Speaker 1: Good afternoon.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Gambling with an Edge.
Speaker 1: Now Here are your hosts, Bob Dancer and Richard Munchkin.
Speaker 3: Good afternoon, Welcome to Gambling with an Edge. I'm Bob
Dancer and I'm Richard Munchkin. Today our guest is Jake Jacob,
who is Richard's older brother, talking about his first autobiography
called Have Bets, Will Travel. Jake Jacob's welcome the Gambling
with an Edge. Hi, it's nice to be here, and
actually it's technically wrong. I wrote the autobiography of Jake
when I was six years old.
Speaker 4: Okay, before we talk about your second autobiography, how'd you
get started gamblings?
Speaker 1: Well, I played games for money, but I wouldn't really
call that gambling. You know, probably everybody in America has
played poker for at least pennies at some point, so
you know, I'll distinguish gambling from playing, you know, for
a living. And I got started because munch called me
up one night and he said, are you interested in
moving to Las Vegas and learning to count cards? Because
if you are, I know a team that is looking
for players, and they're taking on people with no experience.
And I said oh yeah. It was winter in Chicago
and I was more than ready to move to Las Vegas,
I'll bet so. Uh.
Speaker 2: Just to add to that story, I told him read
this book and look at this chart, and you know,
learn these index numbers for you know, when the when
the count is over zero, you you stand on sixteen
against a ten, you know, things like that. And he
got there and you know, I said, so you did that,
and he's like, yep, yep, I did that and I
learned it and I've got the numbers. And I was like,
all right, well so you know, tell me, tell me
the index numbers. And he's like, uh, you hit seventeen
against a deuce at minus twenty four.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 5: You don't need.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it just learned all the numbers.
Speaker 1: A funny thing that, you know, relating to that though,
when writing the book, I was telling a story, you know,
I mentioned that most like jack hands are just not
very interesting. You know, you're you're okay, you here, or
your stand your double bullum, it's all the same thing
over and over again. But I had a really really
unusual play come up. I had a pair of threes
against a seven, and it was right not to split
and so I hit, and I caught a ten, and
of course if it was right not to split, it
was also right not to hit. So I now stood
on sixteen against the seven. The dealer turned over nine
and busted. And this actually happened to me twice a
year apart. So I had the identical hand in the
identical parlay twice. But I was talking too munchkin, I think,
and I said something about it, and he said, well,
you know, there's no number you know, for not splitting
three's when the count gets high. And I said, oh, yeah,
I'm sure there is. And I looked in long and
it's not in long. So I had to go out
and buy a copy of Julian Braun's book, the book
that I learned from. And in Julian Braun's book, if
you're playing four decks, dealer stands on soft seventeen, which
is what I would have been playing back in nineteen
eighty two, there is an index number. And you know,
so you do stand freeze against a seven if the
colb is greater than plus.
Speaker 2: Twelve, not stan you hit hit I mean yeah, yeah,
I mean not not split.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And of all the blackjack players out there, what percentage.
Do you think know that number?
Speaker 1: Even the ones who.
Speaker 2: Know the number, probably none of them have ever had
the play happen.
Speaker 1: Right, you know, right? I mean the only the only
guy I ever met that knew the number was the
man who ran my first team, Arthur Goldberg. I remember
once we had some conversation about that number being unusual.
So he must have also hit Bronze book.
Speaker 4: Well it wasn't even in Peter Griffin.
Speaker 2: Probably was, but Peter, yeah, yeah, I think we have
to dig for it. I think, actually, no, you know what,
it probably wasn't because I don't know if Peter had
index numbers for the high low in his book. I
don't think he'd.
Speaker 4: But now there are there's a ton of stories in
this book. I hope you like stories. Now, listeners to
this show will recognize many of the characters in the story,
and since Munchkin is a regular character in some of
these stories, you've heard Munchkins versions of the same story
on the air. Now we also learned the name of
about thirty bar girls of the nineteen eighties work in Korea,
Hong Kong, or other Asian locales. I am struggling to
find why I want to know the name of thirty
bar girls from the eighties in Asia. Do you have
any good answer to that? Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the I think that with most blackjack books,
or most gambling books, people you know, say, Okay, you know,
I went to the I went to the table, and
I did this, and so it's really about the actual
act of gambling, and there's certainly a lot of that
in my book. But I did things in the book. Oh,
I did things in my life which I put in
the book, which happened. I think only because I was
a gambler. I was just telling somebody the other day,
I said, you know, in the book, I talk about
walking down a pitch black alley in Korea following a pimp.
