Hey, everybody, this is Life is a Gamble, episode number eight,
and my guest today is someone I just met. His name is Bob Dancer,
actually my long time friend and co host from Gambling with an Edge.
So Bob, Welcome to Life is a Gamble. Thank you. It's good
to be here. Glad to be in a studio with you again. If
you ever need a co host, I have somebody in mind. Okay,
I'll keep that in mind. Okay. So I wanted to talk We talk
on this show about big gambles that come up in your life. And I
wanted to go back to the early eighties, late seventies, early eighties when
you were a professional backgammon player in Los Angeles. Yes, and at that
time you were playing at a place called the Cavendish Club, and there was
not a small amount of cheating going on. So let's start there about the
sort of known cheaters that were there at the Cavendish Club. Okay, maybe
go back a few years. Is how I got to the cabin? Yeah,
absolute, yeah? Can. I finished my PhD exams UCLA in nineteen
seventy two and got a job at the Rand Corporation, which is a think
tank in Santa Monica. Did well there until I realized it's like two blocks
from the beach and they didn't really keep track of your hours. And after
a while I got laid off for a bunch of reasons, some of which
may have had to do like I didn't meet a few of the deadlines.
But so in nineteen seventy four I was unemployed, but by this time had
come across backgammon. I read about it in a in a magazine I subscribed
to because of the articles, which was it was called Playboy, and so
that Playboy was the first place I heard about backgammon, and they told about
games with Billy Eisenberg and Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion. I was going,
this sounds pretty good. I think I learned about this. So I
got every backgammon book I could find, such as they were, which is
not very good, and I became pretty good at it. On if you're
only playing against what we would now call ploppies. I had a lot of
games in my past. It's brighter than others. Willing to read, willing
to study, and so I got pretty good. I got into the Cavendish
and I was no longer really good backing up. At that time, they
had backgammon at discos at night, and so the people who played at discos
weren't very good. So I took disco dance lessons, invested in bell bottom
jeans and polyester shirts, and would go to the discos, dance a little
bit and hustle backgammon, and the going was easy. And somebody there told
me about the Cavendish West, which is right where Sunset Boulevard meets Beverly Hills.
It's from West Hollywood to Beverly Hills. It's basically right in the city
limit borderline. When I get to the Cavendish West, it is no longer
It's not like the discos. I'm no longer the smartest person in the room.
The people there were professional gamblers there who were every bit as smart as
the people I went to graduate school with people I worked with at the Rand
Corporation, and they had been playing this game longer than I had. So
I still could hold my own at the one dollar game, and probably at
the ten dollar game if I could afford it, which I couldn't. The
five dollar game is where the really good players played, and I had no
chance there. But I could watch for free, which was educational. You
know, it's funny because I, first of all my back in and started
almost exactly the same as yours. I think I started maybe a year or
two before you did. But I would go to the clubs at night.
I didn't take the dance lessons, but yeah, the clubs. There was
a lot of very easy picking. And another good thing, at least in
the Chicago area, was a lot of places held weekly tournaments, so you
could go to these weekly tournaments and then play for money afterwards. So I
began to watch some of the very we colorful players there, not all of
whom were honest. The one, the biggest name, the biggest cheater,
was named Gabby Horowitz, who had this lovely wife named Marcia All. She
was a law student UCLA at the time. Later on she became famous after
she divorced Gabby, and she became known as Marcia Clark, and she was
a prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson situation. And she looked nothing
then like she did back when she was in her twenties, and we were
all in love with her. But Gabby was basically in Israeli pickpocket. He
had grown up he was a street person. He could make checkers disappear.
In backgammon, you move your checkers around to your homeboard and then you take
them off according to the roll on the dice. Well, Gabby could make
checkers disappear that it shouldn't disappear. He could get five checkers off with one
roll, where the absolute maximum is four. Gabby could get five off,
and you could be watching him and sometimes you'd see it. Most of the
time you wouldn't. He could when he rolled a six and a four entitled
him to move ten spaces if if they weren't all blocked, if it was
advantageous to Gabby to move eleven, he would quickly just put it down eleven
spaces away and pick up his dice. And then most of us at this
time we're counting out ten one, two, three, four, and Gabby
could tell at a glance how far ten spaces away and how far eleven was,
and so if you go, oh, no, it should be back
there, and he goes, no, I rolled a six five, This
is exactly where it's supposed to be. No, he rolled a six four.
