EPISODE 25

For those who may not be aware of it, Blackjack is perhaps the one game in the casino where the player has almost even odds against the House.  Assuming you may have read “Bringing Down the House”, or seen the movie “21” that was based on it, then you know that by keeping track of the number of face cards and aces that have been played, you can reasonably figure out the odds of getting those cards dealt to you.  Given that there are 16 cards in each deck that equal 10 and only 4 aces, then the trick is calculating whether you can get one of those 20 cards to drop into your hand when you need it.  It also means that there are cards in the deck that can do you harm and the 5 card is one of them.

The reason for this is simple.  If I have a 5 showing, the odds (given a single, freshly shuffled deck) are almost exactly 30% that I’ll have a 10, jack, queen or king underneath it.  That underneath card is face down, although it really doesn’t make any difference whether anyone else can see it or not.  What’s important for me is to realize that I probably have a 15 there.  I checked my second card and sure as hell, there was a jack.  The odds that I can get another card that will allow me to sneak under 21 are actually about the same as drawing a 10 or a face card.  The ace does me very little good and only a 3, 4, 5, or a 6 can help me out.  My best move is to check what the dealer has.  If he’s in a similar situation, then I can relax and do nothing.  Let him sweat it.  After all, under the rules, the dealer must take a card if he has 16 or less and he must stick with what he’s got with a 17 or better.

Pretty simple?  It is.  Well, that is provided you actually check to see what the dealer has first before making your play.  But I’d let the big lout sitting next to me get on my nerves.  He was “offering” advice to another player now, very loudly.  The poor guy he was lecturing at that moment kept smiling weakly while he shifted uncomfortably in his seat.   I looked at my cards and tapped my right hand on the table next to them.  I heard someone let out a sigh and in a flash I realized that I’d screwed up.  The card snapped out of the shoe and into the dealer’s hand.  He held it for a fraction of a second as he swept from his left to the right and laid the card down in front of me, face up.  It was a freaking queen.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”  I swear that the voice from my right sounded like one of those little compressed air foghorns.  The big guy was near hysterical.  His face was twisted up into a bizarre grimace, his eyes bulging and his face a shade darker than pink.  Enraged would one way you might have put it – but in fact, I think he was way beyond that.  The guy over to my left who’d been his previous target only a few moments before literally jerked out of his chair.  I looked over at the behemoth as he launched into an explosive attack on my poor play.

“You idiot! You ever play this game before?  It sure don’t look like it!  What kind of moron hits on a dealer’s 5?”

As the onslaught continued, I glanced over at the dealer’s hand and sure enough, he had a 5 showing as well.  By taking a card, a face card at that, I had buried that card and raised the odds for the dealer to escape going over 21.  The two players to my left refused new cards and we all watched as the dealer flipped over his exposed card, a 9 and then take a 4 to give him an 18.  He successfully avoided a busted hand and only had to pay out to one of the players at our table, given that everyone had declined to take a third card.  And the truth of the matter was that my misplay had been largely responsible for this outcome, which my tormentor was only too glad to remind me of.

“I can’t freaking believe it!” he bellowed as the dealer swept up the chips.  “Why don’t you do everybody a favor and leave?  It’s clear you don’t know shit about this game and you’re just screwing it up for the rest of us!”

I too had finally lost it.  I turned to my right and said quite evenly, “Would you please shut the fuck up?”  I then turned back to face the dealer and looked up to him.

“You can’t say that to me,” the big guy screamed.  “Who the fuck do you think you are?  Hey!  Look at me when I’m talking to you!  Don’t you fucking dare act like that!  You little shit!  You’re the one that screwed it up!  Not me!  Just get the hell out of here now…”

But his tirade was cut short as two very large, well-muscled gentlemen in matching black sport coats slipped in on either side of the behemoth and yanked him out of his seat.  Despite his continuing philippic, now directed at the management of the hotel, the city of Las Vegas and anyone else that popped into his mind, the big guy was dragged off while the pit boss came over to attend to the table with the dealer.  A well-dressed man with a clipboard in his hand appeared at my left and asked me if I was okay.

“Sure,” I replied shakily.  “Everything’s cool.”

“We don’t think so, sir,” the man replied.  “The management at the MGM Grande does not tolerate this kind of behavior and I apologize to you for this.  The gentlemen won’t bother you anymore.”

I began to wonder what was gong to happen to the behemoth and then realized that I didn’t give much of a damn.  I was trying to think of some graceful way of getting out of the place myself when the man with the clipboard pointed at the table in front of me.

“Are those your chips, sir?”

I looked carefully at the man with clipboard and noticed that he had small metal tag on his lapel that indicated that his mother had named him “Louis”.

“Louis,” I replied.  “They’re mine, but I really don’t see…”

“Sorry to interrupt you sir,” Louis interrupted.  “But I must ask you if you are a guest at the hotel.”

“No, I’m not.”

“And where is that you’re staying, sir?”

With some embarrassment, I told him.

“Nonsense!” Louis exclaimed.  “You’re staying with us!’

Louis scribbled on a form on his clipboard, signed the sheet and then handed it to me.

“At your convenience, please go back to your hotel, get your things and present this at the check-in desk.  The MGM Grande would very much like to have you as our guest for the next 3 nights.  There’s no rush though.  Please keep playing, if you would like.”

I’d had all of the blackjack I could stand for one night, so I thanked Louis, tipped the dealer with a $10 chip and shuffled away from my seat at the table.  Louis continued to be very nice about it, offering to buy me a couple of beers at the bar as I left the table.  There, I spent about an hour shooting the shit with two bored bartenders about striped bass fishing on Lake Meade.  It seems that the freshwater version of one of my favorite game fish thrived there and these two guys apparently had great success chasing blitzing schools of stripers by motorboat.  Besides the small incidental that they often did so in temperatures of 105 degrees or better, it sounded an awful lot like the fishing that Les and I had done on Long Island.  A few more fishing stories, followed by another beer and another hour had passed.  I realized that it must be later than hell, so I excused myself from the bar and headed out the front door of the hotel to look for a taxi.

I arrived back at my hotel at around 3AM and found that there was a good sized, sloppy drunk crowd in the hotel bar.  All eyes were on a small stage located on the right side of the room where a young lady wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt was struggling through a country western tune I didn’t recognize, accompanied by a very loud karaoke machine.  In spite of the fact that the screen to her left displayed the lyrics, she was having a very tough time of it.  Her pitch was off and she couldn’t read the words.  But every time she came back to the chorus, she’d positive roar.

The patrons at the bar hooted, raised their glasses and tipped their beer bottles to her.  She graced them with a big grin and then blushed, eliciting more approval from the bar.  By then, she’d missed the next line and she hurriedly tried to catch up with the tune.  It was losing battle though.  This in no way inhibited our heroine.  She gamely plowed on, reinforced by her ability to make a big splash with the refrain that marked the return to the song’s chorus.

When she finally finished, the place went berserk.  A dozen or so people rushed up to the woman, hugging her and offering to buy her drinks.  One of the two bartenders ran up to her and slipped a fresh bottle of beer into her hand.  I swear that they all might have tried to carry their new hero around the bar on their shoulders, had they all not been so out of it.

Clearly, it was time for me to pack my bags and bid farewell.



The next installment of SlipNot will be published here on February 23.

If you’d like to read the whole book today, go to amazon.com.