I've got one hundred thousand dollars in my pocket. I've
only been in the country for a week. I don't
speak Korean. I'm looking for a stranger who I've been
told does not speak English, who might be able to
help me change money. And you know, I'm thinking, boy,
I hope this turns out. Okay, Now, what can go wrong? Yeah, Now,
that's the kind of thing that you know, if I said, well,
I did that because I was a gambler. People would
say that makes sense, But I also, you know, once
walked down a dark alley in Cola Lumpo looking for
the world's best noodles. And that also happened because I
was a gambler and wouldn't have happened if I wasn't.
And you know, the bar girls, it was part of
the scene. I mean, you know the girls that you mentioned,
you know I was dating, They weren't all bar girls.
You know. The first one that I mentioned, I think
is a Rah. And you know what attracted me to
her is that she could count up to ten of
the forty eighth minus one, you know, using the Korean
system of numbers, and not many people you know, know
the names of you know, really really large numbers. And
I you know, I said, now this is this is
a woman after my own heart. So that's how we
started dating.
Speaker 4: Wow, I could see just imagine the interview process on that.
So I'm old enough to remember the Western that ran
for six seasons starting in nineteen fifty seven called Have Gun,
Will Travel? Was that show the inspiration for the title
of your book?
Speaker 1: It was? Yeah, yeah, you could call me the Paladin
of gambling.
Speaker 4: Do you see your Do you see analogs between you
and Richard Boone's character.
Speaker 1: No, not really. I just I like the title. I
you know, I struggled with a good title, and I
decided that that one resonated.
Speaker 2: I was drawn more toward Maverick. He was the one
who was a gambler in those older and he always
had a thousand dollars bill pinned on the inside of
his jacket just in case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, that's what this country needs, is a
good thousand dollars bill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Korea had them.
Speaker 5: I mean they were they were checks, but yeah, yeah,
but yo, Singapore negotia checks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Singapore not only has thousand dollars bills, but they
have ten thousand dollar bills how and they used to
be in circulation, but they I believe they still exist,
but the government really tried to take them out of circulation,
and about ten years ago or so it became a very,
very big deal. I remember my favorite money changer freaked
out when I brought one to him and he said,
where did you get that? And I said, I think
I got that from you. Actually.
Speaker 4: Now, this book covers the start of your gambling career
basically through the end of the eighties.
Speaker 1: Through nineteen ninety two, the spring of nineteen ninety two. Now,
you didn't stop gambling at that time, and I'm confident
you have many stories from later years. I am working
on a sequel. And you know again, when I started out,
I thought, well, I'm going to write, you know, about
my gambling career from soup to nuts. And I I
started writing it, and I said, you know, oh, this
would be an awfully, awfully long book if I covered
everything that happened over the past forty some years. And
so I tried to narrow it. So I didn't even
include all of my blackjack play. I just I thought
that I had covered, you know, the most interesting portions
of it. I talk a little bit about playing backamt
but not you know, not a lot I'd mentioned. I think,
you know, horse racing would be in my future. But
so I'm now working on a book that will look
only at horse racing.
Speaker 4: Was that in Hong Kong or other places as well?
Speaker 1: Well? It's actually in. It will be in three parts.
The first part I worked for a guy before I
ever got into gambling. I worked at a cab company
and my boss was a degenerate gambler, and he lost
over half a million dollars betting on horses, which was
a bigger problem than it sounds me because he didn't
have a half a million dollars, so we had to
steal it from Western Union. So, you know, a pretty
interesting situation, and I had kind of a ringside seat
for the whole thing. But that's that's a short section.
In nineteen the fall of nineteen ninety seven, my old
friend Bill Benner got a hold of me and I
knew from visits to Hong Kong in the eighties in
the nineties, and also you know, playing blackjack with the
team Bill was involved with in Atlantic City. I knew
that he, you know, was over there betting on horses.
I had actually watched Alan Woods betting on horses on
racing days because I used to stay at his apartment
and Bill. They had had problems and Bill called up.
I wanted to know if I wanted to come over
and run bets for him, So I went over there
in January of nineteen ninety eight, right after the tie
open Backham return, and then you know, worked for him
off and on for about five years. I had a
key to an apartment in Hong Kong that belonged to
the the operation, and so I used to when I
was on my way tour from somewhere like Thailand, I'd,
you know, call up and say it is anybody using
the apartment? The answer was always no, and then I,
you know, I'd come and stay in the apartment. I'd say, hey,
if you need, you know, you needed anybody to work a
couple of weekends. But then I that had, you know,
petered out. I mean, he kind of moved his operation.
