Here is a breakdown of some of the Best Bets in the casino—Best Bets for the casino. Worst bets for the player, as printed in The High Roller.

SOME OF THE BIGGEST PAYOFFS AT TABLE GAMES
1000-to-one: Royal flush at Let It Ride.
200-to-one: Straight flush at Let It Ride.
100-to-one: Royal flush at Caribbean Stud.
60-to-one: 4 or 17 in Sic Bo.
50-to-one: Straight flush at Caribbean Stud.
50-to-one: Four-of-a-kind at Let It Ride.
45-to-one: Joker and casino symbol on Big Wheel.
35-to-one: Inside number at Roulette.
30-to-one: 2 or 12 in Craps.
20-to-one: Four-of-a-kind at Caribbean Stud.
18-to-one: 5 or 16 at Sic Bo.
15-to-one: 3 or 11 in craps.

Like a newspaper listing contaminated beaches, and the Health Department listing the restaurants with serious cleanliness problems, I have listed these twelve worst bets for the player so as to warn you to avoid these wagers. Sure, BIG payoffs if you win—but the problem here is that it's a rather small chance for you to win.
Save your casino bankroll for betting on propositions that will give you at least a fighting chance to go home with some of the casino's money!

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After more than forty years of casino adventuring—and every casino visit has been an adventure—you might ask if I'm ahead of the game.

Early on in this book I promised to tell it like it is, and I have kept my word. Frankly, I cringe now when I think of some of my early stupidities in the casinos. The only reason I now dare to bare my shame is to warn you against doing what I did, and encourage you to do what I should have done.

I'll not dodge the question. The answer isn't a clear-cut yes or no.
At first I was a wide-eyed neophyte, overwhelmed by the razzle-dazzle of Las Vegas. My adventures were on a gambler's roller coaster—sometimes I'd come home with a score, too often I'd come back with just enough cash to pay my cab fare from the airport. I never took credit. What I lost, when I lost, was never rent money and definitely not any scared money. My seed money rarely exceeded $4,000—sometimes it was as much as five or six—and once foolishly $10,000 (it was a loser).

I'd cash $2,000 at a table, and keep the other thousands in my pocket. In the event that I hit a dry spell, I had the security of knowing that I had my reserve to fall back on. Occasionally I did win, and every now and then it was a goodie. After making my most memorable score of $31,125, 1 prudently invested most all of it in my mail-order book business,- I made damn sure I didn't take it back with me to Las Vegas!
As I made more trips West I became a more savvy gambler. No longer did I make the usual dumb mistakes. No longer did I depend on the slot machines to make my fortune. Gone was my obsession with beating Keno.

No longer did I make a foolhardy shot for the moon, and I didn't try to make a big score in any one casino. Smaller, more realistic payouts were now my goal, done carefully casino-by-casino.

Blackjack became my game of choice. Sure, baccarat had slightly better odds as did craps, but I found that I was more comfortable at blackjack, and the illusion that I had more control over the action.

And there is yet another dimension to the equation. Outside of the monetary winnings and losings I've experienced in my almost half-century of casino adventuring, there was the flavorsome lifestyle that accompanied it all, this during the most important years of my life. Perhaps I was most influenced by my long-time mentor, friend, and publisher, Lyle Stuart, who had—and still has—a James Bond way-of-life. He was the one who prodded me to fly all the way out to Las Vegas in 1960 for my first brief weekend stay, just to see a casino floor show: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford—the Rat Pack cavorting at the Sands.

The memory of that first trip and that first show is one of the fondest and most cherished of my life. There and then I was introduced to the casino—a fantasy world of glitter and gold. I've now spent almost a half-a-century "commuting" to Pleasure Island and enjoying most of it! (I use the term Pleasure Island as a symbolic name for all the casinos around the world that I have adventured in during a lifetime.)

For me, it has been a lot better than spending almost five decades of my life going fishing and watching TV in East Cupcake, Iowa. (My apologies to everyone living in East Cupcake. I'm sure you're happy there, but it just isn't my idea of fun.)

It's comforting for me to know that if ever I'm in a rut in Manhattan, at loose ends with myself, an adventure surely awaits me only two-hours away in Atlantic City, not to mention all those mouth-watering King Crab claws.

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With great fanfare fueled by an expensive media blitz, the Edinburgh Castle set sail on Wednesday, January 28, 1998, from a West 55th Street pier in Manhattan. New York's first quasi-legal gambling ship was about to set sail. On board were hundreds of gamblers, all eager to get past the three-mile limit and into International waters so they could play blackjack, roulette, craps, and baccarat, and the two hundred slot machines on board. Each of the passengers paid $99 for the overnight cruise, the weekday price of admission. On weekend trips the cost doubled to $199 per person.

Just three months after launching, Manhattan Cruises threw in the towel. This ended the first legal high-seas gambling ship venture from the Big Apple.
The problem, according to President Mickey Brown, was that there just weren't that many gamblers who would pay $199, or even the $99 weekday rate. He complained that the almost three hundred workers on the ship sometimes outnumbered the paying customers.

The aborted effort of Manhattan Cruises didn't dampen the enthusiasm of other cruise companies. Five other companies have forked over the hefty $100,000 application fee to New York's Gambling Control Commission, and are awaiting the city's okay before launching their own gambling cruises from both Manhattan and Brooklyn.