Well, the dice are already off the board, and nobody and there's
no witness there, and when somebody does this once, okay, maybe you
were wrong, when it becomes regular occurrence, it becomes all you better protect
yourself. He had colorful language, but he was one of the people,
the biggest known cheaters there, and everybody knew he was a cheater. He
was kind of proud of the stuff that he could get away with. His
hero was a guy named Stanley Thompson, who somebody I had never heard of
at the time and later learned that was one of the best gamblers in the
world and an excellent backgammon player, and he's in Richard's Gambling Wizard's Book.
But Tompson wanted Gabby to teach him how to make checkers disappear, and Gabby
wanted him to teach him how to play back emmon. Now my never met
Thompson. I'm assuming Thompson wanted that information to protect himself against people cheating him.
I have not heard rumors about Thompson cheating, but no, I certainly
never heard that. But but there was also there was another guy. Oh,
there were several more, yeah, but the one what I'm getting to
is the sort of danger element of this. And there was another guy who
was sort of called out as a cheater and one of the Steve Goldman,
Yeah, yeah, I don't I don't know how to describe Danny Kleinman,
but one of I guess what you would say, one of the elder statesmen
of the game, kind of called him out. And yes, Goldman beat
him up, yes, severely. Right. Yes, at the time,
Goldman was maybe thirty years old and muscular and a little bit gone to fat,
but he might have played linebacker in high school and hadn't gone all of
fat. He still had some muscle on him. Danny was probably fifty five
or sixty at the time and was a college professor sorts gammy. Danny was
a theoretician. One of the things Goldman would do, and Danny wrote about
it, was invite people to his house where they wouldn't have to play the
pay the cup club fees, and his wife would cook him a nice dinner.
But of course that the house, Steve's board was magnetized, and if
you if he's flipped the switch, double fives were coming. And of course
if you can roll double fives on demand, you have a real good chance
of winning. So what how did the fight actually happen? Were you there
when that happened. I was not. I did not see the fight.
It actually apparently happened in the parking lot of the of the facility. As
soon as Danny got out of his car. Uh, Steve was waiting for
him and punched him up pretty good Danny. Then you know, Steve left
and Danny went into the club and sat down and blood was streaming out of
his nose and he was he was pretty beaten up. And all of us
saw Danny as we walked in, and so, uh, you know,
people are going, Goldman did this, and he nods and I don't know
what kind of legal repercussions it was faced, but Goldman didn't appear back at
the club again. So it there were lots of cheating that lots of different
ways that cheating that Goldman would do, and he didn't like being exposed.
So now I want to get to the guy you played, right, So
you now sat down with basically some mob guy to play right. Yeah,
I went, but I'll call him Angel. He was supposed to be a
mid level mob enforcer in Los Angeles in the late seventies. I did not.
I'm not positive there was mob in Los Angeles in the late seventies.
But every mobster will tell you that there is no such thing as the mob.
So and but Angel kind of looked like a fifty year old Dean Martin,
a real good looking guy. He would usually play with Manny. Manny
was fought to be his enforcer. Mann Manny was Angel's enforcer. I thought
Angel was a mob enforcer. No, Angel was a mob boss of sorts.
Oh okay, then Manny would have been his bodyguard maybe. Or when
Angel needed some dirty work done, he would send need collections done, he
would send Manny to collect, and when Manny's came to collect, you paid.
So they would play by themselves frequently. In backgammon, you can play
a heads up game, or you can use a shoette, which is three
or more players. And there's a rotation system that we don't have to get
into now. And so one of the skills that backgammon players need to learn
is to evaluate this how good your opponents are. And so I could see
by watching that they were not very good players. I had read all the
books, and by the late seventies the best book was called back Emmon by
Paul mcgreel, and that was out and that was that was really eye opening.
