March 11, 2025 • 49 mins
Did Pennsylvania start as the payment of a gambling debt? Why did American sports betting take so long to legalize? And what do Congress and deadly river accidents have to do with betting? Action Network hosts Chad Millman and Simon Hunter get answers to these questions and many more from today's guest. He's the nation's preeminent gaming historian David Schwartz, a long-time UNLV professor and author of Roll The Bones and Something For Your Money, two of producer Matt Mitchell's favorite books. He loves these books so much he has joined today's episode, and our Action Network trio pepper Professor Schwartz with questions to unearth some of gambling's rich history.
And to RSVP for The Favorite's free live event in Chicago on March 29th, be sure to follow this link to reserve your spot! #Volume #Herd
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to the Favorites of the Podcast presented by BET
three six y five. We are part of the Volume
Podcast Network. I am Chad Mollman of the Action Network.
We are live from our Tommy John Holmes Studios. I'm
joined as always by my co host, my companion, mikem Boudre,
my BFF professional better Assignmon Hunter.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And I saw I man Chadow.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
What's going on?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Brother?
Speaker 4 (00:30):
Listen.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I feel like I'm more of an interested student in
the glorious, colorful, exciting past that is betting and the
sports betting world. It's how I got into it right,
Like I was never better first writer second. I was
(00:57):
writer first who loved the psychology. I love the history,
I love the story of the mob. I love sort
of the characters who populate the world of sports betting.
And so you know, we had Mitchell had come up
with this great idea a few weeks ago where he
did some great old gambling stories and some of which
(01:19):
he stole from an excellent book called Roll the Bones.
And today we are joined by the author of Roll
the Bones, a long time professor at UNLV University Nevada,
Las Vegas, the nation's pre eminent gambling historian Roll The
(01:43):
Bones We Know is Matt's favorite book. So imagine Matt's
delight when we found out our author and our guest
has a brand new book that just came out in
January called Something for Your Money, The History of Las
Vegas Casinos, available now wherever books are sold. He's someone
I've known for years. He was a regular and patient
(02:06):
source when I would head out to Vegas during my
ESPN days and was out there for a variety of stories.
Welcome to the show, Dave Schwartz, Thanks for having me, Chad,
thanks for having me listen. Your book has thrown Matt
Mitchell for a loop. He can't believe this book exists.
(02:26):
He can't believe it tells every story that he's been
dying to know for years. Can you please, for Matt
Mitchell's sake and for the sake of our listeners who
are all avid interested parties in bedding, how did you
end up doing this?
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Well? I grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, just
around the time that they legalized gambling, so one of
my earliest memories was them blowing up the old hotels
and building casinos. So it's a kid. I was really curious, like,
why do people gambling casinos? Why are they blowing up
all the old hotels and stuff like that. So when
I went to grad school, I decided to write a
dissertation in that and that started me on the road
(03:06):
to studying the history of gambling and casinos.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
And so you wrote Roll the Bones. You wrote Something
for Your Money, which just came out. Both of them
are packed with deliciously colorful stories about not just sort
of the recent history of betting, but the entire history
of betting. Gambling is so intertwined with the history of America,
(03:38):
right from lotteries being how we paid for the American Revolution.
Lotteries were how Harvard and Yale were funded and founded.
This it is core to the American experience. All that said,
(04:00):
what were your favorite stories when researching these books?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting. One fun story.
It just shows how far we've come politically and in
a lot of ways. So in the eighteen twenty eight election,
which was the rematch of Andrew Jackson against John Quincy Adams,
one of the scandals was that John Quincy Adams allegedly
had bought a billiard's table for the White House and
so there is an outrage that how dare he buy
(04:26):
gambling equipment with public money? Ironic because Andrew Jackson was
a huge, degenerate gambler, just like absolutely would love the
bent On horses. Just totally sick, sick gambler. So it's
kind of funny that they cus the New England John
Quincy Adams the intellectual of being a gambler. You know,
(04:46):
they tried to do some spin and these days, again
the president or the candidate wouldn't speak for themselves, they
would have people speak for them. So they tried to
do some spin and say, well, you know, he didn't
really buy it, he doesn't gamble, he just has it
so that the visiting aristocrats have something to do and like, oh,
now you're an aristocrat. Now you're better than us. So
(05:06):
trying to make it better made it worse. And it
was one of those things. You know, probably public frustration
over the banking system, all those issues were the things
that probably really got Jackson in the White House, but
you know, this was a little part of it. So
I think that's fascinating that gambling had a role in
this very pivotal election eighteen twenty eight.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
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When you were thinking about this is a field of study,
or thinking about what your first book was going to be,
the next book was going to be, how you're teaching
gambling as a professor, how do you frame the idea
(07:15):
of risk and gambling into the evolution.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
Of the country that we see today.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Well, really is an essential part. And if you look
at it, you know, America, the United States, it really
is a place of second chances, and that means that
things didn't go well your first chance. So there is
this idea that the United States is just tolerant a
risk and that's how things happen. And sometimes it goes
really well, sometimes it doesn't go so great, but there's
(07:44):
always another shot.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Matter, Simon, I don't want to monopolize. If one of
you want to jump in, I know, Matt, you've got
a lot of questions.
Speaker 5 (07:57):
Dave, one of My favorite anecdotes from Roll the Bones
is about William Penn. Is it true that the land
that would become the state of Pennsylvania was potentially the
repayment of a royal debt?
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, you know, that is the story. Obviously I wasn't
there so when when he signed that marker. But William Penn. So,
William Penn was a Quaker leader anybody from Philly, you know,
I went to school in Philly. So the statue of
Billy Penn. So he was a Quaker. Quakers were not
the most popular group in England at the time, and
(08:36):
somehow he got this grant for Pennsylvania, which is a
really lucrative part of what would become the colonies and
later the US. And the story was Sir William Penn,
William Penn, the Quaker's father was a gambling buddy of
King Charles the Second and when he when Sir William
Penn died, Charles the second owed him a lot of
(08:58):
money and basically on his deathbed said just take care
of my son and we're good. And supposedly that's where
it came from. So that's how the Quakers ended up
with Pennsylvania. And that's how we get to the eagles,
I guess.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
And that's that's the most remarkable thing about this book.
That's like fifty five words in this book. I mean,
you just move on to seven hundred other fascinating things.
It really is a remarkable piece of literature.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Do we have any idea where Charles the Second and
William penn were gambling?
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah? Probably farrow fa r oh. That was the popular
game back then, So probably Pharaoh, But it could also
have been a number of card games, you know, not
poker because I wasn't inventing the app, but a number
of there are a number of earlier bidding card games
that would eventually kind of evolve into poker. And the
King had a marker like, yeah, well not literally, that's
(09:54):
just my gambling. Yeah, Like having worked in the casino industry,
you kind of use the terminal alogy basically as a
gambling debt, not legally collectible, but morally collectible. And that's
the thing about gamblers that they rather pay the gambling
debt to prove that they're good for it than not.
So yeah, Charles the Second was good for it in
the end in Pennsylvania. Is the proof?
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Well, Simon as a billy adjacent native. This is in
your territory. It is part of your history now to
know that you are doing the right thing in your
community by gambling as much as you possibly can.
Speaker 6 (10:32):
And it's crazy to think everything GE's birth from the
pen name Penn Medicine. I mean obviously, like you just
talked about, our capitol building has William Penn standing on
the top of it.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
And it's pretty insane to think not that filled Upia
is just known for betting.
Speaker 6 (10:45):
But at its core, I mean, I can't tell you
many street bookies I knew Chad growing up, where every neighborhood,
every block has a different guy, And it's tarting to
make more sense. You really think about the state and
how it was founded and the people that live there,
and because that was probably I wouldn't say common knowledge
right back then, but people must have known. I mean,
everyone just talks to everyone's at everyone's business. This is
(11:08):
before obviously newspapers and everything like that. I mean the
word must have spread around town about how Pennsylvania got birthed?
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Am I assuming that right?
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Oh? Yeah? And I think people knew how big, you know,
Charles the Second was into a lot of that they
spent a lot of time in exile in France. The
French then were the notorious gamblers, so kind of picked
up that habit. And it's kind of interesting too when
you look at people who don't like gambling, which there
are people for a while in England they said, well,
this isn't a genuine English hobby, it's a French perversion
(11:39):
that came into England. So it's kind of funny how
that is spun, you know, and we see that happen
throughout history.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Well, look, you must have seen this through many stages
in your research, whether it was you know, England in
the sixteen hundreds to sports betting and that being the
third rail of gambling. I remember sitting with you in
the UNLV library and I think in the building where
(12:06):
your department is, and we were talking about Delaware in
New Jersey and how Delaware at the time that legalized
New Jersey had just filed suit to get passed, but
the Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act overturned.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
And you use the.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Phrase sports betting is the third rail of all the
betting types, lottery, legal poker, legal casinos, Native American casinos,
all of that. What do you think finally turned. In
your point of view, from your very deep knowledge and
(12:44):
base of perspective, what do you think finally turned for
sports betting.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Well, it's interesting because if you look back in the
nineteen fifties, when people in the government were researching, well
what is gambling and how's it happening? It was mostly
illegal and I remember I think it might have been
something that can him out of New York City or somewhere.