He was still betting on Hong Kong racing, but he
wasn't using outside people to come in and bet. And
I was here in Tucson, I just finished writing my
mystery novel. I got a call from one of the
guys that I knew from both Atlantic City and from
from Hong Kong, and he said, do you want to
come over to Japan. It's a temporary job, just three months,
possibly six. You could come over and everything could fall
apart right away. So you'll be guaranteed one month's pay
even if you get here and have to turn around
and go back. But otherwise, you know, your travel expenses
are paid for, your housing is paid for, and you know,
you get a monthly salary, a pretty good one. So
are you interested? And I said, you know, heck yeah.
And I went over there and they, you know, it
looked like they were going to use me then after
the new year for another three months. And by that
point I thought, okay, you know, I'm kind of in
on the ground floor here, so how can I make
myself indispensable? And it was sixteen years before I came
back to Tucson. I mean, I came back for visits,
but I lived overseas from the time I went over
in the fall of two thousand and four until the
fall of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: So I want to because the book is long and big,
and as Bob said, many many stories. But you mentioned
playing in Atlantic City for Bill, and there are just
two stories that I'd like you to tell, you know,
so the first the first is about needing batteries for
the computer. Yeah, okay, And we should preface that by
saying you guys were using legally using computers in the casino.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, the computers. I think we're legal into
the early twenty first century. I read some of you,
James Grostein playing with them, you know, about two thousand
and two, just because that was.
Speaker 2: That was in California. We played right up all New
Year's Eve up until the midnight when the law changed.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I don't know, and you know, and actually
I almost got involved in testifying before the New Jersey
Senate subcommittee. I went to a hearing of theirs, but
I didn't have to have to talk. But yeah, the
computers were still legal. So we're we're playing with computers.
And if you've ever played with computers, you know that
it's a pain in the neck keeping them up and running.
They're constantly breaking down. There's all sorts of equipment issues.
And one of the issues they go through batteries. And
the batteries were you know, D batteries, they were big batteries.
So the guy that was in charge of maintaining everything
was Richard Doherty, who was a legendary player. He is
the second most arrested player in Atlantic idiot, and he
was the guy who was, you know, giving all the
odd jobs, and he took care of the equipment, you know,
quite well. But anyway, he needed batteries. He said, come on,
you want to go get batteries. And Atlantic City is
this long sleazy boardwalk with fortune tellers and saltwater taffy
and dollar stores. And we went into one of these
dollar stores. The owner was a fat guy with a
cigar clenched between his teeth, and his cashier was named Mona,
and she had, you know, the big hair, and she's
snapping her gum. And we walk in there and Richard says,
you got any D batteries. The guy says, yeah, yeah,
we got round his cigar. He so, yeah, we got
de batteries. Back here, come on. So we go back
in this aisle and down on the bottom shelf there's
a there's a box and it's got about forty D
batteries and Richard says, yeah, okay, I'll take them. And
the guy says all of them. And Richard says, yeah,
take all of them. And he said, kid, what are
you gonna do with forty D batteries? And Richard's eyes
get really big and he said, oh, well, you know,
I got my wife one of those vibrator singies. And
she said, honey, if you bring home some batteries tonight
the night. And the guy, he's trying to picture what
you can do with forty D batteries he just about
hold his cigar. He's like, do you hear that, Mona?
She said, yeah, guy born his wife one of those
vibrator thinges. Yeah, I hoid.
Speaker 4: The first time I heard you tell that story, it
was I think it was written on Facebook and you
said that this was Richard and I didn't realize it
was Richard Doherty. I was pretty sure it was Richard Munchkin.
And and it does sound like a one liner that
Munchkin could have come up with. Well that's proved, and
so I was. I didn't understand it. I didn't understand
actually what happened, but it was still funny.
Speaker 2: So the other story that I think you should tell,
and this is really more in the weeds for our
blackjack players out there, is the story of the memory game.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was why I went to Atlantic City in
the first place. Bill Benner had he'd been on the
phone with the Munchkin and he said, you know, any
cardcomers with a good memory? And Bunch said, well, what
about Jake. So he caught me up and he says,
you know, can you come out to Atlantic City? And
so I got there and apparently Bill had been playing
the high Rollers pit at Harris. And you know, you
probably know if you're a blackjack player, that casinos, every
casino has a routine. Dealers don't just decide, well, I'll
shuffle this way now and I'll shuffle a different way
the next time. They have to follow a set routine
that's come down from on high. And the Bill noticed
that there was a dealer there named Scott, and Scott
had an unusual move. He was not the only dealer
with this move. Maybe two percent of the dealers out
there had and usually they were experienced dealers. When the
cards are interwoven, I mean, in theory they're interwoven, but
in practice, some of these dealers miss time their move,
and so they start releasing the cards with one hand
before they begin releasing with the other hand. And the
effect of that is that a number of cards what
we were calling a clump, drops down unshuffled before the
rest of the cards begin to interweave. And you know,
some do it only a little bit, others do it
a lot. Scott did it a whole lot. He would
drop fifteen or twenty unshuffled cards because his timing was
off that much, pretty consistently. And but you know, one
of the things about it is that, you know, these
clumping dealers, they tend to always drop with one hand
or the other. So Scott was, you know, shuffling, and
it meant that, you know, there was a certain group
of cards that were getting that were left unshuffled all
the way through the shuffle, and Bill you know, had
to a limited extent, been taking advantage of that. He like,
memorized some cards, go to the bathroom, write them down,
come back chat with Scott a little more. While Scott
was on a dead game and he'd be memorizing a
few more cards, he'd go back to the bathroom and
you know, try to figure out what to do about it.
