want to capture those shitty-shooter profits earlier rather than later in the progression. So remember that classic Martingale story from an earlier chapter when the roulette player keeps doubling his bet until nearly have a heart attack only to win the table minimum of 5 bucks after his bet finally hits? Well in dice, with the 4 to 1 payout on the Big Red and the 5 to 1 payout on the Hop, if you keep doubling your bet until the 7 hits, I can guarantee you that if and when the 7 hits, you will have handsome profits relative to the money you’ve risked up until that point. I’m not going to break out an Excel file here cause that’s boring af, but lets say you do pretty much doubling and the shooter hits a 7 on his 4th roll. Here’s what it might look like:
Bet a dollar on Big Red. Lose.
Bet 2 dollars on Big Red. Lose.
Bet 3 dollars on the Hop. Lose (you notice I didn’t double here. Hops for the 7 have to be in multiples of 3)
Bet 6 dollars on the Hop. (2$ on each number.) shooter rolls 43. Win.
Here’s what just happened: your 2$ bet on the 43 pays 30 bucks. You’ve lost 10 total. (1+2+3+4). So your profit is 20 bucks. And that whole sequence was 0 stress and took about 3 minutes. Who doesn’t like a stress-free job where you make 20 bucks in about 3 minutes?
But as the count gets higher, while potential profits keep going up and up, so does the danger to your bankroll, as in any kind of Martingale progression, like I found out in my roulette trainwreck at the Cortez where I dropped like 7 grand on a single Martingale sequence. There are 2 different types of limits to worry: high betting limits on the table, and your bankroll limits. Both matter quite a bit. You want casinos that let you bet really small amounts, and really big amounts, so that you don’t have to worry about the first constraint. In fact, we picked casinos to run our Hoppin Big Red progression that offered the widest possible range, and one that tied for the highest was the Cosmopolitan on the Strip: Big Red, 1-3750; Hop 1-1000; Lays behind: so high that we didn’t worry about it. Our bankroll would run out before we’d hit the table limits.
So when you run the progression, first you want to max out your hop bets; then while keeping your max hop bets, you max out your Big Red bets; then while keeping your Hop and Big Red maxed out, you start doing lays behind, first using the 6 and 8 til they are maxed out, then the 5 and 9, and then the 4 and 10, in the order of the damage that each bet does to your bankroll to make the bet and then to lose it.
I’ll mention one more thing at this point. You might have wondered why I bothered to go through my big clown ruse at the Excalibur to find out what the exact table limits were for the Big Red and the Hops were instead of just asking straight up. Two words: casino fuckery. Is it possible that I might have gotten different answers if we had asked that same question after Rory dropped his 50gs on the table? You would be surprised at some possible answers to that simple question. We were rolling audio tape through the whole clown show until I got them to tell me what the table limits were. Then I took a bathroom break and turned the tape off. Paranoid? Nope we saw casino fuckery right and left.
For our trip, we had 1 roll that got “exciting.” I’ll leave that for the narrative. In that same roll, we encountered casino fuckery that prevented us from using the middle part of the progression, the Big Reds. It all happened in real time, and neither of us could have easily controlled the clock or practically asked for rulings from top brass, which we would have done if we had control of the dice. Think about the setup here. You have a hospitality law professor from the #2 hospitality program in the country getting fucked by a casino in real time with thousands of dollars at stake, with 15 different eyes in the sky recording everything on the table. Umm ya, once they know the score, they’re going to have the fucking hotel GM at that table having a very animated discussion with a very pissed off hotel and casino law professor in real time. None of that was even practical without being able to control the dice and therefore the pace. I didn’t pull rank or flash my credentials, all I did was mentally call an audible on what was going to be the plan if things went south on the next few rolls. I’ll also leave that to the narrative, as that whole sequence was the high point (or maybe low point?) of the whole trip, and where Rory made (or lost?) the most money.
Part III: The MGM and the Coattail Effect
Next day, Rory asked me if I wanted to check out the MGM. I said sure, so Rory got his bag of greenbacks and I got my 1200ish bankroll and we headed over there. Got to a table where there were a couple open spots adjacent. Table was 25 to 10k, with 3, 4, and 5x odds. When they saw Rory start dropping bundles of 5000s, not to our surprise, they asked us to take it to the cage. I asked em to save our spots. The clerk did the count with some cool ass money counters that took nowhere near as long as I expected. We got the chips and headed back to the table. What happened next, in retrospect, was a big factor in why I came to Vegas with 1g and left with 3.4gs. Rory asked the pit boss if she would raise the table limits from 10k to 25k. The pit boss said he’d need to confer with another pit boss. Eventually, Rory ended up in a powwow with the second pit boss while the first was running the table, and they must have chatted for at least 20 minutes. I got a kick out of the whole thing because here we were at the MGM Grand telling their pit bosses that they have some sorry ass table limits, just ridiculously way too low..
Meanwhile, I got my chips and a player’s card and starting watching the shooters. I noticed that there were some seriously shitty shooters down at the other end of the table. So I started to do a couple of test don’ts-mainly table minimum Don’t Come (DC) bets (Don’t Come works the same as the Don’t Pass, but you can start anytime) while I was I was keeping track of the counts. My DCs were hitting (shooters hitting a 7 before they hit the number that became my personal “point”) and the counts were staying low, like 4, 6, etc. I knew that running a Hoppin Big Red progression on my tiny bankroll would be suicide-I would bust after the 11th roll-unless my read of the table was spot on and I could see that the gods of dice had clearly joined my team. And there were a couple of big egos down at the end of the table with big bankrolls who couldn’t shoot for shit, which meant they were going to be there awhile. And then there was the “whale” on my right who let the casino know that their betting limits were just very sorry indeed. I think he mentioned that in addition to his 50k cash buy-in, which is a lot even on the Strip for a cash buy in, as opposed to a line of credit, he had a couple hundy thous in reserve that he was just itching to play with for the right numbers..
I bring quite a bit of mayhem to the tables no matter what, cause I’m kind of a loose cannon-a preternatural fearlessness, a love of pressure, and a certain ingenuity-but with my Navy Frogman, seriously crazy as fuck, and equally mayhemmy but better-shooting, high-rolling nephew right next to me, with the dealers maybe on our side, we were a force to be reckoned with. So I said, let’s see what happens. I drop 3 greens down and ask for check change whites. The dealer looked at me funny, so I said that white it is my lucky color. And she gives me 75 whites. It was time for a test run. So when one of the large egoed, poorly shooting, cash from wallet pulling alpha males at the far end of the table got the dice, I bet a 100$ don’t with a 60 no 6 and a 60 no 8 as a hedge against the 7. After he got his point, I took my hedges down and put a stack of 25 ones on the DC. And the dealer looked at me funny, and I reminded her that white is my lucky color, so she looks over at the pit boss, like, what should I do. This is the same pit boss who had to confer with another pit boss about raising the table limits. And the pit boss whispered something to the dealer which I didn’t catch, but I’m really good at lip reading, and what I thought I read on her lips was, “He’s with the whale. Jack said keep ‘em happy.” So then the dealer just smiled at me and let my foot-long chip stack stay as it was. (I say foot long is better than six-inch.) I put a 1 dollar chip next to my stack and said, “For the dealer,” and smiled right back.