But this government study said, you know the numbers, which
was the illegal lotteries, and policy like, that's the worst.
(13:09):
It's the most exploitative sports betting. At least a better
has a chance, but this is just the worst. And
ten years later, what did states legalize lotteries? And at
the time there's a lot of debate, well, if we
were to legalize sports betting, what happens if the betters
get lucky? Now we owe money. So governments didn't want
to do it because they didn't want to take on
that liability. What happened was the private casino companies, basically
(13:35):
because they have the casino itself to offset that, and
they can use a sports betting to draw people in.
And the old model in the new model it's just
another revenue source because it's online. You know. Basically, once
they got behind it, thing shifted. But before that, states
weren't really eager to legalize it because you know, I mean,
just imagine what it would be like if state in
New Jersey or Pennsylvania or anyone was running, you know,
(13:58):
running a sports book. We would be very different.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Well wait a second, that's I had no idea that
was the case my understanding, and I didn't do any
research on this.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
I just sort of assumed it was that.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Sports betting never really got traction because of moral issues,
and you're saying it had nothing to do with it.
It was really about the fear that they would all
of a sudden be on the hook for customer friendly
outcomes as they call them today, and have to pay
out and all of a sudden, instead of having a surplus,
(14:33):
they've got a debt.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Yeah, well I think that, And again I'm not in
their mind, so I wasn't there back then. I don't
know what they did. But if we look at it,
look at the different forms of gambling. Most states legalized
lotteries first highest margin, you know, then went into casinos. Ah,
they can tax it. They can make decent money. Sports
betting was last because that has the narrowest margin, and again,
(14:55):
you know you don't have that. It's not as dependable.
So when they're doing it or budgetary reasons like okay,
we're going to generate with a lottery, we can generate
this much money a year to fund the schools. Sports betting,
you know, not that stable. So I don't think there's
a lot of people rushing to legalize it back then.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
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Speaker 3 (16:23):
You know.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
In your book, Dave, you wrote a little bit about
the Keyfaber hearings. For those who don't know, I'll say
it quickly so I can set up the question. In
the nineteen early nineteen fifties, estes Keifaber, who was a
cenator from Tennessee, very ambitious guy. There was a lot
of consternation within communities, especially big cities, about the influence
of organized crime, and so he set up this two
(16:47):
years of investigations, going city to city on a tour
where he had subpoenaed the organized crime bosses and they
were being forced to testify about their business and everything
that was going on. To me, one of the biggest
things that came out of it was the realization by
the public that sports betting was the biggest revenue driver
(17:11):
for organized crime. And to me, Dave, I don't know
if you have studied and seen differently, that felt like
a death blow for sports betting. That felt like a
fun thing people did in the community to being sort
of a nefarious, dangerous thing, and it changed that business
is trajectory, yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Because if you look at the history of illegal gambling,
right back in the twenties, when we know organized crime
was doing a lot of stuff, you would see if
you go back in the newspaper archives, we'll talk about
local rackets, boss. So there was like the Brooklyn rackets
and the Waterfront rackets, and the Newark rackets and the
Philly rackets. It was all local. Okay, what happens in
nineteen fifteen fifty one, and the keyf offer is okay,
(17:52):
he needs an issue. He wants to be president, he
needs an issue. Kind of went into antitrust stuff, but
that didn't excite people. McCarthy he had already taken anti communism,
so that's gone, Well, what about gambling. Well, wait, the
local gambling you're doing with your bookie, that's actually part
of this national or even international crime syndicate. So it's
(18:12):
a national issue, so Congress has jurisdiction because across the
state lines, and that's where it really shifted. That's where
you had the idea of the mafia as a national
organization or even international organization. Before that, it was all local,
you know. And again, it's kind of fun to go
back in the archives and see when they start using
that language. So yeah, it did change the narrative because
(18:32):
originally people said, well, yeah, I'm just putting down a
two dollar bet. And there's a book in the archives
called a two dollars bet means murder, Wow, And it's
trying to tell people, yeah, your harmless sports betting is
actually funding organized crime, and that did shift the narrative.
You're absolutely right.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Yeah, there's nothing like a complete and total extraction from
your two dollars bet to that being the reason why
the person down the street is getting knocked off.
Speaker 5 (18:58):
I mean, I've been killed by a small bet before
it's done me that much.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
That makes sense.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
One of my kind of favorite themes of the of
both your books.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
But there's so much.
Speaker 5 (19:16):
There's so much gambling embroiled in parts of American history
and American culture and really international world history. Going back
hundreds of years. But one of my favorite anecdotes was
that in the middle of the nineteenth century, the first
major regulatory act in congressional history, so tigers have been
(19:38):
around for like whatever eighty years, related to boiler construction
and steamboat licensing. Could you explain why that was related
to gambling?
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Okay, so we all know this isn't the golden age
of steamboats all that fun stuff. Also people use steamboats,
they became gambling tools. People both gambled on them, you know,
playing all kinds of aims, especially poker, but also people
would bet which steamboat was going to get there first.
The captains were cut in on it so they would
have an incentive, and they found that captains and the
(20:11):
crew would push the steamship so hard that boilers exploded,
and they said, this is too much risk. We've got
to cut back in this. So it is amazing how
something like that, And it also shows how universal that
gambling gene is, where like literally the vessel you're riding
on with the high pressure steam that is deadly that
you know has killed people before, you're still going to
(20:32):
overload it just to get that edge. That is wild.
It's crazy that.
Speaker 5 (20:37):
You report that in one year five hundred people died
from this, and in.
Speaker 7 (20:42):
Congress is like, holy shit, guys, you keep blowing up
your own passengers because you can't just erasing your steamboats.
We are going to make our first ever regulatory action' hilarious.
Speaker 5 (20:54):
And obviously you know what tremendous about about Las Vegas
and its history, and we'll dive into that shortly. But
those teamboats obviously related to the big business of New Orleans.
Could you explain briefly, you know, kind of how important
New Orleans was to the development of American gambling pre
Las Vegas.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Yeah, I mean, New Orleans is huge. It was really
America's first gambling capital, without a doubt. You had the French,
you had the Spanish, you had Native Americans, you had
African cultures coming in there. So you also had a
lot of people, a lot of money. It was a
thriving port. So it really is where America. If people
in America wanted to gamble, most gambling was happening there.
They experimented with legal gambling houses really early on in
(21:36):
the nineteenth century. The games of poker and crafts were
both both born in New Orleans or near New Orleans.
So really New Orleans in the nineteenth century was the
capital of gambling in America without a doubt.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Incredible.
Speaker 6 (21:51):
Yeah, I just want to piggyback off that. I've thought
a lot about this and you know, gambling. To me,
it's a really important part of my life. And you know,
you seem like some of knows all about I mean,
every little detail, every story. And you know, a story
I love that I read a long time ago is
about Native Americans didn't have a word for lie, but
they did have a word for bet. And I always
thought that's such a human thing, like at our core,
(22:13):
I mean, think of the earliest man. What you said was, Buddy,
I bet you I can race you home and beat
you in a race where I can kill that animal
before you can kill it, like a little bet like that.
What is your discovery of the earliest bets ever written
or made in human history?
Speaker 3 (22:27):
What goes way? It goes back really far. And I've
got another layer of this, you know, so in the earth,
basically for a lot of human history, people weren't living
in settlements, the first settlements, you know, we find evidence
of gambling, you know, primitive dice, things like that, and
kind of the funny thing is so like if we
would say, and I'm not saying this is the absolute year,
but if we say the earliest dice were ten thousand
(22:48):
years old, the earliest cheating dice crooked dice, or like
nine and ninety nine years old, So cheating was also
part of it a long ways away, and it's kind
of funny. Like one of the more poignant stories is
the when Mount Vesuvius erupted and POMPEII was engulfed in ash,
you know, in the taverns. You know, there was this
(23:09):
one thing where it was a gambling table and they
had the guy's debts were like just scratched up on
the wall and they're just thinking like suddenly there's all
the ash and the lava coming down, and this guy's
last thing is like, oh man.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
I'm down, and then he's like, great, I'm off the hook.
That's I was actually thinking. The guy who won is like,
are you freaking kidding me? I finally hit a streak
and now we're all going under.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
This is ridiculous.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
Yeah, really bad beat. Volcanic bad beat for sure, Yeah, volcanic.
So yeah, I can't get worse than that.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
That was good.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
One thing I wanted to also point out from your
book is you have this recurring theme which I really enjoyed,
kind of the Simon's point of you, like, you go
back to the earliest bets made in humankind, but all
the way up to the present day. You keep describing
societies that are getting more and more advanced. Gambling exists
because it's people are congregating. Then gambling is frowned upon,
(24:14):
that it is outlawed, and that it is found to
be totally irrepressible, and that it is eventually tolerated or regulated,
but that it happens in every corner of the world
over and over and over again for thousands of years.
So looking back at the history of gambling kind of
overall and maybe Las Vegas specifically, our audience is mostly
(24:34):
sports betters, Like, what are the lessons that our audience
can take away.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Well, it's basically, I mean, there's a couple of them.
First of all, people have always gambled. I mean, obviously
not everybody, but a lot of people have always gambled.