But this had evolved. So the way it worked is
I now I had gone in and I had you know,
introduced myself to the casino by playing some baccara for
a thousand and two thousand a hand, which also let
me accumulate some orange chips, because I was going to
be going in there with a lot lot of orange
chips when we played. And then I set up a suite.
And in those days you could actually get away with
checking in without ID. They didn't like it, but it
could be done. And you know, so I was going
in under you know, a fake name. I wasn't giving
them my real name. I had with me a woman
named Anita. Anita and EARV were members of the same
country club as Tommy Hyland, and Tommy used a lot
of people from the country club as big players as
you know, what have you. So Anita was going to
be with me posing as my girlfriend to eat cards.
And this was also a psychological ploy of Bills. See,
he figured that the trophy girlfriend was something that you know,
bosses knew. But Anita was twice my age and so
she definitely did not look like a trophy maybe a
trophy grandmother. But anyway, she was, you know, going to
distract the bosses who were going to be wondering what
I was doing with her. At least that was what
Bill thought. So we would go in and we would
bet five hands the first couple of rounds, but it
was mainly the first round that was of interest and
somebody else. We had various people that had been trained
in the Harry Lorraine memory system would come by the
first hand of the shoe and they would memorize the
ranks of the cards. They didn't need to worry about
the suits, and then they would run to a house
phone and they would call up to my suite and
they'd rattle them off to Bill, and Bill would then
call the rents where we had our apartment. That would
be input into a computer and the computer would analyze
and it would determine that, you know, if we were
in say the let's say we were at the third
card in the string. Well, they what you got was
we looked at the third through twelve cards in the string,
and it would say, okay, you're at the say the
third card in the string, and if you play two
hands of basic strategy, you can win, you know, two bats.
Or maybe you play one hand and you play mimicking
the dealer. You know always hit the seventeen and they
always stand at seventeen. You mimic the dealer and you
play one hand and you're guaranteed a winner. So it
you know, you'd work that out for ten cards, the
third through twelfth card. Now I have memorized the suit
and rank of the first two cards in that string,
so I'm keeping those two cards in my head. It
gets to the shuffle. Scott is now shuffling the cards
and at this point. I and I had practiced this
move we had we had I was wearing a suit
and in my pocket I had a pager. Now we
had propped the pager so that it was resting high
on a wad of toilet papers, so it was high inphanacy,
and the pocket was propped open so it wouldn't accidentally
close over the top of the pager, but it was
concealed by my suitcoat. Now I had this cheap three
dollars watch. If Anita was the cheap three dollar girlfriend,
this was the cheap three dollar watch that would be
the non rolex. And because I was an eccentric millionaire,
so I had this move down where I would, you know,
I and I practiced it. I would I would take
my arm and i'd you know, go like this to
look at the watch, and it would move my suitcoat
back and I would glance down at the watch and
just for about two or three seconds. But what I'd
really be looking at that was the pager and there
would be a string, a ten string of numbers, So
in that glance, I would memorize the ten digits and
then I would, you know, put my arm down and
the suit would cover up the pagery again, so the
eye in the sky would only have had that two
or three second window of opportunity, and it's unlikely they
would ever notice that, you know, there was a pager
with numbers in there. So now I'm I'm remembering the
two cards from the previous shoe the two cards from
the new shoe firsthand, and I've cut the string to
about a deck and a half in now, Anita and
I would be playing, and she'd be eating cards, playing
triple five hundreds to eat cards because we had a
five hundred dollars minimum game while I'm playing orange chips
thousand dollar chips. And then I'd tell her, oh, sit out,
I feel you know, I feel lucky of playing one
hand for now. And then what would happen is when
the two cards key cards appeared in order, I'd go, okay,
I mean the string, and let's say that there was
card number one, card number two, and two more cards appeared,
so now I know that I needed the third number
in the string. And let's say that third number was six,
So a six would tell me that I needed to
play three hens of five thousand dollars of reverse basic strategy.