Ok so what just happened there? Recall that the 7 is about chaos, about negative energy, fuckery, karmic payback for all the bad things you’ve ever done, etc. So if I’m shooting for the Pass line and some clown puts a tall stack of chips as an odds bets at the other end of the table, say 10 reds instead of 2 greens, if he’s betting the Do’s, I will literally go down to the end of the table with 2 greens in my hand and ask if he can use those instead of the 10 reds. If he says no, I pull my odds off and pass the dice. Next time I’m going Don’t and I’m going to aim for and sink his stack of reds (with a 7) if it’s the last thing I do. Because I know that if I have a perfect set and a perfect throw and one of the dice hits a chipstack, I’m going to 7 out as sure as you’re alive. So if you’re on the Don’t and want to win and the shooter is on the far side of the table, it is well if you create an obstacle course of tall mountains and valleys for the shooter to have to navigate through when he is trying to avoid the 7. Memo to the shooter: good luck sir.
So what the dealer had in mind was to replace my crazy stack of whites with 1 green. And had Rory the whale not been there with his 50gs, that’s exactly what she would have done. Once I got the green light, my table play on other shooters looked like something out of The Matrix. Every single roll, I had a stack of 25 whites on the DC all the way until the shooter 7ed out-every one of that stack of whites paid 25 on the 7 (except for the last 25 bet that got stranded on the DC)-which he did, again and again. It got so ridiculous that I made an unspeakably crazy move, which was from my same bankroll, I started Hoppin Big Red progressions, and as my bankroll increased, so did the number of rolls that I could survive before I went bust. And if the count started getting kind of high, I started elevating the level of mayhem, by barking out, “1 dolla Any Seven for the dealer” and “1 dollar, the Big Red Any Seven for the.. shooter!” If everything else had failed and he was still rolling, that was as good as Gandalf being at the table and commanding-with his staff raised and shooting lightning bolts in all directions-“Shooter, you will now roll a 7!” So the shooter would lose like 300 bucks, but at least he’d get 4 dollars back.. Oh and if you ever see a player go take out a marker, make a trip to the atm, or open up his wallet to dig out more money, whatever he’s betting, do the opposite.
And when it got to Rory’s roll, I just confirmed we were doing Don’ts, and rode with him. But weird thing, I would never run a Big Red Hoppin progression on either Rory or me-excepting to goof off like the clownshow at the Excalibur-because I have literally rolled for 30 minutes before hitting the 7, and so if I’m going to do some master class showoff demo on a Don’t Bet, it will be odds behind my flat bet, even though I rarely do that. My sets are number specific, so if I need a no nine for example, I’ll use an ace three, three ace set (top of dice and back of dice numbers.) That set is favored for the 7 but especially unfavored for the 9. So if it takes me a half an hour of rolling before I get my 7, so be it.
So I was just killing it and Rory was doing pretty good too. And then Rory committed the only deadly sin (of the 7) at the tables for either of us the whole trip. He put a 300 dollar don’t on some new chick at the other end of the table, and she sunk his bet. He didn’t say anything but I could tell he was pissed. Not smart, because we hadn’t seen her shoot yet, but certainly not a Deadly Sin so far. Rory was the next shooter. He put a 600 bet on the Don’t and didn’t hedge it. (Actually he doesn’t need to because he’s a great no-7 shooter. I’m a terrible no-7 shooter on the come out for some reason, so I always hedge myself.) Usually with a big bet like that, either of us would take our time, get the perfect set-I like aces over deuces-hoping to catch the come out craps wins on the 2 or 3-and try to do an egg toss or some other precision throw to get aces or ace deuce, which pay even money on the don’t. He didn’t do any of that. He just picked em up and threw ‘em. The stickman barked out, “7 Winner Winner, Front Line Winner! Pay the line, take the Don’ts!” I turned to Rory and said, “We’re coloring up.” I told the pit boss, “Shooter passes. Color coming in.” I had stacks and stacks of chips, especially a million whites. I colored up at around 2800. Rory colored up at around 53,000. But he had committed the Deadly Sin of Wrath, and unfortunately, we had to halt operations for that session. I had accomplished my goal for the trip from that single session, and took kind of a comical betting strategy after that. I compare it to the bowman Ajax the Lesser hiding under the great shield of Ajax the Greater, while still making plenty of kills with his marksmanship. Later, Rory thanked me for calling for a coloring up. That’s how skilled players can go broke quickly, and I wasn’t going to let that happen to my nephew.
Part IV. The Cortez: From ATF to the DNS List
So it was New Years Eve by this time-Vegas is a weird place cause you lose all sense of time. It is hard to remember what day it is, what date is it, and even whether it’s day or night. But yes it was New Year’s Eve, and we had reservations for the Excalibur for the 31st and the Cortez on the 1st, because that was literally my favorite hotel in Vegas, even though Downtown Las Vegas is considered a much less desirable place to stay than the Strip. Don’t get me wrong, if I had Comp offers for the Bellagio and the Cortez, I’d pick the Bellagio. But if I had 10 grand to play with and I had to guess which hotel would treat me like a king and which would treat me like a working stiff, of course the Cortez would win in that scenario. So I asked Rory if he’d like to go check out the Cortez and see if they had any rooms for New Years Eve, so we could get comfortable there without having to move again. He said sure. He said he’d been in touch with a casino host-those are the folks who arrange the comps for VIPs-and thought it might be worth a shot. So we drive over there and as were walking to the front desk, I said hold up a minute and we took a couple seats in front of some slots. I said we’re going to go stand in line to see if there are any rooms? And you’ve been in touch with a casino host and he knows you’re coming to the Cortez with 50gs?
And Rory said, “Yup.”
So I said, “That’s nuts. Fuck the front desk. They're gonna say all rooms are booked. Let’s go find your casino host.”
And Rory thought that sounded like a good idea.
Now there’s some backstory here. First time I stayed at the Cortez, I came with about 3,500 with my gf at the time, South African cutie Victoria, and got treated like a king. The second time I came to the Cortez, with my younger brother Yoey-Navy Jayhawk Aircraft Commander and US Naval Academy grad-I came with 10 grand, and they treated me like an emperor. (I won 8gs, but my little bro just won a whole lot of pussy, including some civilian doubles with a couple of hotties..) So the whole idea of bringing 50gs to the Cortez just pretty much blew my mind. I literally could not wrap my head around it, but as I thought about it, I was like, yup we definitely need to go see Rory’s casino host. So we went straight to the dice tables and asked the first pit boss we found if he could hook us up with Rory’s casino host. He made a call, and this gent showed up at the table not two minutes later. We bumped fists-ya the whole covid thing-and he asked us to follow him to his office.
And the host kind of did that “Oh you’re that guy,” meaning the crazy dude who said he’d be bringing 50gs for a trip around New Years. And Rory was like, “Yup that’s me.” And the host said, “Is that what you brought?”, kind of incredulous. Rory opened up his Chase bag, and the host’s eyes kinda bugged out a bit, I thought. And Rory said, “We’re booked for the 1st to the 3rd, but we wanted to see if you might be able to get something for us tonight.”
So there’s this funny thing in the casino industry. And it’s about rooms. And before I point out what it is, I have this theory about something analogous, and that is, if a gal is asked whether she’s single or taken, the answer she gives can vary quite a bit, depending on who’s asking. For one gent, she might say definitely taken. For a second gent, she might say, well it’s complicated. And for a third gent, who’s got a roly blade on that is worth as much as the GDP of a small country, she’ll say, “Omg, you have no idea how single I am,” even though she hurriedly had tucked away her wedding band just moments before.