But things do go in cycles, and there's no reason
to think that people are going to keep on betting
the way they're betting right now, you know, because if
we look back, just looking at casinos in Vegas in
the sixties, and we're just going to go back sixty years,
(25:01):
which is not that much time historically, but like sixties,
they're mostly playing craps. Blackjack is just starting to get
big because skill play is just starting to get popular,
but it's still mostly craps. There's maybe a couple of
dozen slot machines, is not that big a deal, and
the casinos are a lot smaller. Go to the nineties,
giant air conditioned slot machine houses, just total slot machines.
(25:24):
But the slot machines look really different than they are today.
They're mostly steppers, a couple of video machines, but mostly
steppers versus today. Less focus in the gambling, more focus
and everything else. You've got electronic table games, You've got
all kinds of things evolving, you know, And that's and
think about how sports betting has changed too with the
advent of technology, and now you don't have to go
(25:45):
to the bookie bookies in your phone, so there's just
a lot of that going on. And I think my
other lesson is, you know, they say the house always wins,
Usually the house does but when it does, and I
this might be kind of ominous for sports betting. You know,
when the house doesn't win, the house tends to change
the rules. So if people find something, find an exploit,
(26:07):
they will change the rules to prevent that because the
house has to win otherwise they don't stay in business.
Speaker 5 (26:13):
Oh, for sure, that's another recurring theme throughout throughout history.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Well, that's also why the States didn't want to be
in that business, right They worried that they all of
a sudden would have a season where they owe money
instead of are taking in money.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
And what do you do with you know, that hole
in the budget.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Sports betting specifically, why do you think, I guess from
your point of view, you said it'll change.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
How is it different than what you thought it.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Would be when it was legalized, even in these past,
say seven years.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Well, it's really interesting because if you look at the
history of sports betting in Nevada, traditionally it was maybe
and I'm saying from the eighties onward, when you had
the advent of casinos being in sports betting, it was
maybe one percent of total Nevada gaming revenue, maybe one percent.
You know, then in the early twenty tens, we get
up to two percent and kind of into three percent.
(27:12):
So it really is something in Nevada. It really is
an amenity to bring people in. The whole idea that
they had is I don't want my hot blackjack player
leaving to go someplace else to place a bet, so
I'm gonna have this here even if it doesn't make money.
And you know, every slot manager in the world is saying,
if I had that space that the sports book has
(27:35):
or the polkroom has, I could make the revenue to
make a year. I could make in a month, you
know that, And like true, but then they're gonna leave
to go bet in someplace else, and they're they're gonna
gamble there. So they really did do as amenity. What
we've seen, you know, in the past ten years or
even less, is the emergence of sports betting as a
revenue source in its own through online and mobile, which
(27:58):
is something we have not seen in Nevada before or
so that's totally different. And it did you know way
back when, back in twenty ten, when I was trying
to extrapolate, well, how big of a market is it, Like, well,
if it's two percent, it'll be this and it turned
out to be a lot bigger than that because behaviors changed.
So that's just proof that it happens.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, I remember when I first started going out to
Vegas and I was working on the odds, and I
would get the numbers from the Nevada Gaming Control Board
of the total handle and then the hold for these
sports books, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
(28:39):
late nineties, early two thousands, it would be like six
million a year in total revenue for every sports book
in the state of Nevada. I'm like, why the fuck
am I writing this book because this thing doesn't matter
at all, like we thought it was a big deal,
and it means nothing with the overall scheme of what
(29:03):
really is important in the state of Nevada. But it
has always sports betting since really the state of Nevada
legalized it in the seventies. I think has had this
outsized impact on the rest of the industry in terms
of not its importance, but a little bit of its glamour.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
Would you say that.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah, And obviously there's a lot more illegal betting going
on back then, which I don't think we even you know,
for a while, the FBI estimated it. Then at some
point they just kind of gave up. I learned that
when I was researching another book, covering the Wire, which
was about online gaming gambling prohibition. So it's kind of
interesting to see how they eventually said, we don't know
how much illegal gambling there is, illegal sports betting there
(29:44):
is going on. We know it's big, so's that's kind
of the uh, yeah, that's kind of where that is.
But Nevada, did you know? Originally yeah, they did views
it as an amenity, but now it's becoming a revenue
source in its own right.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
This is a sloppyly awarded question, apologies, but like you
you could describe a let's say, a thousand years of
betting activity across the whole world, right, Yeah, all of them,
all of the betting activity in every form, always involved
other human parties, and almost always leaving your home, and
(30:20):
now only in the last like what decade you no
longer need both of those things. How enormous of a
change is that in the from a cultural standpoint to
like what betting is and how intrinsically human the activity is.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
It's a big change. That's one that's probably about five
or six hundred years in the making to be a
little little, little little dramatic there. So if we think back,
you know, to the dawn and gambling, as we were
saying like, yeah, can I throw this, you know, rock
farther than you can? I catch this? Sound them before you,
you know that sort of thing, like Simon was saying, Yeah,
that is personal. Oh my horse is faster than your horse.
(31:01):
All right, well I don't know, but my buddy's horse
is faster than your buddy's horse. Okay, now we're doing that.
You know, my alma mater can be your alma mater
in football, okay, you know, my favorite team can be
your team. It was very personal.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
You have.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
This shift to mercantile gambling and commercial gambling that really
happens kind of really gets underway more in the Renaissance,
in that period the Reformation, as you have the rise
of sort of capitalism and fun things like that, and
it intensifies in America with the mention of the spot machine,
where like, if you think about what we did in America,
we took gambling and we invented a machine that can
(31:42):
gamble more efficiently, which is such an American thing. And
that's late nineteenth century eighteen ninety nine. This is what
they were doing, and this is what Americans are doing, like, oh, railroad,
will build build a bigger railroad. Telegraph yeah, all across
the country. Gambling, Yeah, here's a machine that'll do that
for me. So in every okay, looking at betting. Invention
(32:04):
of the telegraph, Hey huh, Now we can find out
what's happening at race tracks all around the country. We
can bet on them here. And that was really the
first remote betting, and I argue that was the first
remote remote entertainment where people would actually be hearing them narrate,
like what's happening in the race, and they're very excited.
(32:26):
And people were freaked out then because they're like, oh
my god, why are they jumping and yelling and screaming
and stuff and they're not even at the track.
Speaker 5 (32:33):
I would say it's probably the intrinsic power of the
spoken word chad, Yeah, timeless, timeless and evocative.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Yeah, yes, yeah. And they had no concept of remote
entertainment like today where we'll watch the game and get
all excited even though we're not in the stadium. You know,
they had no concept and that was how that was born.
So it is really interesting. In every technological devancement, people
are betting, you know, telephones, people using telephones to bet,
Internet people using the Internet to bet. Mobile people are
(33:01):
using mobile now and I don't see a reason why
that won't continue.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
So which came first? This is a chicken in the egg.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Is it.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Gambling as a point of pride or gambling for the
sake of gambling? And I think there's a nuanced difference there.
But before technology, gambling for the sake of pride, because
you ed had to be more in person and a
little bit more about competition versus gambling that is at
(33:37):
scale and is about gambling for gambling sake.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Yeah, I mean, think about the difference between poker and
slot machines. You know, poker, and I know everybody gets
bad beats and stuff like that, but it comes down
to I'm better than you and I'm taking your money
because of skill for even though yeah, I mean there
are bad beats and stuff like that, and you know,
whereas slot machines is just hey, I'm putting my money
up and whatever happens happens, it's out of my hands.
(34:04):
So it's that's that different. You know, people who just
want that rush of gambling versus people who want to
gamble to show their skill. You know, that is the
difference right there, and they probably always had a little
bit of them. Probably the skill dominated more early on,
but since we've gone to more totally random games like slots,
a little bit more of the pure gambling.
Speaker 6 (34:23):
That's why I love gambling though, Like slots now there's
an edge. Like I know guys who have quit sports
betting on what I do, and they literally live in
books or outside sports books by the slot machines, and
they just watch people on machines and they know timing
wise that this machine's hot, like this is this machine's
right in the pop Like they just watch them and
play for hours and they'll wait and jump on their machine,
(34:45):
which is just to me, it's like crazy how people
just find an edge and every little thing like you
talked about, and you know, go back ten thousand years
of those fake dice pros. Everybody they're always me find
an edge. They might call that cheating. To me, that's
a professional, that's someone trying to find an edge. So
I love the breakdown of all these history right now.
It's really interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
You know, Nate Silver not to plug another book, But
talking about slots, he wrote a book that came out
over the summer called On the Edge, and he had
a section in there about people who, to your point, Simon,
are looking to find the edges in slot machines. I've
probably been to Vegas a thousand times, no exaggeration, in
(35:25):
my life, and I think that I've played slots zero times, Simon.
Like when you go to the casinos, now, do you
have any urge to do anything other than walk to
the book, make your bet and get out? Or will
you stay and play Parker? I know you love poker,
(35:47):
Like will you play poker? Will you play blackjack?
Speaker 4 (35:49):
What is your menu?
Speaker 6 (35:52):
That's the running joke to a lot of professional sports
better is it's like basketball players want to be rappers,
sports betters want to be poker players, and vice versa
poka players.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
I know some really high level poke players.