In other words, if I had like thirteen against a five,
I would hit, but you know, if the dealer had
a big card, I would stand and you know whatever,
and so that you know, in theory, we'd be generating
a lot winners. What made this more complicated than it
sounds is that Scott was unreleased. Now luckily, you know,
it was only a four table pit, but it meant
that I had to try to predict where he was
going to be and be there when he you know,
when he shuffled. But I'd also have to try to
get you know, the h the first hand and memorize
the key cards. And just to make things more interesting,
Bill couldn't stand not to get you know, up to
the minute play by play reports, especially if there had
been a lock winter or might have been a lock winter.
So he wanted me practically every shoe to go up
to the suite. So now we'd go up to the
suite and I'd report in and then he'd say, okay,
go on back. Now I'd go back, and now I'd
be looking around the pit and trying to figure out
what table do I want to be at, And then
we'd hit that table and say to the boss says okay,
could I have a five hundred dollars minimum on this table,
and then you know, we'd leave again. And I guess
they thought I was banging the Jesus out of Anita.
But whatever they were thinking, you know, they began to
think it was pretty weird. And the amount of heat,
I mean, they were taking the play, but they'd figured
out that I'd given them false you know, a false
name and false information. And they had two bosses watching
me all the time. But whenever, you know, lock winter
would come up, or you know, a big swing, because
you know, randomly I was having big swings with amounts.
I was betting there'd suddenly be four more bosses, so
there'd be six bosses lined up in a falling. So
all of them standing there staring at me. Well, I'm
trying to look nonchalant, but you know, remember all these numbers,
and you know, I've got a good memory. But after
a while I realized that I was having trouble forgetting,
you know, because by now I'd memorized a whole lot
of two card combinations and a whole lot of ten
digit numbers. And they were beginning as I got more
and more tired and stressed and I'd go up to
the room and you know, two o'clock in the morning
and there were twenty people crammed.
Speaker 2: In the room.
Speaker 1: There's no room for me to sit or lie down
on the bed, so I'm lying on the floor and
people are stepping over me and I'm just you know,
and then they'd go, okay, time to go and yeah, yeah, okay,
and go back down and I do it again, and
you know, by four o'clock in the morning when we wrapped,
I was just you know, I was limp.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, when when we talk about moving beyond counting,
I think many people have no idea how complicated and
difficult some of these plays can be. But the edge
on that play was just massive, sure.
Speaker 1: I mean, because you know, when you get a lock winner,
you've got a lock winner. So you're betting one, two,
three hens of five thousand at a time knowing that
you're going to win. Yet that's pretty strong.
Speaker 2: So even if you only get one shoe per hout,
it's still a great, you know play.
Speaker 1: Well, it turned out that Bill told me that there
were like a half a dozen guys that tried to
do it, and there were only two of us, so
were able to do it, you know, to actually pull
it off. The other guy, of course, was you know,
Mike Mihalic and who was part of the you know,
part of the team at the time. And Mike, Mike,
I guess got you know, he had Scott on the
table all night long. Now, I generated and I can't
remember why it was on the mount. I generated thirty
eight thousand, five hundred winners. Mike generated sixty. But the
difference is that we took a net loss on you know,
after all the smoke cleared and he added up everybody's
you know, action, we had lost seventeen thousand dollars. That
was the actual result. Mike plays, he generates sixty thousand
in ev but he wins one hundred and fifty. And
he also he was playing some baccara for cover and
he won another twenty on the baccara table. And the
night before he had gone in and played some baccaraj
just to establish himself, and he won fifty. And Harris
thought that he was up to some kind of baccara
scam the one hundred and fifty and Blackjack had any
even mention to it. Was the baccara that was messing
with their minds.
Speaker 4: Wow. Another story that I like was from Korea. I
think you were part of a team and some money
had gone missing and you were falsely accused of it.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, that was way back in. That was
in Las Vegas when I first started on.
Speaker 4: And you had to take a light detector test, right,
and that had interesting results. Can you share that story?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, what happened? The team had terrible results.
This was the very first team I ever played on,
and I personally I couldn't win. And I kept asking people,
you know, come watch me play, and they'd watch me
play and they'd say, you know, you're not doing anything wrong,
but you're not very lucky.
Speaker 5: Exactly what happened to me when I started. So I
was stuck fourteen thousand dollars, but the bank roll was stuck.