Well I’m convinced that the casino industry takes a similar approach. Whether there are rooms available, and the quality of the available rooms, depends on who’s asking. In this case, I’m quite sure that the official story was that everything was booked. But when Rory with his 50 gs asked the same question, the answer was, “Well yes it looks like we just got an availability, and it’s in the tower, and it just so happens to be on the top floor. Would that work ok for you? And by the way, I do apologize that our Suite isn’t available at just this moment, but if it becomes available during your stay, we’d be more than happy to give you a comped upgrade, if that’s ok with you.”
And Rory said, wryly, “Yes that would be fine.”
And the host said, “Ok let me take care of some paperwork. The General Manager isn’t here at the moment, otherwise I’d have you meet him, but our Marketing VP is in his office. Would you like to meet him?”
And Rory didn’t miss a beat. “Oh wow, I was just going to ask if the GM or Marketing VP would be available for a quick hello.”
“Absolutely. Matter of fact, while I finish up the paperwork on your room, let me escort you to his office.”
Now quick backstory. I’ve stayed at the Cortez every year I’ve been to Vegas, a total of at least 7 trips and probably more, and I haven’t met any of these people. I’ve arranged all my comps through the dice pit bosses, and never even had a suggestion or inkling that I should check in with the casino host, or anyone above him, never mind the casino General Manager or Marketing VP.
So the host takes us through a security door and all the way to the back office. (Bigshots always have the backmost office or a corner office, I’ve noticed.) We meet the Marketing VP, and he rolls out the red carpet.
“I’m so glad you’ve decided to stay with us. How long would you like to have your room for? We can comp you for up to 7 days as a matter of course, but if you need extra time, just let us know and it shouldn’t be a problem.”
And Rory replied, “Wow great offer! But unfortunately, I fly back to Washington on the 4th. Next time I’d certainly be happy to stay longer.”
“Great! I hope the top floor-the penthouse-is to your liking?”
Rory didn’t miss a beat. “Ya I do Paramotor flying to around 10,000 feet, so no fear of heights here.”
And this conversation went on for a while, and probably an hour later, we were checking in to a damn nice room on the top floor of the Cortez tower on New Years Eve, when everyone knows there were no rooms available. And pretty much from there, well what can I say. They were scared of Rory and his monster bankroll. Because no one with that kind of bankroll ever stays at the Cortez. Why would they?
We had run a Big Red progression at the Cortez a year earlier, so I knew what their betting limits were: 1 to 1000. I hadn’t ever thought about the hop bet as something that I could integrate with the Big Red until a couple of months ago, so I had no idea what their hop limits were, but I bet if some clown wanted to bet a 1000 hop bet, the pit boss would say, “Sure go right ahead.”
But they already know me-I had a room comp from the 1st to the 3rd that I never used-because one year I dropped 3500, another I won 8k., another I won 4k, etc. They knew not as much about Rory, but they had seen him in action more than a couple years, and knew that he-like me-is a real dice player, and potentially dangerous. And coming in with a 50k bankroll I guess was just a bridge too far.
First time we went down to the tables to get the betting limits, it was 1-1000 on the big red, and 1-250 on the hop, as quoted by a certain pit boss by the name of Warren. So I wrote an entire model-obviously not from scratch-but I built an entire betting model based on those limits. It’s not as good as the Strip, but it’s respectable and doable.
Once we were ready to play, the same pit boss, Warren, said he “misremembered” the betting limits the other day, and that actually on the hop it was 100 max, and on the big red it was 250 max. I asked Warren how many years he’d been working the dice tables, and he said 15 years. I just shook my head. I asked Rory if he still wanted to play, or if we should just go somewhere else. He said let’s play. So I just improvised a progression right there at the table, but to make sure it worked, I actually needed to lay out like 20 bets. So I used something called a community bankroll, which I’ll explain in a minute, to try lay out the 20 bets. To make a lot of the bets, I needed change, so I was hitting Warren up for check-change every couple of minutes. He sort of glared at me, and I said look I’m just getting ready to play. You will see plenty of action. When I asked him for check change to set up my 20th bet, he literally threw my black chip back, like kinda go fuck yourself. And I said, “Warren, I asked for check change for a hundred. Is there a problem with that?”
And he said, basically, wtf are you even doing, keep bugging me for change, and you’re not even playing.
And I came back at him, “Well Warren you say you’ve been in the dice business for 15 years, but you can’t seem to get your story straight on what the table limits are for the bets in the middle. Every time I ask you, I get a different answer. What’s that about? Maybe if I could get a straight answer from you, I wouldn’t be needing to keep bugging you about having to get check change all the damn time.”
And that really set him off. He stood up, glared at me, and said, “That’s it. Your done for tonight.”
I thought the whole thing was funny. I looked at my 19 bets I’d laid out plus the multiple thousands in my rails, so I said fine, color me up Warren. I knew it was going to take at least 20 minutes, maybe more, for him to color me up, with the absolute mess I had in my rails, and I thought that was funny af, and so I said, “Here ya go, biatch..” Naw I didn’t really say biatch. But I thunk it. And I start handing over probably the messiest chip stack he’d ever seen in his 15 years in the dice game, and I’m trying not to laugh, it was just that funny. And I said, “Warren, whenever you finish, give em to Rory.”
And I left the table. I went to go talk to literally my favorite pit boss ever in all of Vegas, who was at another station doing whatever pit bosses do. I wish I could remember this gent’s name. He seems like a Jonathan to me, so I’m going to call him Jonathan. Well here it is, as of now, 2021, and back in the late aughts, when I was at the Cortez with my S. African girlfriend Victoria at the time and I got my first trial by fire in shooting dice at the Cortez, Jonathan was the pit boss running that table, and he was the one who dq-ed me from shooting when I had my very first Jesus roll. And I didn’t hold it against him. In retrospect, most pit bosses would’ve dq-ed me quite a bit earlier. But Jonathan had that old school, down-home, service-oriented vibe that made me come back to the Cortez year after year. I’d be chatting with him about whatever, and he’d say, “By the way, px, we’re having a New Years shindig in the ballroom, food, drinks, live band, party favors. You want me to comp you a couple tickets?” And I’d say, “Wow, Jonathan, that sounds great. Me and I my girl would love that.”
So I ambled my way over to Jonathan, and I said, “Jonathan, you know you are literally my fave pit boss in all of Vegas. And you remember that one time you dq-ed me for rolling short back in the day when I got on a hot roll, what was that about?” And then I bust out laughing, and he did too.
So anyway, I said, “You know why I keep coming back to the Cortez almost every year? Because of people like you.” And then I recounted the incident with Warren. And I said, “The way Warren treated me, I didn’t feel like I was even at the Cortez. Besides the first night we were here and got the red carpet rolled out for us, it seems like I must be at the wrong hotel. And this incident with Warren was just the latest example of what I’m seeing.”
And he came back with some weird stuff about me and my nephew having this monster bankroll but not really playing, to which I responded, “Well if Warren could keep his table limits straight, we would have already been playing a whole lot more. Fifteen years in the game and he doesn’t know what his own table limits are?”
And he covered for Warren, talking about how he had to pull some double shifts and so on, and then he kind of implied that the game had changed, and he was happy to be retiring next year. And some wheels started to turn in my head, and all of a sudden, I understood everything. And I lost interest in the conversation. And I said, “Congratulations. This might be a good time to do that.” And he nodded.
Then he said, “Look px I know you are here to play. Get some sleep, come back in the morning, and get a fresh start. You are one of favorite guests. Win, lose, or draw, you always bring some excitement to our casino. You are welcome here anytime.”