And ROBERTI had a few books out, and so I had absorbed all
of the literature at the time, and so I was a strong intermediate player.
I was not I never can make it up to expert, but but
I was strong intermediate and these guys weren't close to that, and I could
see the mistakes that were making. So I always wanted to play. One
day, Angel said, you wanted to play, let's play. Great,
So let's sit down just the two of us. Other people when they saw
Angel was willing to play with other people that they wanted in the game too.
Angel go, no, just play with Bomb. So there were witnesses
watching. So early on, in backgammon, you shake dice in your cup
and roll the dice onto your side of the board. Okay, Angel rolls
the dice a little bit too hard and one of them falls onto the floor.
This happens to everybody occasionally, no big deal. So Angel tells me
he has a really sore back, so he wanted me to go down and
get the dice, and sure, I was happy to be in the game
with Angel. So I went down and I came back and looked like one
of the checkers had been moved one space. I wasn't positive. There are
thirty checkers in a backgammon game and they move every move so they so you
don't really memorize a position every time. But I was pretty sure it was
not where it was supposed to be. So I looked at him and looked
at him, and he's looking staring at me, daring me to call him
out. Don't say a word. Two or three minutes later, one of
his days falls on the floor again. Bob, my back really hurt.
So this time I take time to memorize a position before I went down.
Go down. Sure enough, it's changed, So I put the checker back
where it belonged. So he said, are you calling me a cheater?
I'm going I don't know who moved the checker, but I am sure that
it's correct now. He grunted, and the game continued. Two minutes later,
the game falls on the floor. That falls on the floor again,
Bob, can you go down and get it? My back is killing me,
so I go, yeah, I can do that, but I first
got to go to the rest room. I gotta go pee really bad.
So instead of going to the restroom, I left the Cavendish West. I
just walked out the door. At that time, I was stuck forty dollars
with Angel. Knew that when he could move the checkers anyway he wanted to,
no matter what he rolled, I had no chance, and so I
wasn't going to play him anymore. And I didn't think I owed him any
money because I'm likely he was cheating. Before I got in situation, other
people saw what had happened. It was everybody agreed Angel was cheating. So
I would get phone calls from friends I had at the Cavendish somewhere on the
order of way to go, don't let the sobs get away with that there
there's nonsense, good way to stick up, and other people about the same
number would go, aren't you crazy as your life worth more than forty dollars?
Forty dollars is nothing this guy. These guys could kill you or put
you in the morgue anything. So about fifty fifty I finally called the current
owner of the Cavendish West. It this was a revolving door. They would
change hands and there were a lot of people who were owners for some time.
This one was Bernie Case, who had been a foreman there for years,
doubtfully had his own money, so he was probably somebody else was a
bankroll behind it. I don't know who, but he was at least the
manager of the place. He had heard lots of stories, and he agreed
I didn't owe Angel any money, but said, you know, if Angel
decides to kill you or or hurt you really bad, don't blame me.
But now are you avoiding going to I stay out of the cabinish for two
weeks and then then I called Bernie and so I go, okay, So
I decided to go back, So welcome back. People are kind of wondering
what's going to happen, because Angel will come in there sooner or later.
So finally I'm in the middle of the game, an Angel shows up and
he walks over to the table, makes eye contact with me, doesn't say
a word until I rotate out of actively playing in the game. He gives
me the come hither finger and come talk to me. So you know I
have to do this sooner or later. So I go over there and he
tells me then I'm a very brave man and also a very foolish man.