We were on a forty thousand dollars bankroll, and the
bank roll was stuck, you know, at least that much,
maybe more. And Arthur called a halt and he wanted
to refinance, and he went to Chuck, the head of
the Czech team, who was a friend of his, and
Chuck was going to refinance, but asked, did everybody on
the team take polygraph tests. So I have to get
up early in the morning, which is something I hadn't
done in ten years. But I got up early on
I think it was a Saturday morning, and I went
in and there's a young guy there, you know, looks
like a cop want to be and he you know, hi,
how are you? And I don't know if you've ever
had a polygraph test or seen a real one administered,
But what they do is they ask you a series
of questions, general questions, and they established kind of a
baseline questions like, you know, is your name Bob the answer?
And do you live in Las Vegas? That that kind
of thing to which you expect to answer yes. They
actually want you to answer yes.
Speaker 1: Oh. But first thing that well, they asked these questions,
but they also they perform a card trick. They have
you pick a card and then they go through the
deck a couple of times, and you're supposed to answer
no to every card, and then they say, you know,
was your card so and so? And when you say yes,
you know it was such and such, they say, aha,
you know you are you know, a good candidate for
a light detective test. This shows that the test works
on you and.
Speaker 2: It's a card trick. That's a scam, right they know.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it is. Nobody's ever said yes, that's what's
going on, but I'm certain that's what's going on. That
you know, they're psychologically prepping you for for the test,
especially in light of what happened. I'm sure that it
was a scam. Because anyway, oh yeah, you're a good
candidate for the test, so great. So there are about
five questions that are these baseline neutral questions, and then
there are five questions about, you know, did you ever
tip with bank well money? And have you ever violated
team policy? And did you steal any money? And a
couple more like that. So we run through the test
twice and again that's I guess standard procedure. And now
he says, I've got to go out of the room
take care of something, but we'll probably do the test
one more time. Do you want to think about any
of your answers? And so anyway comes back in. We
go through another time, and you know, I answered the
same way each each way and each time, and now
he says, well, he said, are you sure you don't
want to change any of your answers? And I said, yeah,
I'm sure, you know, I you know, my answers are
my answers. And he said, well, you know, I think
you've lied all the questions. I think you stole the
fourteen thousand dollars and that's what I'm going to have
to report to mister Golver. And I was stunned and
I said what and he oh yeah, and so so
I said, well, you know, you can report anything you want,
but you know I didn't steal any money. I didn't
lie to any questions. And I walked out of there,
and you know, I felt like I was going to
pass out. I mean, this was Kafka asked, is the
word that describes it? I just I couldn't believe what
had happened. And so I got right on the phone
and I called up Arthur and I told him, you
know what happened. They had a team meeting without me,
and nobody on the team believed the results that they
wanted to be retested. So I go back in and
this time it's an older guy and he looks at
me and he smiles and he said I knew you
were going to be fat. And I said, oh, yeah, thanks,
how's that? And he said well, us fat guy. He
was also overweight. He said, us fat guys, the test
doesn't really work on us. And he suddenly, here's your
results from last week, which it turns out it was
his son that had administered the test. He owned the firm,
his son and administered the test the week before. So
he's showing me and he said, now, this past registers,
you know, your respiration. This pen registers the electrical impulses
and your fingertips based on your perspiration, and you know,
this is your heart rate. And so he was showing
me that two and a half of the pins, you know,
two pins completely just toting flatline, nothing, no result. It
was like, you know, I wasn't even there. One of
them was totally erratic. And then only one of them,
the fingertip one was showing, you know, some actual signs
of life. And so what had happened was that the
first examiner didn't understand blackjack and assumed that his mission
was to find somebody who had stolen money. That was
the way he understood what was happening. Nobody had stolen
any money. And it didn't help that when he was
asking everybody else on the team had dirty secrets. You know,
they they had tipped lots of money. They were making
cover bets. Some of them were paying for taxis with
team money. They want of them paid the rent with
team money. And then he gets to me, and I'm like, no,
are you kidding? That's against the rules. I wouldn't do
it anything like that. And actually I had tipped. I tipped,
you know. He says, well, you know, like, is it
more than three hundred dollars. No, it's less than five dollars.
You know, the cocktail waitress would come around with my coke,
and you know, sometimes I took a fifty cent piece
from an odd black jacket gave it tour and you know,
I probably did that a couple of times, and you know,
it was team money, but I felt a little bad
about it. But anyway, and it turned out that the
least anybody else on the team had tipped was one
hundred dollars. So you know, now I come in and
I sound like I'm too good to be true, but
I'm also the guy who lost fourteen thousand. So anyway,
the guy said, okay, we're going to do the test again.
Now hold your arm. He had me hold my arm
real tight against my side, and he said that'll help.