And I said, “Thanks Jonathan.” And gave him a fist bump. And that was that. By the time I got back to the tables, Warren had finished the count and Rory was packing up. We went upstairs, and Rory fired off an angry email to his casino host and cced it to the Marketing VP, about how his uncle had received sub-par treatment at the dice tables.
And it wasn’t until the next morning that he got the reply. He’d been 86-ed from the Cortez. After we checked out-we made sure everything was comped first-I said, “Rory you want to hit the dice tables here one last time and put on a clinic and put a nice dent in their chipstack?”
He said, “You don’t think they’ll cross reference?”
And I said, “Naw. Their left hand has no clue what their right hand is doing. Plus, I’m a lawyer. If they make any mistakes, I’ll make ‘em pay in a different venue.”
I said, “Lets go take a peek at the tables. If that fucker Warren is there, no. fucking. way.”
And he was. And we left. Last time I’m ever staying at the Cortez. I gave them a 1 star rating on every single review site I could find.
Then I said, “Ok, now we got comps at the MGM and the Excalibur. Should we go get a free room, or look for an…upgrade?”
Rory was like, “Oh, let’s definitely upgrade.”
And it was settled. Well to get an upgrade, first ya gotta play some dice..
Part V. All For One and One For All. “We Stay Together, We Survive.” Maximus, from Gladiator
Before I continue the narrative, I have to back up for a quick detour. I referenced in Part IV something called a community bankroll, but never got around to explaining what it was. And it’s important to understand the rest of the story, so I need to explain what it is.
And before I do that, I have to give some backstory. It turns out that pretty much any trip I’ve ever taken to a casino, at some point I was up, sometimes by 5%, sometimes by 10%, sometimes by 50% and of course I’ve had some trips where I tripled up or better (200%+). My style is aggressive, and I can have wild swings in my bankroll. And for all those trips where I was up at some point as some decent percentage of my bankroll, sometimes I still came home having busted. That’s what happens when you are as aggressive bettor as I am. Sometimes you win, and win big, and sometimes you lose, and your bankroll is bust.
And it turns out that the reason why you go back to the tables after you have crushed it with a big win to gamble, not only your profit, but even your original bankroll is important. One possible reason is you are addicted and can’t help yourself. That’s not me and never has been, but for someone who has an addiction, they have no business being there in the first place and they need to get help before their life falls apart, and it will. I’ve taken gals (this has happened only with providers, not gfs) who had family members who were gambling addicts, and when we finally got back to h-town after the trip, they were just in shock. And I’d be like, “What are you so shocked about?” And they would answer, “I’m just amazed at how you did that.” And what they were talking about was I didn’t pawn a bunch of shit to go gamble. I didn’t make multiple runs to the atm. I didn’t hit people up for gambling money. I set a budget of fun money, and if I lost it, that was that. In short, I had rules and discipline. I went there with a better than 50% chance of leaving with the casino’s money, and I always made the casino pay for just about everything. And I always had fun, and my gals-this applies to providers-always got a piece of the action, and they usually ended up with a nice pile of cash at the end of the trip, not the kind of cash a random hobbyist will be forced to shell out for an extended travel engagement with a hot provider, but like real money to buy their daughter a new wardrobe or prepay a couple of months’ rent.
But if the reason why you went back to the tables with both your bankroll and your profit is that you think the casino can’t beat you, because you are too smart, too skilled, too lucky, or what have you? Now you have committed one of the 7 Deadly Sins-interesting that there are exactly 7 of them, don’t you think-and a reckoning may be in store for you. Which Deadly Sin did you just commit? Try answering that question; I won’t just yet but I will circle back to that theme in a later (asynchronous) chapter.
But say your reason for going back to the tables willing to risk both your profits and your bankroll is you think it’s fun, it’s money you don’t need or care if you lose, and you are happy to help out the economy in Vegas, Lake Charles, San Juan Costa Rica, or even Macao. Then I say, go for it. Maybe the casino can hire some more workers or avoid pending layoffs.
So it turns out that for this particular trip, coming home with 3k is a bfd for me, because I need to reopen my Chapter 7 case to get a lien removed from my condo, and I’d prefer to have the top bankruptcy lawyer in h-town handle this instead of some clown who thinks he knows bankruptcy law. Me lol. So when I turned the corner at about 2900, coming home with something around that was kinda important. One option was I could just go drop it off at the atm, let Rory handle the comps for the rest of the trip, which would be basically automatic, and just watch him play for the rest of the trip. This wouldn’t be a half bad idea at all. That would be a pretty disciplined move.
But then I thought about another idea, and I proposed it to Rory “So Rory, what would you think about doing a community bankroll?”
And he said, “How would that work?”
And I said, “What if we did this. Each one of us could decide how much to throw in to the community pot. Say you threw in 47000, or 52,000 or whatever, and I throw in 3000. Actually lets use 47000 and 3000 as an example to keep the numbers simple. 47,000/50,000 works out to a 94% stake for you in the community bankroll, leaving me with a 6% stake. So lets say we do a gambling session with the community bankroll and color up at 55,000. That’s 5000 profit. Your stake is 94% of 5000, which is 4700. My stake is 300. At any point we can disband the community bankroll to cash out or whatever. If we lose some money, we split the losses the same way. What do you think?”
And Rory said, “Interesting. What else?”
“Ok we need to set up some ground rules. Here’s what I suggest. Left pocket is always community bankroll, and right pocket is personal money. If we both follow that, we won’t accidentally mix personal with community bankroll, and we can both make bets from the Community Bankroll. And, Before any money goes on the table, we have to both agree that it’s a good bet. So we both have veto power on each other. We still might lose some money anyway-hey that’s why they call it gambling-but the chance of both of us agreeing on a truly dumbass bet is about .0001%. I’ll be tracking the counts and the rolls simultaneously with chips, so we’ll have good data to formulate betting strategy on. What do you think?”
And Rory kinda nodded his head slowly and said, “You’ve given this some thought, I see.”
“Logistics baby. You can’t run a business unless you can master logistics. Logistics is why Jeff Bezos is worth 120 billion today.”
So Rory replied, “You think we’ll make 120 billion doing this?”
And I retorted, “Oh for sure.” And we both bust out laughing.
And Rory was like, “Ok lets try this. But if it aint working for me, I’m out.”
“Sure thing.”
So we created a community bankroll of 53,000 to start. Rory kept a couple of gs of his personal bankroll separate, and I kept 100 bucks and my tip money and that was it. And that very same community bankroll lasted until we colored up at the Cromwell, at the end of our trip, to make sure we got to the airport on time for Rory to catch his flight.
That convo happened while we were still at the Cortez. Rory hadn’t made much money yet, but if he been doing my exact betting with his stack, then when he said to the dealer, “Make my 50gs look like 150,” it would have been so already, and I’d be seeing him off at the airport, whether he wanted to stay or go.
When I asked Warren to color up my 21 bets plus my randomly organized rails, I was playing a community bankroll. It made sense for me to run it, since I had a deeper understanding of the theory, since I had written it in the first place, and would be able to make adjustments on the spot after Warren lowered the betting limits on the Big Red and the Hop. That, by the way, was casino fuckery. I didn’t expect it at the Cortez, but there it was, lowering the betting limits just because there were two big chipstacks on the table and the casino bosses were shittin bricks.
So we’re sitting in my car in the El Cortez parking garage. We had narrowed down our upgrades to two casinos, The Golden Nugget and the Cosmopolitan, because they were both tied for best betting limits, 1-1000 on the Hop and 1-3750 on the Big Red, and they were both badass hotels, better than even the MGM in my opinion. We were going to confirm that at the tables, on tape, before Rory pulled out the monster community bankroll of 53,000, or even if he halved it and gave me 26,500. (There are huge advantages of having 2 bettors with large bankrolls instead of just one, but it’s math stuff, so I’m not going to go into details to make everyone fall asleep while they’re trying to read this otherwise kinda interesting thread.)