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Resorts was the first casino in Atlantic City in 1978. You stood in line to get in, and if you didn't have a jacket you were turned away at the door. Here's how the casino scene has changed in the first twenty years of legal gambling in Atlantic City:

Annual Visitors
1978: 9.4 million
1998: 34.0 million

Number of Slot Machines
1978: 893
1998-, 34,539

Number of Table Games
1978: 84
1998: 4,447

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Totally pissed off (with the ringing and the buzzer still buzzing), Tom, who originally intended to take his winnings in cash, announced that he wanted a check for his $10,000. The shift manager wasn't happy about that, for the casino's hope and expectation was that Tom would drop much of his winnings back into the slots.

Tom got his check and departed the casino. Two nights later he was dining with his girl friend at the Four Queens downtown when it suddenly dawned on him that he was doing it all wrong. They quickly finished their meal and he took a taxi back to the Desert Inn. There Tom passed the check into the cashier's cage and requested credit at the tables for the full amount. From table-to-table Tom and his lady went—blackjack, craps, roulette—every time signing markers for credit against his $10,000 check at the tables, all the while accumulating chips. Gambling ostentatiously, but in reality betting small, Tom kept slipping chips to his lady, who shuttled back-and-forth from the tables, cashing them in. When April 15 came around, along with his copy of the casino's W-2G tax form for his $10,000 win, Tom attached Xeroxes of $12,000 in markers. (To buffer his deductions, during the course of the evening he deposited with the cashier another $2,000 in cash for additional credit at the tables.) The Bottom Line: Won $10,000. Lost $12,000.
Total gambling tax liability: zero (The IRS will allow you to deduct losses only up to your documented winnings, but not a cent more.)

Xeroxes of casino markers are not the only way to prove you were a loser in the casinos. Any gambling losses you can show are applicable against your casino, lottery, or racetrack winnings. The Internal Revenue Service lumps all forms of gambling together, except for the stock market. (Nicolas Darvas once wrote a book entitled Wall Street: The Other Las Vegas.)

In the casino, the only gambling "receipts" available to the player are losing Keno tickets. Of course, you can keep a diary of where you played, what you played, and what you won and lost, but that's a monstrous pain in the ass, and tends to take the fun out of gambling. If you are fortunate enough to win big, and you need proof of gambling losses, the Keno trash cans are a good starting point. Just make sure your Keno tickets don't have coffee stains and cigarette burns. The race track and Off-Track Betting parlors are two other places to collect losing tickets. Be sure that tickets from the race track and betting parlors don't have heel marks. In case of an audit, IRS agents actually check your boxes of losing tickets for any tell-tale heel marks!

Almost everyone today knows about the random number enumerator microchips that controls slot machine payouts, but few know that changing the chip on the "hit" frequency—which can vary from 1 percent to 15 percent—is fairly simple. It's akin to changing the fuse in your fuse box at home. In Nevada, casinos can change RNE chips at will without notifying the Casino Control Board, as long as the new chips were previously approved.
The good news is that the casinos cannot change the frequency on either the video poker or video blackjack machines.

At one time it was a Federal offense to ship slot machines across state lines into states that banned them as illegal. This is no longer so. In fact, you can legally own an antique slot machine for your den or rumpus room. Check "Coin Machines" in your Yellow Pages to find your friendly local slot machine dealer.

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, there used to be a candy store on every block. Now, in California, Proposition 5 passed, and now all one-hundred-and-one—that's right, a hundred-and-one—Indian tribes are eligible to open casinos up and down the state.
A California gambler will feel like a kid on a block full of candy stores. The Governor strongly opposed video slot machines but, according to the Associated Press, he is now amenable to "an electronic lottery machine that spits out a series of numbers on a slip of paper, rather than dumping coins." Talk about hypocritical bullshit . . .

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Slots and the IRS
As I mentioned earlier, in my decades of slot action, I did hit one $5,000 jackpot. I wasn't even trying for a big win,- I was just hoping for cab fare to the next casino. As it happened, this was during my early casino life when I wasn't very savvy, so I filled out the required W-2 form for gambling winnings and paid the appropriate taxes due on April 15. (Any machine winnings of $1,200 or more are taxable. Many casinos legally circumvent the regulation by having slot machines and Keno tickets pay out $1,199.)

To see the total unfairness of the federal gambling tax setup, consider that only the poor man's games are targeted: Keno, Bingo, the slot machines. High Rollers who wager thousands of dollars or more on the turn of a card can win a king's ransom at the tables and are not required to fill out any tax forms as long as they don't cash in more than $10,000 in any 24-hour period.

Not everyone plays by IRS rules when it comes to W-2G taxes. A friend of mine (I'll call him Tom) told me how he beat the system. Tom hit a quarter progressive machine at the Desert Inn in Vegas for $10,000. Bells went off and the machine started humming with a steady, annoying drone. Over the loudspeaker it was announced that machine number so-and-so had hit a $10,000 jackpot.

A shift manager with a clipboard arrived, as did a slot machine mechanic, who opened the machine and carefully checked it out.

Another casino honcho showed with a camera and took Tom's picture.
Tom quipped that he initially thought it was because he was such a handsome guy. Later he found out the photo was taken to compare his face with photos in a Rogue's Gallery of slot machine cheats.

The bells continued to ring and the buzz was still buzzing. Next, a burly security guard with a clipboard showed up and gave Tom a W-2G federal tax form to fill out. Leaning on a vacant blackjack table nearby, the goon also asked for and carefully checked Tom's driver's license, Social Security card, and a credit card to verify that Tom was indeed Tom.

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