And now it went from about one and a half
pins to about two and a half pins. And he said, okay, well,
now it looks like three of the questions you're telling
the truth and the other two are ambiguous. And so
I'll report that to mister Goldberg. And you know that
was and then we got refinanced and when life went on,
but I vowed that I would never again take any
sort of you know, whether there was a light detector,
whether it was sodium pentathol, which was once proposed. I mean,
you know, it was not a not proposed to me specifically,
but just a team that was trying to recruit me
mentioned that they were going to use it was either
sodium pentathal or voice stress as policy the test members
of the team. And I said, I don't care what
you're doing. I'm not going through that again. You know,
so not interested.
Speaker 2: So we could go on here all day long, literally,
because there are so many stories in the book. But
I think another one that people will appreciate is the
boss at the Tropicana asking you if you are at
a hard counter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so I had been getting weird heat, you know,
i'd go into these places, and actually I had gotten
back room at the Union Plaza and they literally had
seen nothing. I mean, I went in and it was
a Friday night. It was really crowded, and I decided
it was too crowded to play. So, you know, I
maybe I had varied my bet from twenty five dollars
to fifty dollars and I got back ruled, and I
was pretty freaked out about that. But I went into
the Tropicana and I figured, great, you know, I'm going in.
It's a high limit casino and I never played the
Tropicana at all to this point. So I went in
there on day shift and I sit down at a
table and the two bosses in the pit looked at me,
and I just picked up body language that they were
reacting to my presence, and I thought, I am really
getting paranoid because these people have never seen me, so
you know what, you know, why would they be reacting
like that. I must be imagining things and I'm playing,
and you know, I haven't had any big bets yet,
I haven't done anything. And another boss, a high roller,
sat down and he asked for a thousand dollars marker
and this other boss, who turned out to be the
shift manager, came to the table to fill the marker
and he turns to me and he says, do you
count cards? And I said what? And he said are
you a card counter? And I said who me? No,
you know I don't count cards. And he said are
you sure? And I said, well, I know basic strategy.
I don't know if it was a good answer now,
but that was, you know, I said I know basic strategy.
And he said, oh, you know basic strategy, but you
don't count cards. And I said no, I don't count
cards and he said okay. So he leaves and then
he comes back and he said are you sure you
don't count cards? And I said, yeah, I'm really sure
I don't count cars. Would you be willing to swear
to it? And I said yeah and he said okay.
He said, raise your right hand, soa what he said, Well,
I'm raised your right hand. I said okay. And he
said do you solemnly swear that you do not count cards?
And I said I do solemnly swear that I do
not count cards. I said, well, okay, that's good enough
for me, and he walked off and I said, what
the hell is that? And the dealer was kind of,
you know, freaked out by this. He said, I don't know,
he's always clowning around. Then he comes back a third
time and he said, now you don't count cards, right,
And I said right, And he said you swore to
it right now?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Right, I swore to it. And he said, but this
sure looks like you. And he's got a picture of me,
and he shows it to the dealer he said, looks
like him, doesn't it. And so you know, now I
knew I wasn't going to be able to play there,
but I was wondering about the picture, and so I
called over one of the bosses and I said, where
did that guy go? You know, he had a picture
of me. I'd like to know where he got that picture.
And he said, we'll talk to them playing close security
out in the aisle. So I went over and I said,
you know, there was a boss that was just here
blah blah blah, and they said, have you ever played
at the Hilton? About a week before, I had made
the mistake of playing in front of a notorious boss
named Mike Sterling who had barred me, and apparently they
took a picture of me from the eye in the
sky and had put out a flyer, and this is
why I was getting all of this heat. Now, I
thought that, you know, people are never gonna believe this story.
And I got home and the phone starts ringing off
the hook. And it turned out that every card counter
in town was in the Tropicana watching while this was
going on. You know, I mean I was surrounded by
a guy from my team, a guy from Munchkin's team,
a guy from Chuck's team. They were all in there,
all watching him.
Speaker 2: So I guess it used to be a lot more fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had to change my look. I wound up,
you know ya getting a disguise.
Speaker 4: Well, Munchkin has told that he did not like wearing disguises.
Did you like wearing disguises?
Speaker 1: The only part I didn't like was I got contact lenses.
I've worn glasses since I was seven. I had eye
operations recently, which I have very mixed feelings about. I mean,
they were for the health of my eyes, and that
part's good, But otherwise, if Baginie came along and said,
do you want your vision restored to status quo ante,
I'd say, yeah, now do it? You know right away,
because I really don't like the way I see right now,
but I can see well enough without glasses not to
not to be wearing them right now. I got contact
lenses at that time, and I absolutely hated contact lenses.
I'd come home and my eyes would be on fire.