And I said, “Alright Rory, you got the big chipstack. Where to?” And he said to the Golden Nugget. So I set the gps, and off we went to seek our fortune, and find out if the gods of dice were with us or against us.
Part VI. Joe Navy at the Golden Nugget.
So we head out and we’re at the Golden Nugget in like 2 minutes. It’s like 6am and there was no traffic. We head in and find a table of shooters. Brothas who started playing the night before and were still rolling 9, 10 hours later. Only good shooters or good bettors, but usually both, can pull that off.
There are 2 open spots on the table, but they are on opposite sides, so they won’t do Rory and me any good, with our community bankroll and whatnot. I ask one of the good shooters if there is any chance he would be willing to move to the open spot on the other side of the table. He said no. Then he said for 50 bucks. Considering our bankroll, I thought it would be worth it, but Rory was like, no fucking way I’m paying 50 bucks for that. So I got the spot and dropped my measly 100 so I could get the table betting limits; as advertised, Hop was 1-1000 and the Big Red was 1-3750. The dealer laughed when I asked her the upper betting limits, given my paltry chipstack. I was like, ya laugh now sweety, cause in a few, you won’t be laughing any more. Ha ha.
Once I had the limits, I asked Rory to take my place while I sat down to write out the progression for those table limits. It sucked cause the paper I had to write on and the pen I had to write with did not like each other. Anyway, got it done and made my way to the table. I asked Rory to step back a bit. I told him that I got the progression done, but most of these shooters are bad choices to run any don’t progressions. I asked him if there were any bad shooters and he said only one guy at the far end of table. He gave me half the bankroll and left to use the bathroom.
The dice moved quickly and the 7 shooter was the shooter after the next. Rory still wasn’t back yet. I didn’t want to wait another round to get back to the shitty shooter, so I took my license and dropped about 25k in bricks of hundreds to get a card and chips. The pit boss looked at me funny because I was in Rory’s spot. So he said, “Whose money is this?”
Just to keep things simple, I said, “It’s mine,” which was partially true because I had about a 5% stake in the money. A second pit boss started the count while the 1st came over to me with a clipboard with a form and a pen. When I looked at it, it was an IRS form pursuant to some random statute like “The Truth in Banking Law,” or some ridiculous shit like that, and he wanted my social security card too..
I don’t know how many of ya’ll have ever run a business, but for those of you who have, maybe you can relate. When you work in corporate America, you get a certain percentage of your paycheck withdrawn automatically for federal income tax and payroll taxes. During tax season, you wait for your big fat refund and your only problem is figuring how to spend it.
Well, when you have your own business, it doesn’t work like that, unless you go out of your way to make it work like that. Otherwise you have an enormous bill at tax time, and then you gotta figure out how you’re going to pay for it. Well, lets just say that I and the IRS have an ongoing “conversation” around my tax situation and payments.
So the last thing in the world I need is some form going to the IRS showing that I bought in at the casino for 26ish grand. Like literally the last thing. So I had a deer in the headlights look on my face, and I said, “I’m sorry I can’t sign this form.”
And he said, “Whose money is this?”
And I said, “Mostly my nephew’s.”
Then he said, “I can’t take this money then,” and handed me the 26ish-k back. By this time, Rory had gotten back, and is looking at me like “What the fuck kind of retarded move did you make while I was in bathroom?”
Now let me give you some backstory. In all my times playing dice and buying in with bankrolls as high as 100k, I have never-not even once-been asked to fill out an IRS form or a banking form of any type, so this was the last thing I ever envisioned happening after I dropped half the community bankroll to get chips. (By the way, the brotha next to me who refused to move but offered to for 50$ said, “Ya that price tag just went up..”)
I asked Rory to step back from the table, and I said, “I know you think that was a total clown move, but in 12 years of playing dice, not once, not even when my buy-in was 4x that, have I had to fill out an IRS form. So this is complete bullshit. The only reason why I did it was the table’s only shitty shooter was about to roll, and I didn’t want to wait another hour before he got the dice again.”
Rory said, “Ya we call those guys Joe Navies. Little bitches who are a stickler for rules that don’t even exist.”
I said, “Exactly. He’s not going to let me play with half the bankroll now, so why don’t you take the whole bankroll and play it out.´ I handed him the scrawled out progression and the 26000ish. I said, “Look I’m just a total retard. If I go sit by the slots and catch up on the news, I won’t make any more idiotic moves.”
And before I left, I said, “Look over the progression now so you know how it works and if you have any questions. Don’t get sloppy. Don’t run this shit on anyone but 7 shooters. Agreed?”
He replied, “Sure no problem.”
Then I followed up. “You’re going to run the show, but don’t be afraid to move to the Do’es (Pass Line instead of Don’t Pass) on some of these good shooters. 10 to 1 both those brothas can shoot. They’ve been playing for 10 hours straight on their original bankroll. That’s impressive.”
Navy style: “Copy that.”
So I sat down at the slots and caught up on the news while Rory did his thing. I felt like an idiot but Joe Navy is so far off the charts in terms of deviating from the way pit bosses usually run their affairs that I just said to myself that what I had done was perfectly sensible, even though I felt like the biggest loser in the casino.
Ten minutes later, Rory pulls up in the slot next to me, and I inquired how it went.
He said, “So I played with half the bankroll for a couple of minutes. Then I dropped the rest of the community bankroll in so I’d have more chips to run the progression.”
“So?”
So Joe Navy said, “I don’t know if that money is your money or your friend’s or both. I can’t accept it and I can’t give you any more chips than what you already have.”
Rory was basically like, ya fuck this. So he called color and now he was ready to hit the cage. As we headed there, I said, “You know we really don’t know what the gods of dice had in mind. Maybe we would’ve gotten fucked at that table. Maybe we dodged a bullet.”
Before we left, Joe Navy gave me a player’s card and said, “You are welcome to play in our casinos anytime. But you will need to bring your social security card next time.”
So I said thanks, but what I was thinking was, “Ya screw you too, Mr. Joe Navy, little biatch that you are you.”
As were walking back to the car, I said, “What say you we Cosmo right about now?”
And Rory got all militaristic, “To the Cosmo we will come, the Cosmo we will see, and the Cosmo we will conquer.”
“Roger that..”
And again, we left to see if the gods of dice were with us or against us. We still didn’t know for sure. We couldn’t decide if what happened at the Golden Nugget was an omen or a sign; I leaned toward the latter. May it be so..
VII. Showtime at the Cosmopolitan
Set our GPS to the Cosmo and we were pulling into their parking garage within about 15 minutes. Wow this place is fancy. Their driveway is polished stone. The main foyer had this giant sheet of stained glass in red and yellow with backlighting; just stunning. By the lobby, they have this art display of people behind watery glass in a full 3-D panorama, dancing, flirting, trying to get out, trying to say hello. It is creepy af, but it is absolutely mesmerizing. I also noticed several professionals who looked like they came straight from Bissy Track. Rory doesn’t hobby-he’s happily married and wants to keep it that way-but apparently he was impressed when I pointed out the hot chicks who were definitely working.