He goes He's gonna let it slide this time, but if I ever cross
path with him again, don't expect the same result next time. Did he
ever ask for the money directly or this all sort of happened behind the scenes
with Bernie and he didn't mention the forty dollars at that time, but actually
he did. Yes, he did ask for the forty dollars, and I
said, I'm not going to pay you were cheating. I've checked with the
Bernie and others and we all agree you were cheating. I'm not going to
pay you. At that point, that's when he told me I was a
rave man, but a foolish one. So he decided he's gonna let it
slide this time, but stay out of his game forever. And at which
point I promptly went into the restroom and threw up wow literally oh yeah,
because well, because I didn't know what was going to happen. I came
away from the Cavendish knowing a lot more about cheating. And there are a
lot of cheaters there that I haven't mentioned, but they were there, and
there were a lot of techniques. Learned a lot to protect myself. But
so losing your money playing fairly is one thing losing your money because of cheating,
maybe losing your life because of cheating is something different. I came away
feeling I had more to risk from cheating than I did from actually people playing
better than me. Yeah, because you get to pick spots when you're I
mean to make money. And this is really kind of the reason I gave
up back him and was to really make money at it, you had to
seek out basically, you know, sick people. You know, the most
money comes from degenerate gamblers who are just going to lose their money no matter
what happened, no matter how lucky they get. Eventually they're just gonna find
a way to lose all their money. And it just became kind of distasteful
to me to have to seek that out. That and in addition, there
were just a lot of assholes who, you know, when people are losing
their money, they can be really abusive, and you, if you're the
better player and you're there to make money, you have to sit and take
it while they you know, harangue you. Yeah, poker dealers know exactly
what Richard is talking about. Yeah. Yeah, And so that is one
of the reasons I never decide to put to become really good. Try to
become really good at poker, because the same people who play who are lousy
losers at backgendmon are the same type of people who are lousy losers at poker,
and they have different methods of cheating at poker, but they're there.
Yeah. So so now I play mainly video poker, and I'm not too
worried about casinos cheating. I play slots and there are casinos that I know
are not playing fair. Whether it's legal cheating or not, I don't know.
But there are casinos here in Vegas and elsewhere who are not who are
taking unfair advantage of players, and you just have to learn what those are
and avoid that situation. And yeah, that's because life is a gamble,
right as life is a gamble. Yeah, well, good, thank you
for doing this. I think that's a good place to end it. And
as a tribute to gambling with an Edge, we should do a recommended for
the end of the show. Do you have a recommended? I have a
couple. Let me try the first one and see if that goes. I
just finished the book called American Prometheus, which is the book in the Night
the two thousand five book on which the movie Oppenheimer was based. So Oppenheimer
is of course, he was the father of the atomic bomb. He led
the Los Alamos laboratory where the first atomic bomb was done. Later in life,
regretted what he had done, was taken down by political enemies later.
So Prometheus is a person in Greek mythology maybe who did really really well,
but they ended up killing him because he'd had done so well well. My
recommended is a book that we have been recommending for over a year has finally
come out, and that is James gross Jean's new book called The Ultimate Report.
And it is a book that has the basic strategy for I believe it's
six of the most popular carnival games in the casinos, Ultimate Texas, Hold
Him, Mississippi stud Criss Cross Poker. And if you play those games at
all, you really need this book because the vast majority of people play these
games so horrendously you would have no chance of ever winning any money just because
people play the game so badly. And so this book has a basic strategy
for each of those games and a simplified basic strategy that is easy to memorize
for each of them as well. And so that's if if you like those
carnival games and casinos, that is my recommended I'm actually looking forward to get
to reading that book. One of my biggest disappointments on Gambling with an Edge
is James. We never got him on the air. Yeah. Well he
was one of those most frequently asked about by listeners saying can you get him?
And I always said no, you know, there are a few guys
like that that just you know, don't want the Gelco was another one.
Yeah, yeah, so but yeah, I mean the thing is, even
if you don't play the games, uh, he's such a good writer,
you know. And so yeah, so I'm not a carnival game player,
I will definitely read it. I will learn something about video poker by reading
James write about carnival games. He just has the things he looks at are
good. I've not seen the book yet and I'm looking forward to picking it
up a copy. Yeah. So that's it for this week, and as
always, you can reach me at life is a gamble Pad at gmail dot
com or I'm on Twitter at r WM twenty one and I'll see you next time.