Speaker 6 (36:03):
I've seen when many tournaments in Vegas, especially in twenty fourteen,
I mean twenty fifteen when I was really in Vegas
a lot, and I would see these guys win one
hundred K and then just go bet it on like
a Lakers first half and lose it. And it's like
that's also why these sportsbook exists, right, They're hitting these
guys who are great at one thing, but something that
great at and they have confidence in when they shouldn't
have confidence in. So yeah, for me, slot machines, chat,
(36:27):
I'm with you on that. The only time I've ever
hit a slot machine is at the airport in Vegas,
Like that's the one time they'll get me.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
If I got eight hours to kill and I got
the itch, I'll hit the slot machines and things like that.
But I'm with you. The big thing for me is blackjack.
Speaker 6 (36:39):
I told you, if I'm really nervous about a bet
I made, I can't watch the game in the sports book,
I can't be around all the people talk and anything
like that.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
I'll go right across the blackjack table.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
You know it.
Speaker 6 (36:48):
Give me a twenty dollars limit. I don't even care.
I'm just there to kill time while watching the game
on one of the corner of TVs. So that's definitely
my nervous hitter is. I just like to sit there
play blackjack for a couple hours while watching games.
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Speaker 3 (38:16):
Dave. Do you gambed now? Having worked in the casino
and having been awake at four thirty in the morning
watching people gamble kind of kills all the romance. Yeah,
what I'm hearing at four thirty.
Speaker 5 (38:25):
Is my business day. One day the volcano is coming
for me. So that's yeah, more terms back, you know.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
It's just yeah, you see things doing surveillance, it's like, uh,
you know, just like, well, I'm not in part of it.
For me, it's like I'm no smarter or luckier than
these people. So it's not it's got to be somebody.
I don't think it's going to be me.
Speaker 5 (38:45):
Our audience will not be surprised that I absolutely adore gambling.
I can think of the two casinos where I was
made to move because they were shampooing the carpet while
I was playing, which, as you know, like they're doing
that at like four am, Christmas morning or whatever when
they're like no one, no one will be here, which
is never going to make anybody move. I proposed at
(39:05):
the roulette wheel of the Old Barbary Coast then Bill's
Gambling Hall. Yeah no, yeah, they I did not know
that she hit her number and they pushed the chips
out with the ring on top. I had had to
take the ring because I was traveling for business and
it was around Thanksgiving from Milwaukee to Denver to my
(39:26):
family's Thanksgiving in Baltimore to Las Vegas, so I hit
every time zone, which made me want to puke my
guts out. Don't travel with a diamond ring, uh And
then yeah, I just assumed that the uh Bill's Gammon
Hall would be fine with it. They were like, what
the fuck are you talking about. I was like, oh right,
I forgot to like clue you in on this. I
had lost enough money at Bill's historically that the pit
(39:48):
boss was like, oh dude, no problem, no problem, and
he showed the ring to the camera, placed it on
the chips and said, I'll clear this table out and
then you have to get you have to fill it.
So I got my my family who would come with me,
and we sat down and she lost every spinch. She
played ten numbers at a time, so you're gonna win
about one in every four spins. She lost twelve spins.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
In a row.
Speaker 5 (40:09):
It was absolutely excruciating, sweating through my clothes. By now,
the pit boss has told every other table in the
vicinity of what's happening. So every time she lost. There
were audible groans coming from the other tables, which she
thought she was being mocked. But yeah, it was great,
and we're November twenty ten, so still going strong, she said, yes,
still going strong. Yeah, it's great, dude, put.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Out another edition because that's the best gambling story I've heard.
Speaker 5 (40:34):
Oh, I remember when I told the Bill sports Book,
Because of course, she says, yes, we hug and I'm like,
I got to go make some more bets, and I said, hey,
I just got engaged, and the guy's like, sounds good.
I go, no, I got engaged. Here the reaction of
the Bill's Gaming Gold sports Book employees to that I
had chosen to get in that casino at that time,
I've never seen people ask more clarifying questions. They would
(40:56):
have been less incredulous if I told them I arrived
there on a dragon, But to their credit, they gave
me the whole book of drink tickets. So shout out
to the now defunct Bill's Gambling Hall corner of Flamingo
in the Strip.
Speaker 4 (41:10):
That is legendary.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Matt. I don't know how we've known each other for
as long as we have and you've never told me
that story.
Speaker 5 (41:17):
This is my total coincidence. I'm drinking from a Bill's
gambling home mug as you think, which I bought that day.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
You've told me every boring, long gambling story of your
entire life, and you've never told me that story.
Speaker 5 (41:29):
I'm just full of surprises, Chad. You know, we all
contain multitudes.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Dave, you just said something that I wanted to follow
up on. You worked surveillance at casinos.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Oh yeah, yeah, back when that was my postgraduate work.
So when I was in undergrad, I worked security. After
I went and got a PhD, I came back, moved
back to Atlantic City and went in a surveillance Well did.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
You guys take out to the loading docks?
Speaker 6 (41:53):
Were you out there with them or you were still
in the back room just in their earpiece, And yeah,
take them out the back door.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Just to mean, yeah, I was kind of was thinking
about this. I really like doing security because you're out there,
you know, you're just out with people, You're you're interacting,
you're you're on the floor. You got all that excitement
in surveillance, you're just up in the room and it's
like sometimes it was kind of fun, kind of like
mystery science theater three thousand, just like watching TV and
like making jokes and stuff. Other times it was just
(42:21):
there's a lot of tedium. There's a lot of tedium
just watching people doing repetitive motions again and again and again,
and you kind of pick up like when someone's gambling,
like they're very focused and they're gambling. So if somebody's
gambling and they're looking around, well maybe I gotta watch
them because they shouldn't be doing that. They should be folks.
I remember one time there's this guy playing slots and
(42:41):
I'm like, he's really nervous. He's gambling. He's like really nervous,
and like he's rubbernecking. Okay, I'm pretty sure he's doing
a sort thing with slugs. I'm like all zoomed in,
like yeah, man, he's I'm gonna get him. This is great.
Then I assume it was his wife comes down and
it's like and that's why he was nervous because he
was waiting for his Maybe he was going to propose.
(43:02):
I don't know. Yeah, it's so funny, Like I thought
I had it. I was so excited, like, yeah, I
got finally got one. I got a slot scam. Here
didn't didn't have a slot scam. Mostly I think I had,
you know, just a couple of per snatching kind of things.
Those kinds of things did you.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Get pretty good though, at being able to tell if
someone was trying to count cards or cheat at the
table at all.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Now they had account team for that, so that was
kind of beyond what what I did. Then, you know,
it was more just which basically watching the money, and
again it is very a lot of tedium just watching
the money. Let's say there's an overage or an underage.
Underage is worse at a cash window. You've got to
go back and watch that cashier's whole shift, and basically
(43:48):
they're shooting it from the top down, so you're watching
it slow motion, then putting out the money, proving the chips,
stacking the chips. Okay, I know it's two hundred and
seventy dollars and we're met, we're one hundred dollars short,
so boom boom boom. Oh wow, now I've seen a
transaction where the cashier was eighty dollars short. So now
I've got to look for eighty dollars transactions too, not
(44:09):
just the big ones. That was like, yeah, my soul
left my body. I remember I spent like three shifts
scrutinizing this one thing, and then Super I was like, eh,
it probably happened during tape change, because back then they
had tapes, and I was like, oh God. Never felt
so defeated like that.
Speaker 5 (44:27):
A lot like batting, it feels like you're in the
middle of the basketball.
Speaker 3 (44:31):
Yeah, yeah, because I'm like, yeah, I know I'm gonna
find this, and you know they're yeah, So that's yeah,
that was quite a thing, Dave.
Speaker 5 (44:40):
One of the themes book books is the h everything
that is old is new again, And one of my
favorite examples is in the middle of the nineteenth century,
you have Francois Blanc and he runs a bunch of
incredibly successful casinos. He's the guy that made Monte Carlo
luxurious gambling location, right, and he's visited by Napoleon's nephew
(45:06):
and he's a big celebrity. They can't wait to have him.
And he rolls up and bets only the table maximum
for like three days, and he kicks the shit out
of the casino. He wins an absolute fortune, and then
before they can win it back, he just pee packs
his stuff and leaves very abruptly. They could barely make
make the payment he took like basically all their cash
(45:26):
on hand. But in the all that is old is
new again. They were like, what are we gonna do?
He goes, here's what we're gonna do. Tell every person
in every contact that we have across Europe that this
guy cleaned us out. We are total dopes. Tell him
exactly how much you want, tell him how easy it
was for him. Let everybody know we are right for
the picking looses slots in town kind of mentality.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
And it worked.
Speaker 5 (45:50):
The next year was their most profitable year on record.
It feels like the sports book's helping to promote the
long shot parlays that hit that like there's a universal
there's a timelessness to all these tricks. I'm sure you
have a million examples.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
Oh yeah. And it is just that basic psychology where
people report the big wins but nobody reports the losses.