We did a walk around at the tables. We didn’t care about the table limits, only about the betting ranges on the Hop and the Big Red. Found a table that was 25-50k, with 3,4,and 5x odds. A couple of people were on the table, but there were 2 open spots, 1 and 2 right of stick. Since Rory was going to be the big bettor and I was going to be offering close air support, I put Rory at 1 Right and I took 2 Right of Stick.
Before we let anyone know about our big buy-in of 53k, I dropped 100 of my personal money for chips and asked them about the low and high bets on the Hop and the Big Red. They probably figured I’d last about 6 minutes tops, but were nice enough to humor me by telling me the low limits-a dolla-which they thought were well within my betting limits, but kind of laughed when they told me the high bet on the hop was a 1000 and the high bet on the Big Red was 3750. There’s another question that I should have asked, but I didn’t know that I should have asked it, because the answer is obvious. Until it’s not.
Course I had been rolling tape, so I took a bathroom break to turn my tape off after I got the table limits. I told Rory to do his thing. When I got back, Rory told me they wouldn’t count his bankroll at the table but asked him to go to the cage. I asked the pit boss to save our spots and watch my big balla bankroll of a lousy hundo in chips while we went to the cage, and he said sure thing. After he saw Rory’s buy-in, I don’t think he was laughing at us anymore. Maybe we were still clowns, buy some clowns with serious money to play with.
After making small talk with the cashier, the count she did at the cage was one of the fastest counts of 53,000 I’d ever seen. I think she and Rory had both done this transaction before, which made me wonder about Rory. We got the chips and headed back to the table.
We did major check change, with Rory asking for like 300 in red (5s) and like 300 in whites, which the dealers thought was absolutely nuts. We got the rest in greens (25s), blacks (100s), purples (500s), and the rest orange (1000s). The dealers were surprised we got no change above 1000 chips.
When we got back to the table, I started doing the counts on each shooter. Normally I would also track the rolls, but since we planned on doing nothing but Don’ts, so there was no point in tracking rolls.
Mainly the table was cold to choppy, although one African American gent down at the end of the table looked like he could be a pretty good shooter, but his counts went no more than 9 rolls. Actually, no one made it past 9 rolls.
I had no interest in shooting, as it sucks a lot of your energy and to me, it just wasn’t worth it. Rory was doing nothing but don’ts on his own rolls. He was literally the best Don’t shooter in Vegas. There was a time when I was practicing a lot and could hit 9 or 10 Don’ts in a row. Some years back at the Cortez, another shooter bragged that he was the best don’t shooter in Vegas, and I turned to Rory and footnoted, “He may be the best Don’t shooter in Vegas, but he’s the second best at this table. Lol.” And Rory was like, “True dat..”
And we never run any kind of Big Red progression on own Don’t rolls cause that’s a good way to give yourself a heart attack and PTSD after. He was running a straight Anti-Martingale his own Don'ts, starting at 100. Every time he hit, he’d go up another 50, and every time he sunk himself, which he did only once the whole session, he’d drop back to about half of his previous bet. Rory was also putting a 1$ dealer bet next to his Don’ts to get the dealers on our side.
After the dice had gone around the table about 3 times, we had the data we needed. So I asked Rory if he was ready to start running some Hoppin Big Red progressions on other shooters, and he said he was. Shooter by shooter, I’d ask, “Hoppin Big Red? What say you.” And he’d say yup. Then he’d ask me, “And what about you?” And I’d answer, “I concur.” And it was a wrap. The truth is we never passed up the Hoppin Big Red progression on any roll on any shooter during that entire session except when Rory was the shooter.
So every time, we’d do a minimum flat don’t bet, which was 25, and start the progression immediately. I always had Rory’s next bet ready, cause things move crazy fast. Once our Hoppin Big Red progression got up to about 600, we started putting a stack of whites on the Don’t Come (DC) bar, and putting about 4 whites as a dealer tip next to it to incentivize the dealers to let us do the stacks of whites instead of 1 green, and they were on board. The idea here is the more obscene chip stacks that the shooter has to deal with, the greater the chance that he will hit one of them and seven out, or seeing the obstacle course may disrupt his otherwise good shooting and cause him to seven out. And it was working.
The casino was paying out like a lucky slot machine. It was nuts. 4,6,10,3,7 out line away. Paid 60. 5,2,3,9,10,12,4,6,6,8, 7 out line away. Paid 2250 on the Hop the 7s. And because the table was cold, our stacks of whites that were going behind various numbers were paying too when the shooter 7ed out. Occasionally, on a particularly awful shooter, I would ask Rory if I could add another progression called the DC 7, which starts with a very large don’t bet and then keeps halving on the DC. He said I could, so we added that element on the truly awful shooters, which also was paying really well.
We were up by around 4000 and I’m not sure how long we had been there, but it didn’t seem like very long. There was 1 particular African American gent down at the end of the table, who clearly wasn’t an awful shooter, and he started to get kind of hot. On one roll he hit two points, and then on his next roll, he hit 3 points. His counts were getting kind of high, but the higher they got before he sevened out, the more we got paid, so we didn’t think too much of it.
I also noticed that he started to hit quite a few 6s and 8s, which could potentially pose a quite serious problem for our betting strategy if he got super hot on a particular roll. I also watched him shoot a couple of times, and I came to believe that he’s a legit shooter. If we had just joined the table, I’m pretty sure we would have taken a pass. But because he was making us more money than anyone else on the table because his counts were going higher than other shooters before he finally sevened out, we figured why rock the boat?
There are some additional considerations to reflect on. One of the 7 Deadly Sins is greed. Greed applies when you’ve made good money, but it’s never enough; you always want more. You have committed the sin of greed, and the gods of dice-who hate greedy dice players btw-may very well decide that your comeuppance is due. Were we being greedy staying up on this shooter who was starting to get hot? You decide. All I know is that we were killing it.
Another of the 7 Deadly Sins is pride. Were we getting too big for our bridges? Did we begin to think that the casino couldn’t beat us? This is possible, but maybe not as likely as greed, because we always knew in the back of our minds that if a shooter somehow made it to his 25th roll without a 7, almost our entire bankroll would be bust, and we would have to switch to another progression called the Dead Man, which is the “when everything else has already failed,” and either Rory or I, but preferably both of us, would have 1 or more Jesus rolls from the Pass Line to rescue our demolished bankroll.
I have used the Dead Man progression on at least 2 occasions to bring myself back from the dead, and one time when it was a poor choice for a progression, and the result was less than spectacular. Those 3 stories will show up later in this asynchronous narrative. If it came down to the Dead Man, I would have taken Rory’s spot, 1 right of stick, and he would have taken 1 left of stick if it was open, or maybe wait for one left of stick to open, or maybe shoot two right of stick, as that is Rory’s second favorite shooting spot. Between the two of us, I would say my odds for a Jesus roll when our backs are totally to the wall are better than Rory’s, cause handling total clusterfucks and general mayhem is kinda my specialty, although, generally speaking, I would say Rory is a better shooter than me on both the Do’s and the Don’ts.
Part of the reason why Rory is a better shooter than me is that, while he plays at the Indian casinos in Washington state almost every weekend, my regulation dice table is disassembled, waiting for completion of my attic, which, by the way, the renovation of which cost me 30k in HOA legal fees and 15 of my own, and why I had to file Chapter 7, which I did, pro se, but now wanted better legal counsel (lol) to get the lien on my condo for 30k removed, and why now I had asked to join Rory’s 50k bankroll instead of flying solo with my now 3k, essentially hiding behind Rory’s massive bankroll, as the archer Ajax the Lesser did under the shield of the superwarrior and mountain of a man Ajax the Greater during the Trojan War, as recounted by Homer. However, I took great satisfaction when the HOA president’s pipes busted during the freeze, whereas my attic is so well insulated, it was warmer than my main floor. Sorry, so much backstory, but it just proves that karma is indeed a bitch and she has a great sense of humor.