I practically ripped them out of my eyes when I
got home. And I several years later, I did the
same thing in Korea. I got barred at Walker Hill,
and I went back to wearing contact lenses, and it
was the same problem. But otherwise, I you know, I
got a haircut, and I shaved my beard. I had
a beard, shave my beard off, and you know that
all changed the way I look pretty drastically.
Speaker 2: Is there one story that is one of your favorites
that we haven't gone over yet.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I kind of like this story. I mean,
I'm telling it an honor of Bob, I think, because
he was so fascinated by all the Korean girls my
first trip.
Speaker 4: By the inclusion of so many Korean girls.
Speaker 1: So it's the last weekend of the trip and I'm
supposed to play on the graveyard shift, which means I
have to get up about six o'clock in the morning
and I walk up to go to the toilet around
one and I was trying to go back to sleep,
and I hear her knocking at the door, and I,
you know, who can that be? And I went to
the door. I opened the door and there is this
Korean girl standing there and she is one of the
most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life. I mean,
you know, even in only years since, she's just you know,
just gorgeous. And she doesn't speak any English, but she
seems interested in coming in, and I'm, you know, a
good host. I invite her in and they anyway, in
the morning. I tried to indicate that she could, you know, stay,
she didn't have to leave, but she insisted on coming
down to the lobby and started talking. There were a
couple of women, older women that slept behind the front desk.
They were cleaning women, and she bumped a cigarette from
them and was sitting there talking with them when I
left gone when I came back. So the next day,
we're checking out of the hotel and I'm responsible for
paying everybody's room, and the manager's on duty, and that
you know, I thought about this, I said, mister Lee,
I said there was this girl, miss Park, that came
to my room the other night. He said, oh, can
I talk to you when he takes me outside? And
he said, do you know mama son? And that's so
I know what a mama son is. And he said,
well sometimes guests, he said, they they you know, call
oh captain and Bell Captain talked to Mamasan. May give
Mamasan's thirty five thousand and one, and then she sent
girl you know and I said yeah. He said, well,
he said Saturday night, he said, guest in three or five.
He talked to Bell Captain. My room was five O three.
Speaker 4: Uh fu. That is a cute story the U and
for our audience. I did enjoy these stories. And Jake
is very comfortable with the English language, and we'll throw
in words you've never heard of periodically, and uses nice
turns of phrases, and he will prove to you beyond
the doubt that he is smarter than you are. But
it is a book that I enjoyed very much, and
I hope it does really well for you.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you, and I'm glad you enjoyed it. I
hope everybody that reads it does, and I hope everybody
reads it a lot of people getting joyment out of it.
Speaker 2: Well, I usually ask all our guests at the end
of the show, favorite restaurant in Las Vegas that is
not in a casino?
Speaker 1: Huh? Probably these days? What the heck is the name
of the place? I've been there four or five times,
and you know, I go more by where it's located.
It's over on the northwest side of town, at the
desert in out you know, pretty far west. It's a
seafood place. I never have trouble finding it, you know
when I when I go there. But my wife likes oysters,
and there are oyster bars and casinos, and you have
to go to a casino and fight the traffic and
the parking and all that. And this place is really
easy to especially since we had to stay at Airbnb's
over on that end of town. So but since I
can't remember the name off the top of my head,
let me switch and I'll say Lotus of Siam. My
wife his Thai, my daughter is Thai. I've lived in Thailand,
and most restaurants that people say are good Thai restaurants aren't.
But Lotus of Siam is really good. And my wife agrees.
Speaker 2: They just reopened the original location, which was closed for
a long time.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that just reopened and they now have they
also have one in the Red Rock Casino, so yeah.
Speaker 1: And then they have you know, they have a fancy
one on Flamingo right right.
Speaker 4: So now Richard lives on the east side of town.
Why on earth when you come to Vegas would you
find an airbnb on the northwest part of town. You
could get him anywhere.
Speaker 1: Well, I try to get close to Chinatown if I
get close enough, which I managed once, my wife could
actually walk there when I was out there, you know,
doing this and that, because well, I'm when I'm coming
the next time, there's going to be a backham A
tournament going on, and you know, I'll be I'll be
busy for a few days and it would be nice
if she could. Yeah, I think we're a little too far,
but you know, if she can walk to Chinatown, she's happy.
And although the funny thing is that her favorite market
actually is over of the northeast end of town. It's
at McLeod and desert In. It's called the Lao Asia
Market and that's that's by far her favorite place. Very good,
thank you.
Speaker 4: It was a pleasure to listening to your stories again,
the ones that were in the book, and you shared
someone's today that work. So I wish the best of you.
Jay Richard, got hit, Royal flushes everybody. Good day, Free
audio post production biophonic dot com.