We assume everyone else is winning but me, So I'm
gonna win soon because that's all I hear about. And
you know, in Vegas, when somebody wins at the airport slots,
that makes local news, like somebody wins, you know, fifty
thousand dollars in slots. It's like, what about all the
people who didn't win today at the slots? How come
(46:27):
that's not newsworthy? So, yeah, that is a that is
a thing. I don't think that's ever going to go away.
Speaker 5 (46:33):
Yeah, people think all these things are new inventions. It's
like they've been doing They've been following a playbook that
is hundreds of years old.
Speaker 3 (46:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
All I heard from that Matt is that guy won
a lot and the casino lost a lot, and the
next year the casino made it back, which means Simon
and I next year, we are freaking.
Speaker 5 (46:54):
Do I mean the advertising obviously would have worked on me,
So I can also appreciate the universality of the advertise
because I definitely would have been like, all right, pack
our buggies or whatever, the get on the railroad. We
got to hit this casino in France.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
Dave, I want to thank you for coming on Roll
the Bones, which is a great book, a great reference book,
full of amazing anecdotes. Something for your money, another fabulous book.
Congrats on the release earlier this year. And that's not
wrong when he tells me to say you are the
pre eminent Vegas casino historian.
Speaker 4 (47:31):
You got it all. Thanks for providing so many good stories.
Speaker 3 (47:35):
Thanks. It means a lot coming from you guys too,
you know, humbling and gratifying. Yeah, I'm glad, you know,
And I hope people do like the books. It's just
trying to share a little bit of that excitement and
some of these cool stories that have happened.
Speaker 4 (47:46):
Everyone go buy the books.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
As a reminder, the Favorites podcast is presented by Bet
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Customers get one hundred and fifty dollars in bonus bets
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Speaker 4 (48:06):
Whatever the moment, It's never ordinary. At Bet three s five.
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Must be twenty one or older and present in Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana,
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(48:29):
This Thursday, eleven am Eastern talking Free agency in the
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Love you.
Speaker 5 (48:52):
Action Network reminds you please gamble responsibly.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
If you or someone you care about has a gambling problem,
help is available twenty four to seven at one eight
hundred Gambler
Welcome to the Favorites of the Podcast presented by BET
three six y five. We are part of the Volume
Podcast Network. I am Chad Mollman of the Action Network.
We are live from our Tommy John Holmes Studios. I'm
joined as always by my co host, my companion, mikem Boudre,
my BFF professional better Assignmon Hunter.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And I saw I man Chadow.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
What's going on?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Brother?
Speaker 4 (00:30):
Listen.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I feel like I'm more of an interested student in
the glorious, colorful, exciting past that is betting and the
sports betting world. It's how I got into it right,
Like I was never better first writer second. I was
(00:57):
writer first who loved the psychology. I love the history,
I love the story of the mob. I love sort
of the characters who populate the world of sports betting.
And so you know, we had Mitchell had come up
with this great idea a few weeks ago where he
did some great old gambling stories and some of which
(01:19):
he stole from an excellent book called Roll the Bones.
And today we are joined by the author of Roll
the Bones, a long time professor at UNLV University Nevada,
Las Vegas, the nation's pre eminent gambling historian Roll The
(01:43):
Bones We Know is Matt's favorite book. So imagine Matt's
delight when we found out our author and our guest
has a brand new book that just came out in
January called Something for Your Money, The History of Las
Vegas Casinos, available now wherever books are sold. He's someone
I've known for years. He was a regular and patient
(02:06):
source when I would head out to Vegas during my
ESPN days and was out there for a variety of stories.
Welcome to the show, Dave Schwartz, Thanks for having me, Chad,
thanks for having me listen. Your book has thrown Matt
Mitchell for a loop. He can't believe this book exists.
(02:26):
He can't believe it tells every story that he's been
dying to know for years. Can you please, for Matt
Mitchell's sake and for the sake of our listeners who
are all avid interested parties in bedding, how did you
end up doing this?
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Well? I grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, just
around the time that they legalized gambling, so one of
my earliest memories was them blowing up the old hotels
and building casinos. So it's a kid. I was really curious, like,
why do people gambling casinos? Why are they blowing up
all the old hotels and stuff like that. So when
I went to grad school, I decided to write a
dissertation in that and that started me on the road
(03:06):
to studying the history of gambling and casinos.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
And so you wrote Roll the Bones. You wrote Something
for Your Money, which just came out. Both of them
are packed with deliciously colorful stories about not just sort
of the recent history of betting, but the entire history
of betting. Gambling is so intertwined with the history of America,
(03:38):
right from lotteries being how we paid for the American Revolution.
Lotteries were how Harvard and Yale were funded and founded.
This it is core to the American experience. All that said,
(04:00):
what were your favorite stories when researching these books?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting. One fun story.
It just shows how far we've come politically and in
a lot of ways. So in the eighteen twenty eight election,
which was the rematch of Andrew Jackson against John Quincy Adams,
one of the scandals was that John Quincy Adams allegedly
had bought a billiard's table for the White House and
so there is an outrage that how dare he buy
(04:26):
gambling equipment with public money? Ironic because Andrew Jackson was
a huge, degenerate gambler, just like absolutely would love the
bent On horses. Just totally sick, sick gambler. So it's
kind of funny that they cus the New England John
Quincy Adams the intellectual of being a gambler. You know,
(04:46):
they tried to do some spin and these days, again
the president or the candidate wouldn't speak for themselves, they
would have people speak for them. So they tried to
do some spin and say, well, you know, he didn't
really buy it, he doesn't gamble, he just has it
so that the visiting aristocrats have something to do and like, oh,
now you're an aristocrat. Now you're better than us. So
(05:06):
trying to make it better made it worse. And it
was one of those things. You know, probably public frustration
over the banking system, all those issues were the things
that probably really got Jackson in the White House, but
you know, this was a little part of it. So
I think that's fascinating that gambling had a role in
this very pivotal election eighteen twenty eight.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
As a reminder, The Favorites podcast is presented by Bet
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When you were thinking about this is a field of study,
or thinking about what your first book was going to be,
the next book was going to be, how you're teaching
gambling as a professor, how do you frame the idea
(07:15):
of risk and gambling into the evolution.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
Of the country that we see today.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Well, really is an essential part. And if you look
at it, you know, America, the United States, it really
is a place of second chances, and that means that
things didn't go well your first chance. So there is
this idea that the United States is just tolerant a
risk and that's how things happen. And sometimes it goes
really well, sometimes it doesn't go so great, but there's
(07:44):
always another shot.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Matter, Simon, I don't want to monopolize. If one of
you want to jump in, I know, Matt, you've got
a lot of questions.
Speaker 5 (07:57):
Dave, one of My favorite anecdotes from Roll the Bones
is about William Penn. Is it true that the land
that would become the state of Pennsylvania was potentially the
repayment of a royal debt?
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, you know, that is the story. Obviously I wasn't
there so when when he signed that marker. But William Penn. So,
William Penn was a Quaker leader anybody from Philly, you know,
I went to school in Philly. So the statue of
Billy Penn. So he was a Quaker. Quakers were not
the most popular group in England at the time, and
(08:36):
somehow he got this grant for Pennsylvania, which is a
really lucrative part of what would become the colonies and
later the US. And the story was Sir William Penn,
William Penn, the Quaker's father was a gambling buddy of
King Charles the Second and when he when Sir William
Penn died, Charles the second owed him a lot of
(08:58):
money and basically on his deathbed said just take care
of my son and we're good. And supposedly that's where
it came from. So that's how the Quakers ended up
with Pennsylvania. And that's how we get to the eagles,
I guess.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
And that's that's the most remarkable thing about this book.
That's like fifty five words in this book. I mean,
you just move on to seven hundred other fascinating things.
It really is a remarkable piece of literature.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Do we have any idea where Charles the Second and
William penn were gambling?
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah? Probably farrow fa r oh. That was the popular
game back then, So probably Pharaoh, But it could also
have been a number of card games, you know, not
poker because I wasn't inventing the app, but a number
of there are a number of earlier bidding card games
that would eventually kind of evolve into poker. And the
King had a marker like, yeah, well not literally, that's
(09:54):
just my gambling. Yeah, Like having worked in the casino industry,
you kind of use the terminal alogy basically as a
gambling debt, not legally collectible, but morally collectible. And that's
the thing about gamblers that they rather pay the gambling
debt to prove that they're good for it than not.
So yeah, Charles the Second was good for it in
the end in Pennsylvania. Is the proof?
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Well, Simon as a billy adjacent native. This is in
your territory. It is part of your history now to
know that you are doing the right thing in your
community by gambling as much as you possibly can.
Speaker 6 (10:32):
And it's crazy to think everything GE's birth from the
pen name Penn Medicine. I mean obviously, like you just
talked about, our capitol building has William Penn standing on
the top of it.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
And it's pretty insane to think not that filled Upia
is just known for betting.
Speaker 6 (10:45):
But at its core, I mean, I can't tell you
many street bookies I knew Chad growing up, where every neighborhood,
every block has a different guy, And it's tarting to
make more sense. You really think about the state and
how it was founded and the people that live there,
and because that was probably I wouldn't say common knowledge
right back then, but people must have known. I mean,
everyone just talks to everyone's at everyone's business. This is
(11:08):
before obviously newspapers and everything like that. I mean the
word must have spread around town about how Pennsylvania got birthed?