As this particular shooter’s rolls got longer and longer, I found myself laying out more and more bets ahead of time, expecting that he would pass 8 easily, and maybe even 13 rolls without extraordinary effort. I was getting check change whites from blacks (100s) on the regular, and kept tipping the dealers on the DC bets-stacks of whites-to keep them on our side. I noticed that the shooter was picking off our DC bets with regularity. The way this works is, say you have a DC bet of 25 and the shooter rolls a 6. The 25 DC goes behind the 6. Now I’m hoping that the shooter rolls a 7 before a 6. If he rolls a 6 before a 7, he just picked off my DC. If I have another DC bet out there, that bet goes behind the 6, and again I’m rooting for a 7 before a 6 again. I would most likely do another 25 DC, and so on. Good shooters get a sadistic enjoyment of picking off Don’t bettors’ numbers, and it is especially satisfying for a good Pass Line shooter to sink the entire bankroll of a Don’t bettor. I myself have done so many times, too many to count, when I was betting on my own shooting from the Pass and would look out on my Don’t bettors to see which bet I should sink first. I would make an analogy to a skilled marksman in battle picking off enemy soldiers, 1 bullet at a time.
By about his seventh roll, I was ready for the DC with stacks of whites. I noticed he also began to hit lots of 6s and 8s, which presented a separate challenge to our betting strategy, which I will explain later. So needless to say, this gent’s rolls were becoming a tad bit exciting. But our chipstack kept getting fatter and fatter, so if it aint broke, you don’t fix it, right? Maybe.
I began to take stock of our situation, and to realize that the situation was getting a bit dicey. But the time to decide on whether to run a Hoppin Big Red progression is at the beginning of the roll, not in the middle. If you bail out at the beginning and the shooters rolls 25 rolls without a 7, you are a genius. But if you bail out in the middle of his roll, you are a pussy and should maybe stick to golf. (Not saying people that play golf are pussies, but that at least in golf, a bad day on the links doesn’t cost you 50 grand.)
After the dice had circled the table a good 12 times since we’d been there, this particular gent brought the count to 15 before sevening out, with a payout of 6000. Rory and I were happy with the win, but also quite concerned that this gent had made it to the 15th roll before sevening out. When the dice had come a full 360, Rory and I knew we had a serious decision to make.
I turned to Rory: “What say you, sir?”
Rory looked at me grimly, for he knew as well as I that this decision would be the single most momentous decision of our entire trip up to this point. And rather than commit himself, he put the onus back on me. “What do you think?”
“I think-no in fact I know cause I just counted our chips-we’re up by about 6000. But if we do this, we do this. No backing out midstream, no second thoughts.”
At this point, a certain Jedi Master’s words came to the front of my mind. “Either we do, or we do not. There is no try.”
And all Rory did is repeat some words back to me: “There is no try.”
And then we both bust out laughing. And I knew it was a wrap. Rory confirmed the decision. “I came here to gamble. Lets play.”
And I replied. “I concur. And there is no try.” And we busted out laughing again. Couple of lunatics ready to take the 100 foot plunge and hope the water was deep enough that we both didn’t end up quadriplegics. That’s why they call it gambling..
I felt a surge of adrenaline course through my body, and I began to lay out the bets with alacrity. I was doing check change blacks (100s) for whites (1s), which is never done. We started with 25 on the Don’t and 1$ on the Big Red. Shooter set his point which was a 6. 2$ to the Big Red. Shooter rolled an 8. 3$ Hoppin the 7s. Shooter rolled a 6 and hit his first point. We lost our 25 don’t bet. I asked Rory if I could Martingale the Don’ts and he said sure. I put 50 on the Don’t, handed him 6 for the Hop. Shooter rolls an 8, the new point. I hand Rory 12$ for the Hop. Shooter hits the 8, his second point. We lost our 50 Don’t. I hand Rory 24$ for the hop and put $100 on the Don’t. Shooter rolls a 9, his new point. I hand Rory 48 for the Hop. This shit be getting real, and real fast. I started to zoom in like a laser beam on the action cause I know that we’re midair but we’re still not sure how deep the water is.
I take a monstrous stack of whites, leaning over slightly as is the tradition, and place them next to my $100 Don’t, and barked out, “Lay behind the 9, and a dollar bet for the boys.” I put 1$ next to the obscene stack of whites. I take another crazy stack of whites and put them on the DC, plus a $5 dealer tip, calling out 25 DC, and 5 for the boys, because it’s real important to me that the dealers let my crazy stack of whites stand instead of replacing them with a green. They did not intercede. I hand Rory 96 for the hop. Shooter rolls a 4, and my crazy stack of whites goes behind the 4. I pushed an identical bet to the DC, and handed Rory 192 for the hop. Shooter rolls ace deuce, and I call out, “Same bet,” as the dealer pays my DC even money on the 3, and puts 5$ in the dealer depository. I hand Rory 240 for the Hop.
At this point, I figured fuck it, lets get another crazy chip stack on the board. So I take another crazy stack of whites and put them on a bet called the Field. (The Field wins on certain numbers, sometimes pays double or triple on the 2 or 12, and loses on everything else.) Shooter rolls a 10. My field pays even money, my DC goes behind the 10, and I hand Rory 300 for the Hop. I put another crazy stack of whites on the DC with a dealer bet on the side. The table is starting to look crazy with all these nutjob stacks of whites on bets seemingly everywhere. I leave my Field bet up.
Shooter rolls a 6. I lose my Field bet, My DC goes behind the 6, and I hand Rory 450 for the Hop. I ask Rory if I can Martingale my Field bet, and he’s like sure whatever, can’t you see I’m busy. So I put 2 reds (5s) at the base of my Field bet and put 40 whites on top, while pushing in another monster DC bet of only whites plus a dealer bet on the side. Absolutely insane-looking table.
Shooter rolls a 6. I lose my field bet, so I double it. My DC becomes a lay behind the 6. Another crazy stack to the DC, and I hand Rory 600 for the Hop.
Shooter rolls an 8. Lost another field, double again. DC goes behind the 8, and I hand Rory 900 for the Hop. Shooter took his time, looking for a safe landing spot in the minefield I laid for him. Throws and clears the chipstacks. Dice land flush and true and I already knew it wasn’t a 7. Dealer barks out, “4 the hard way!” I win a couple hundred on the field, I lose my “no 4” from an old DC bet, and my new DC moves behind the 4. This shooter is proving to be a bit difficult to elicit the 7 from.
I hand Rory 1200, put a stack of about 30 whites on the field, and about 30 whites on the DC. I notice the shooter changes his set a bit, 2s or 4s. He let them fly, and although he cleared the chipstacks, one of the dice took a funny bounce, and in that instant, I was thinking, “Maybe, please..”
But the stickman barked out, “10 the easy way!” My field paid 30, I lost an old DC against the 10, and my 30 whites moved behind the 10. I handed Rory 1800 for the Hop. Left my field bet up, added odds in white to the lay behind the 10, not that it was a good bet-I kinda hate odds on Don’t bets and don’t understand why people take odds on a lay behind because it puts them in a worse spot than without adding odds-but I did it because the 10 is the furthest right number on the board and could serve as another piece of fuckery for the shooter to try to avoid. Put another 30 whites on the DC with a dealer bet next to it.