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Am I assuming that right?
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Oh? Yeah? And I think people knew how big, you know,
Charles the Second was into a lot of that they
spent a lot of time in exile in France. The
French then were the notorious gamblers, so kind of picked
up that habit. And it's kind of interesting too when
you look at people who don't like gambling, which there
are people for a while in England they said, well,
this isn't a genuine English hobby, it's a French perversion
(11:39):
that came into England. So it's kind of funny how
that is spun, you know, and we see that happen
throughout history.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Well, look, you must have seen this through many stages
in your research, whether it was you know, England in
the sixteen hundreds to sports betting and that being the
third rail of gambling. I remember sitting with you in
the UNLV library and I think in the building where
(12:06):
your department is, and we were talking about Delaware in
New Jersey and how Delaware at the time that legalized
New Jersey had just filed suit to get passed, but
the Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act overturned.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
And you use the.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Phrase sports betting is the third rail of all the
betting types, lottery, legal poker, legal casinos, Native American casinos,
all of that. What do you think finally turned. In
your point of view, from your very deep knowledge and
(12:44):
base of perspective, what do you think finally turned for
sports betting.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Well, it's interesting because if you look back in the
nineteen fifties, when people in the government were researching, well
what is gambling and how's it happening? It was mostly
illegal and I remember I think it might have been
something that can him out of New York City or somewhere.
But this government study said, you know the numbers, which
was the illegal lotteries, and policy like, that's the worst.
(13:09):
It's the most exploitative sports betting. At least a better
has a chance, but this is just the worst. And
ten years later, what did states legalize lotteries? And at
the time there's a lot of debate, well, if we
were to legalize sports betting, what happens if the betters
get lucky? Now we owe money. So governments didn't want
to do it because they didn't want to take on
that liability. What happened was the private casino companies, basically
(13:35):
because they have the casino itself to offset that, and
they can use a sports betting to draw people in.
And the old model in the new model it's just
another revenue source because it's online. You know. Basically, once
they got behind it, thing shifted. But before that, states
weren't really eager to legalize it because you know, I mean,
just imagine what it would be like if state in
New Jersey or Pennsylvania or anyone was running, you know,
(13:58):
running a sports book. We would be very different.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Well wait a second, that's I had no idea that
was the case my understanding, and I didn't do any
research on this.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
I just sort of assumed it was that.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Sports betting never really got traction because of moral issues,
and you're saying it had nothing to do with it.
It was really about the fear that they would all
of a sudden be on the hook for customer friendly
outcomes as they call them today, and have to pay
out and all of a sudden, instead of having a surplus,
(14:33):
they've got a debt.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Yeah, well I think that, And again I'm not in
their mind, so I wasn't there back then. I don't
know what they did. But if we look at it,
look at the different forms of gambling. Most states legalized
lotteries first highest margin, you know, then went into casinos. Ah,
they can tax it. They can make decent money. Sports
betting was last because that has the narrowest margin, and again,
(14:55):
you know you don't have that. It's not as dependable.
So when they're doing it or budgetary reasons like okay,
we're going to generate with a lottery, we can generate
this much money a year to fund the schools. Sports betting,
you know, not that stable. So I don't think there's
a lot of people rushing to legalize it back then.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
It's always about the money, it's never about the morals.
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Speaker 3 (16:23):
You know.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
In your book, Dave, you wrote a little bit about
the Keyfaber hearings. For those who don't know, I'll say
it quickly so I can set up the question. In
the nineteen early nineteen fifties, estes Keifaber, who was a
cenator from Tennessee, very ambitious guy. There was a lot
of consternation within communities, especially big cities, about the influence
of organized crime, and so he set up this two
(16:47):
years of investigations, going city to city on a tour
where he had subpoenaed the organized crime bosses and they
were being forced to testify about their business and everything
that was going on. To me, one of the biggest
things that came out of it was the realization by
the public that sports betting was the biggest revenue driver
(17:11):
for organized crime. And to me, Dave, I don't know
if you have studied and seen differently, that felt like
a death blow for sports betting. That felt like a
fun thing people did in the community to being sort
of a nefarious, dangerous thing, and it changed that business
is trajectory, yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Because if you look at the history of illegal gambling,
right back in the twenties, when we know organized crime
was doing a lot of stuff, you would see if
you go back in the newspaper archives, we'll talk about
local rackets, boss. So there was like the Brooklyn rackets
and the Waterfront rackets, and the Newark rackets and the
Philly rackets. It was all local. Okay, what happens in
nineteen fifteen fifty one, and the keyf offer is okay,
(17:52):
he needs an issue. He wants to be president, he
needs an issue. Kind of went into antitrust stuff, but
that didn't excite people. McCarthy he had already taken anti communism,
so that's gone, Well, what about gambling. Well, wait, the
local gambling you're doing with your bookie, that's actually part
of this national or even international crime syndicate. So it's
(18:12):
a national issue, so Congress has jurisdiction because across the
state lines, and that's where it really shifted. That's where
you had the idea of the mafia as a national
organization or even international organization. Before that, it was all local,
you know. And again, it's kind of fun to go
back in the archives and see when they start using
that language. So yeah, it did change the narrative because
(18:32):
originally people said, well, yeah, I'm just putting down a
two dollar bet. And there's a book in the archives
called a two dollars bet means murder, Wow, And it's
trying to tell people, yeah, your harmless sports betting is
actually funding organized crime, and that did shift the narrative.
You're absolutely right.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Yeah, there's nothing like a complete and total extraction from
your two dollars bet to that being the reason why
the person down the street is getting knocked off.
Speaker 5 (18:58):
I mean, I've been killed by a small bet before
it's done me that much.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
That makes sense.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
One of my kind of favorite themes of the of
both your books.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
But there's so much.
Speaker 5 (19:16):
There's so much gambling embroiled in parts of American history
and American culture and really international world history. Going back
hundreds of years. But one of my favorite anecdotes was
that in the middle of the nineteenth century, the first
major regulatory act in congressional history, so tigers have been
(19:38):
around for like whatever eighty years, related to boiler construction
and steamboat licensing. Could you explain why that was related
to gambling?
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Okay, so we all know this isn't the golden age
of steamboats all that fun stuff. Also people use steamboats,
they became gambling tools. People both gambled on them, you know,
playing all kinds of aims, especially poker, but also people
would bet which steamboat was going to get there first.
The captains were cut in on it so they would
have an incentive, and they found that captains and the
(20:11):
crew would push the steamship so hard that boilers exploded,
and they said, this is too much risk. We've got
to cut back in this. So it is amazing how
something like that, And it also shows how universal that
gambling gene is, where like literally the vessel you're riding
on with the high pressure steam that is deadly that
you know has killed people before, you're still going to
(20:32):
overload it just to get that edge. That is wild.
It's crazy that.
Speaker 5 (20:37):
You report that in one year five hundred people died
from this, and in.
Speaker 7 (20:42):
Congress is like, holy shit, guys, you keep blowing up
your own passengers because you can't just erasing your steamboats.
We are going to make our first ever regulatory action' hilarious.
Speaker 5 (20:54):
And obviously you know what tremendous about about Las Vegas
and its history, and we'll dive into that shortly. But
those teamboats obviously related to the big business of New Orleans.
Could you explain briefly, you know, kind of how important
New Orleans was to the development of American gambling pre
Las Vegas.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Yeah, I mean, New Orleans is huge. It was really
America's first gambling capital, without a doubt. You had the French,
you had the Spanish, you had Native Americans, you had
African cultures coming in there. So you also had a
lot of people, a lot of money. It was a
thriving port. So it really is where America. If people
in America wanted to gamble, most gambling was happening there.
They experimented with legal gambling houses really early on in
(21:36):
the nineteenth century. The games of poker and crafts were
both both born in New Orleans or near New Orleans.
So really New Orleans in the nineteenth century was the
capital of gambling in America without a doubt.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Incredible.
Speaker 6 (21:51):
Yeah, I just want to piggyback off that. I've thought
a lot about this and you know, gambling. To me,
it's a really important part of my life. And you know,
you seem like some of knows all about I mean,
every little detail, every story. And you know, a story
I love that I read a long time ago is
about Native Americans didn't have a word for lie, but
they did have a word for bet. And I always
thought that's such a human thing, like at our core,
(22:13):
I mean, think of the earliest man. What you said was, Buddy,
I bet you I can race you home and beat
you in a race where I can kill that animal
before you can kill it, like a little bet like that.
What is your discovery of the earliest bets ever written
or made in human history?
Speaker 3 (22:27):
What goes way? It goes back really far. And I've
got another layer of this, you know, so in the earth,
basically for a lot of human history, people weren't living
in settlements, the first settlements, you know, we find evidence
of gambling, you know, primitive dice, things like that, and
kind of the funny thing is so like if we
would say, and I'm not saying this is the absolute year,
but if we say the earliest dice were ten thousand
(22:48):
years old, the earliest cheating dice crooked dice, or like
nine and ninety nine years old, So cheating was also
part of it a long ways away, and it's kind
of funny. Like one of the more poignant stories is
the when Mount Vesuvius erupted and POMPEII was engulfed in ash,
you know, in the taverns. You know, there was this
(23:09):
one thing where it was a gambling table and they
had the guy's debts were like just scratched up on
the wall and they're just thinking like suddenly there's all
the ash and the lava coming down, and this guy's
last thing is like, oh man.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
I'm down, and then he's like, great, I'm off the hook.