I look out at the table and it was probably the craziest looking table I’d ever seen. Every single number on the board except for the point of 9 had a massive stack of whites behind the number. The DC had a massive stack of whites, as did the field.
I looked at Rory like, “Can you believe this shit?” And he gives me this look of no. fucking. way.
I can only imagine what the table looked like to the shooter. Maybe a clusterfuck crossed with mayhem itself with a big touch of fuckery for good measure. I could not believe he hadn’t hit a single chipstack so far on his entire roll. Rory and I have an inside joke that goes back to an incredible roll I had at Lauberge when I was short stacked and ran a Deadman progression and ending up 10x up my shortstack up on a single roll. One of the other players commented, “Is he Jesus?”
So I turned to Rory and said, “Hopefully he’s not Jesus.”
Rory didn’t miss a beat. “Well if he’s Jesus, then we’re Satan. Lets see if we can end this holy roller..”
“Copy that. But if we lose, at least we’ll have a fun story to tell our grandkids..”
Rory concurred. “Absolutely fucking epic story.”
The stickman pushed the dice to the shooter. Again he set hardways, 5s over 4s. Obviously this guy knows his way around a dice table. And it was my job to make sure he sevened out. I knew we had only 2 more bets on the Hop before we would max out and start having to add Big Red bets, per the progression. I started to get those bets ready too. The shooter set aces over deuces. On instinct, I added 100 to my field bet and added another 15 to my DC. He shot. Absolutely perfect throw. Dice stayed true and level. Dealer calls out, “Aces for the big 2. Triple the field.” My field bet paid about 360. My DC paid about 50, and the dealers got paid on my dealer tip on the DC. I’m thinking, “Ya a 2 is all well and good, but where the hell is my damn 7?”
I called out, “Same DC, same Field.” Rory got distracted for a second, but the dealer asked if he wanted any bet on the Hoppin 7s. I put 2400 in his hand, and he declared, “2400 hoppin the 7s.” I had all the same bets as before. I noticed that the shooter was setting 6s over 3s, and I thought to myself, “That’s a 9 set. So I pulled my odds on the Don’t against the 9, and added 200 to the field bet. Shooter throws the dice. Perfect throw. Dealer barks out. “Good field 9. Winner on the front line. Front line winner!” Shooter just hit his third point. I lost my small don’t bet against the 9. My DC moved to behind the 9. My field paid about 250.
Our next hop bet was the table max: 3000. In the progression I wrote, the Big Red bets don’t start until the shooter had sunk our table limit bet on the Hop. But I figured I may as well get started early, for rhythm and momentum. I hand out 3000 to Rory for the Hop. I call out without even asking Rory, “250 on the Big Red,” and hand Rory the 250. This is where things got interesting.
One of the dealers declared, “You can’t make that bet. You are already maxed out on the Hopping 7s, so you can’t add to a bet on the 7.”
I replied, “That makes no sense. They are separate bets. I can put chips on any damn bet on the table.”
Backstory. Rory and I initially planned to split the community bankroll 50/50, so we could both bet simultaneously. When we first started, it was Rory who dropped the 50k. All I had was 100$, which I put in so I could get the straight story on the lower and upper limits. Rory was the one who dropped the 53k. We asked for half and half, for Rory to get half and me to get half. The dealer said that since Rory was the one who dropped the 53k, only he could get the 53k in chips. If Rory and I knew that rule, we would have divvied up the 53k before we showed up at the table. But since Rory did the buy in, I couldn’t have any of his chips to bet with. That sucked because I could have backed up Rory’s bets on the Hop instead of using the Big Red, since the Hop is a better bet.
So now these scumbags-even after all the dealer tips we’d been making-pulled serious fuckery on us and put us in a super bad spot. We would have to go straight to the lays behind the 6s or 8s to back up our Hop bets, which were going to cost us a fortune; the first bet would have to be 12000 behind the 6 or 8. If the shooter is hitting 6s and 8s and sank our lay behind on the no 6 or no 8, we would be running into bankroll issues quickly. I had to think fast on my feet.
To my “That makes no sense” comment, the same dealer replied, “House rules.”
At this point I was seriously pissed. I barked out in my courtroom voice, “Have you cleared your House rules with the Nevada Gaming Commission?”
No one replied, but they suddenly realized I was either someone in the know, or more likely, a lawyer who knows how this shit works. The Nevada Gaming Commission is incredibly powerful, and can levy fines, can reverse payouts, and even pull the casino’s gaming license. So this is serious shit.
So I said, “Down on the Big Red, since you are pulling up rules out of your ass.”
Then I pointed to the eyes in the sky. “They see and hear everything, don’t they?” Then, in a stentorian voice, I bellowed, “Let the record show that the Cosmopolitan changed the rules of the game midstream by declaring that after a max Hop bet, no Big Red bets could be made, contrary to the rules and to the detriment of the players.”
From their body language, I could see what was going through their minds: “Oopsies. This is getting kinda dicey..”
I turned to Rory and asked, “Can I bet a minimum Pass Line bet instead of a Don’t Pass?”
He looked at me like, “Are you nuts?”
And I said, “There’s a method to my madness. Trust me.”
And he gave me a look of this is really crazy, but I know you’re the dice guru, so who knows. He said ok. So I put 25 on the Pass Line.
Keep in mind that a shooter is going for a 7 on the Come Out roll. And I had begun to realize that this shooter was unflappable. Every single obstacle I threw at him, he just went around it. And I remembered my maxim I learned from my Russian Roulette experience at the Cortez: “Never fight the table.”
Shooter got the dice. I knew I couldn’t bet the Big Red on ourselves. But there’s no House rule that says you can’t bet the Big Red on someone else. So I started with the safer bet. I called out, loudly: “20$ Big Red for the Dealer.” I waited a second, and the Stickman said, “It’s a bet.” Big relief.
And while the shooter was still setting the dice, I barked out in a booming voice that could be heard halfway across the casino: “20$ Big Red Any 7 for the shooter.”
The shooter set “hard sevens,” which meant he set 7s on every face of the dice. And finally the shooter threw. Time stood still. 1/100th of a second felt like an hour. It was a perfect throw. Easily cleared the chipstacks. Both dice landed flush and level. I could barely look.
The pit boss barked to the stickman, “Call it!”
And the stickman said, calmly and placidly, “Winner winner, front line winner. Pay the line. Take the don’ts.” The dice said sixty one.
First I high-fived Rory. Then I went to the other side of the table and high-fived the shooter. Then I just took a deep breath. Un-freaking-believable.
So the dealers start paying out the bets. First they paid my Pass Line, 25. Then they paid my DCs that were against every single number on the board, 4,5,6,8,9,10, around 30 each. Then they got to the HOP. They moved the 52 and 43 to the dealer chipstack. On the 61, they counted out $15,000, and pushed it towards Rory. They asked if we’d like to stay up on the Hop.
Rory jumped in, deadpan: “Super tempting, but maybe not right this moment, thanks.”
So they pushed the extra thousand to Rory.
Then they paid the shooter 80, and the dealers got 80, which made them super stoked. I called out, down off the Big Red, so they pushed another 40 to Rory.
I turned to Rory. “I’m thinking maybe this might not be a bad time to color up.”
Wryly, Rory replied, “Ya, come to think of it, you might be right.”
Rails and rails and rails went to the center of the table. The count: $64,427, with a profit of $11,427. We threw the dealer a green-they were cool except for one major piece of fuckery-and headed to the cage.
(to be continued..)
My Bio Page - Texas - Houston