That's I was actually thinking. The guy who won is like,
are you freaking kidding me? I finally hit a streak
and now we're all going under.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
This is ridiculous.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
Yeah, really bad beat. Volcanic bad beat for sure, Yeah, volcanic.
So yeah, I can't get worse than that.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
That was good.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
One thing I wanted to also point out from your
book is you have this recurring theme which I really enjoyed,
kind of the Simon's point of you, like, you go
back to the earliest bets made in humankind, but all
the way up to the present day. You keep describing
societies that are getting more and more advanced. Gambling exists
because it's people are congregating. Then gambling is frowned upon,
(24:14):
that it is outlawed, and that it is found to
be totally irrepressible, and that it is eventually tolerated or regulated,
but that it happens in every corner of the world
over and over and over again for thousands of years.
So looking back at the history of gambling kind of
overall and maybe Las Vegas specifically, our audience is mostly
(24:34):
sports betters, Like, what are the lessons that our audience
can take away.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Well, it's basically, I mean, there's a couple of them.
First of all, people have always gambled. I mean, obviously
not everybody, but a lot of people have always gambled.
But things do go in cycles, and there's no reason
to think that people are going to keep on betting
the way they're betting right now, you know, because if
we look back, just looking at casinos in Vegas in
the sixties, and we're just going to go back sixty years,
(25:01):
which is not that much time historically, but like sixties,
they're mostly playing craps. Blackjack is just starting to get
big because skill play is just starting to get popular,
but it's still mostly craps. There's maybe a couple of
dozen slot machines, is not that big a deal, and
the casinos are a lot smaller. Go to the nineties,
giant air conditioned slot machine houses, just total slot machines.
(25:24):
But the slot machines look really different than they are today.
They're mostly steppers, a couple of video machines, but mostly
steppers versus today. Less focus in the gambling, more focus
and everything else. You've got electronic table games, You've got
all kinds of things evolving, you know, And that's and
think about how sports betting has changed too with the
advent of technology, and now you don't have to go
(25:45):
to the bookie bookies in your phone, so there's just
a lot of that going on. And I think my
other lesson is, you know, they say the house always wins,
Usually the house does but when it does, and I
this might be kind of ominous for sports betting. You know,
when the house doesn't win, the house tends to change
the rules. So if people find something, find an exploit,
(26:07):
they will change the rules to prevent that because the
house has to win otherwise they don't stay in business.
Speaker 5 (26:13):
Oh, for sure, that's another recurring theme throughout throughout history.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Well, that's also why the States didn't want to be
in that business, right They worried that they all of
a sudden would have a season where they owe money
instead of are taking in money.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
And what do you do with you know, that hole
in the budget.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Sports betting specifically, why do you think, I guess from
your point of view, you said it'll change.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
How is it different than what you thought it.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Would be when it was legalized, even in these past,
say seven years.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Well, it's really interesting because if you look at the
history of sports betting in Nevada, traditionally it was maybe
and I'm saying from the eighties onward, when you had
the advent of casinos being in sports betting, it was
maybe one percent of total Nevada gaming revenue, maybe one percent.
You know, then in the early twenty tens, we get
up to two percent and kind of into three percent.
(27:12):
So it really is something in Nevada. It really is
an amenity to bring people in. The whole idea that
they had is I don't want my hot blackjack player
leaving to go someplace else to place a bet, so
I'm gonna have this here even if it doesn't make money.
And you know, every slot manager in the world is saying,
if I had that space that the sports book has
(27:35):
or the polkroom has, I could make the revenue to
make a year. I could make in a month, you
know that, And like true, but then they're gonna leave
to go bet in someplace else, and they're they're gonna
gamble there. So they really did do as amenity. What
we've seen, you know, in the past ten years or
even less, is the emergence of sports betting as a
revenue source in its own through online and mobile, which
(27:58):
is something we have not seen in Nevada before or
so that's totally different. And it did you know way
back when, back in twenty ten, when I was trying
to extrapolate, well, how big of a market is it, Like, well,
if it's two percent, it'll be this and it turned
out to be a lot bigger than that because behaviors changed.
So that's just proof that it happens.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, I remember when I first started going out to
Vegas and I was working on the odds, and I
would get the numbers from the Nevada Gaming Control Board
of the total handle and then the hold for these
sports books, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
(28:39):
late nineties, early two thousands, it would be like six
million a year in total revenue for every sports book
in the state of Nevada. I'm like, why the fuck
am I writing this book because this thing doesn't matter
at all, like we thought it was a big deal,
and it means nothing with the overall scheme of what
(29:03):
really is important in the state of Nevada. But it
has always sports betting since really the state of Nevada
legalized it in the seventies. I think has had this
outsized impact on the rest of the industry in terms
of not its importance, but a little bit of its glamour.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
Would you say that.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah, And obviously there's a lot more illegal betting going
on back then, which I don't think we even you know,
for a while, the FBI estimated it. Then at some
point they just kind of gave up. I learned that
when I was researching another book, covering the Wire, which
was about online gaming gambling prohibition. So it's kind of
interesting to see how they eventually said, we don't know
how much illegal gambling there is, illegal sports betting there
(29:44):
is going on. We know it's big, so's that's kind
of the uh, yeah, that's kind of where that is.
But Nevada, did you know? Originally yeah, they did views
it as an amenity, but now it's becoming a revenue
source in its own right.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
This is a sloppyly awarded question, apologies, but like you
you could describe a let's say, a thousand years of
betting activity across the whole world, right, Yeah, all of them,
all of the betting activity in every form, always involved
other human parties, and almost always leaving your home, and
(30:20):
now only in the last like what decade you no
longer need both of those things. How enormous of a
change is that in the from a cultural standpoint to
like what betting is and how intrinsically human the activity is.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
It's a big change. That's one that's probably about five
or six hundred years in the making to be a
little little, little little dramatic there. So if we think back,
you know, to the dawn and gambling, as we were
saying like, yeah, can I throw this, you know, rock
farther than you can? I catch this? Sound them before you,
you know that sort of thing, like Simon was saying, Yeah,
that is personal. Oh my horse is faster than your horse.
(31:01):
All right, well I don't know, but my buddy's horse
is faster than your buddy's horse. Okay, now we're doing that.
You know, my alma mater can be your alma mater
in football, okay, you know, my favorite team can be
your team. It was very personal.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
You have.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
This shift to mercantile gambling and commercial gambling that really
happens kind of really gets underway more in the Renaissance,
in that period the Reformation, as you have the rise
of sort of capitalism and fun things like that, and
it intensifies in America with the mention of the spot machine,
where like, if you think about what we did in America,
we took gambling and we invented a machine that can
(31:42):
gamble more efficiently, which is such an American thing. And
that's late nineteenth century eighteen ninety nine. This is what
they were doing, and this is what Americans are doing, like, oh, railroad,
will build build a bigger railroad. Telegraph yeah, all across
the country. Gambling, Yeah, here's a machine that'll do that
for me. So in every okay, looking at betting. Invention
(32:04):
of the telegraph, Hey huh, Now we can find out
what's happening at race tracks all around the country. We
can bet on them here. And that was really the
first remote betting, and I argue that was the first
remote remote entertainment where people would actually be hearing them narrate,
like what's happening in the race, and they're very excited.
(32:26):
And people were freaked out then because they're like, oh
my god, why are they jumping and yelling and screaming
and stuff and they're not even at the track.
Speaker 5 (32:33):
I would say it's probably the intrinsic power of the
spoken word chad, Yeah, timeless, timeless and evocative.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Yeah, yes, yeah. And they had no concept of remote
entertainment like today where we'll watch the game and get
all excited even though we're not in the stadium. You know,
they had no concept and that was how that was born.
So it is really interesting. In every technological devancement, people
are betting, you know, telephones, people using telephones to bet,
Internet people using the Internet to bet. Mobile people are
(33:01):
using mobile now and I don't see a reason why
that won't continue.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
So which came first? This is a chicken in the egg.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Is it.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Gambling as a point of pride or gambling for the
sake of gambling? And I think there's a nuanced difference there.
But before technology, gambling for the sake of pride, because
you ed had to be more in person and a
little bit more about competition versus gambling that is at
(33:37):
scale and is about gambling for gambling sake.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Yeah, I mean, think about the difference between poker and
slot machines. You know, poker, and I know everybody gets
bad beats and stuff like that, but it comes down
to I'm better than you and I'm taking your money
because of skill for even though yeah, I mean there
are bad beats and stuff like that, and you know,
whereas slot machines is just hey, I'm putting my money
up and whatever happens happens, it's out of my hands.
(34:04):
So it's that's that different. You know, people who just
want that rush of gambling versus people who want to
gamble to show their skill. You know, that is the
difference right there, and they probably always had a little
bit of them. Probably the skill dominated more early on,
but since we've gone to more totally random games like slots,
a little bit more of the pure gambling.
Speaker 6 (34:23):
That's why I love gambling though, Like slots now there's
an edge. Like I know guys who have quit sports
betting on what I do, and they literally live in
books or outside sports books by the slot machines, and
they just watch people on machines and they know timing
wise that this machine's hot, like this is this machine's
right in the pop Like they just watch them and
play for hours and they'll wait and jump on their machine,
(34:45):
which is just to me, it's like crazy how people
just find an edge and every little thing like you
talked about, and you know, go back ten thousand years
of those fake dice pros. Everybody they're always me find
an edge. They might call that cheating. To me, that's
a professional, that's someone trying to find an edge. So
I love the breakdown of all these history right now.
It's really interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
You know, Nate Silver not to plug another book, But
talking about slots, he wrote a book that came out
over the summer called On the Edge, and he had
a section in there about people who, to your point, Simon,
are looking to find the edges in slot machines. I've
probably been to Vegas a thousand times, no exaggeration, in
(35:25):
my life, and I think that I've played slots zero times, Simon.
Like when you go to the casinos, now, do you
have any urge to do anything other than walk to
the book, make your bet and get out? Or will
you stay and play Parker? I know you love poker,
(35:47):
Like will you play poker? Will you play blackjack?
Speaker 4 (35:49):
What is your menu?
Speaker 6 (35:52):
That's the running joke to a lot of professional sports
better is it's like basketball players want to be rappers,
sports betters want to be poker players, and vice versa
poka players.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
I know some really high level poke players.
Speaker 6 (36:03):
I've seen when many tournaments in Vegas, especially in twenty fourteen,
I mean twenty fifteen when I was really in Vegas
a lot, and I would see these guys win one
hundred K and then just go bet it on like
a Lakers first half and lose it. And it's like
that's also why these sportsbook exists, right, They're hitting these
guys who are great at one thing, but something that
great at and they have confidence in when they shouldn't
have confidence in. So yeah, for me, slot machines, chat,
(36:27):
I'm with you on that. The only time I've ever
hit a slot machine is at the airport in Vegas,
Like that's the one time they'll get me.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
If I got eight hours to kill and I got
the itch, I'll hit the slot machines and things like that.
But I'm with you. The big thing for me is blackjack.
Speaker 6 (36:39):
I told you, if I'm really nervous about a bet
I made, I can't watch the game in the sports book,
I can't be around all the people talk and anything
like that.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
I'll go right across the blackjack table.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
You know it.
Speaker 6 (36:48):
Give me a twenty dollars limit. I don't even care.
I'm just there to kill time while watching the game
on one of the corner of TVs. So that's definitely
my nervous hitter is. I just like to sit there
play blackjack for a couple hours while watching games.
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Speaker 3 (38:16):
Dave. Do you gambed now? Having worked in the casino
and having been awake at four thirty in the morning
watching people gamble kind of kills all the romance. Yeah,
what I'm hearing at four thirty.
Speaker 5 (38:25):
Is my business day. One day the volcano is coming
for me. So that's yeah, more terms back, you know.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
It's just yeah, you see things doing surveillance, it's like, uh,
you know, just like, well, I'm not in part of it.
For me, it's like I'm no smarter or luckier than
these people. So it's not it's got to be somebody.
I don't think it's going to be me.
Speaker 5 (38:45):
Our audience will not be surprised that I absolutely adore gambling.
I can think of the two casinos where I was
made to move because they were shampooing the carpet while
I was playing, which, as you know, like they're doing
that at like four am, Christmas morning or whatever when
they're like no one, no one will be here, which
is never going to make anybody move. I proposed at
(39:05):
the roulette wheel of the Old Barbary Coast then Bill's
Gambling Hall. Yeah no, yeah, they I did not know
that she hit her number and they pushed the chips
out with the ring on top. I had had to
take the ring because I was traveling for business and
it was around Thanksgiving from Milwaukee to Denver to my
(39:26):
family's Thanksgiving in Baltimore to Las Vegas, so I hit
every time zone, which made me want to puke my
guts out. Don't travel with a diamond ring, uh And
then yeah, I just assumed that the uh Bill's Gammon
Hall would be fine with it. They were like, what
the fuck are you talking about. I was like, oh right,
I forgot to like clue you in on this. I
had lost enough money at Bill's historically that the pit
(39:48):
boss was like, oh dude, no problem, no problem, and
he showed the ring to the camera, placed it on
the chips and said, I'll clear this table out and
then you have to get you have to fill it.
So I got my my family who would come with me,
and we sat down and she lost every spinch. She
played ten numbers at a time, so you're gonna win
about one in every four spins. She lost twelve spins.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
In a row.
Speaker 5 (40:09):
It was absolutely excruciating, sweating through my clothes. By now,
the pit boss has told every other table in the
vicinity of what's happening. So every time she lost. There
were audible groans coming from the other tables, which she
thought she was being mocked. But yeah, it was great,
and we're November twenty ten, so still going strong, she said, yes,
still going strong. Yeah, it's great, dude, put.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Out another edition because that's the best gambling story I've heard.
Speaker 5 (40:34):
Oh, I remember when I told the Bill sports Book,
Because of course, she says, yes, we hug and I'm like,
I got to go make some more bets, and I said, hey,
I just got engaged, and the guy's like, sounds good.
I go, no, I got engaged. Here the reaction of
the Bill's Gaming Gold sports Book employees to that I
had chosen to get in that casino at that time,
I've never seen people ask more clarifying questions. They would
(40:56):
have been less incredulous if I told them I arrived
there on a dragon, But to their credit, they gave
me the whole book of drink tickets. So shout out
to the now defunct Bill's Gambling Hall corner of Flamingo
in the Strip.
Speaker 4 (41:10):
That is legendary.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Matt. I don't know how we've known each other for
as long as we have and you've never told me
that story.
Speaker 5 (41:17):
This is my total coincidence. I'm drinking from a Bill's
gambling home mug as you think, which I bought that day.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
You've told me every boring, long gambling story of your
entire life, and you've never told me that story.
Speaker 5 (41:29):
I'm just full of surprises, Chad. You know, we all
contain multitudes.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Dave, you just said something that I wanted to follow
up on. You worked surveillance at casinos.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Oh yeah, yeah, back when that was my postgraduate work.
So when I was in undergrad, I worked security. After
I went and got a PhD, I came back, moved
back to Atlantic City and went in a surveillance Well did.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
You guys take out to the loading docks?
Speaker 6 (41:53):
Were you out there with them or you were still
in the back room just in their earpiece, And yeah,
take them out the back door.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Just to mean, yeah, I was kind of was thinking
about this. I really like doing security because you're out there,
you know, you're just out with people, You're you're interacting,
you're you're on the floor. You got all that excitement
in surveillance, you're just up in the room and it's
like sometimes it was kind of fun, kind of like
mystery science theater three thousand, just like watching TV and
like making jokes and stuff. Other times it was just
(42:21):
there's a lot of tedium. There's a lot of tedium
just watching people doing repetitive motions again and again and again,
and you kind of pick up like when someone's gambling,
like they're very focused and they're gambling. So if somebody's
gambling and they're looking around, well maybe I gotta watch
them because they shouldn't be doing that. They should be folks.
I remember one time there's this guy playing slots and
(42:41):
I'm like, he's really nervous. He's gambling. He's like really nervous,
and like he's rubbernecking. Okay, I'm pretty sure he's doing
a sort thing with slugs. I'm like all zoomed in,
like yeah, man, he's I'm gonna get him. This is great.
Then I assume it was his wife comes down and
it's like and that's why he was nervous because he
was waiting for his Maybe he was going to propose.
(43:02):
I don't know. Yeah, it's so funny, Like I thought
I had it. I was so excited, like, yeah, I
got finally got one. I got a slot scam. Here
didn't didn't have a slot scam. Mostly I think I had,
you know, just a couple of per snatching kind of things.
Those kinds of things did you.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Get pretty good though, at being able to tell if
someone was trying to count cards or cheat at the
table at all.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Now they had account team for that, so that was
kind of beyond what what I did. Then, you know,
it was more just which basically watching the money, and
again it is very a lot of tedium just watching
the money. Let's say there's an overage or an underage.
Underage is worse at a cash window. You've got to
go back and watch that cashier's whole shift, and basically
(43:48):
they're shooting it from the top down, so you're watching
it slow motion, then putting out the money, proving the chips,
stacking the chips. Okay, I know it's two hundred and
seventy dollars and we're met, we're one hundred dollars short,
so boom boom boom. Oh wow, now I've seen a
transaction where the cashier was eighty dollars short. So now
I've got to look for eighty dollars transactions too, not
(44:09):
just the big ones. That was like, yeah, my soul
left my body. I remember I spent like three shifts
scrutinizing this one thing, and then Super I was like, eh,
it probably happened during tape change, because back then they
had tapes, and I was like, oh God. Never felt
so defeated like that.
Speaker 5 (44:27):
A lot like batting, it feels like you're in the
middle of the basketball.
Speaker 3 (44:31):
Yeah, yeah, because I'm like, yeah, I know I'm gonna
find this, and you know they're yeah, So that's yeah,
that was quite a thing, Dave.
Speaker 5 (44:40):
One of the themes book books is the h everything
that is old is new again, And one of my
favorite examples is in the middle of the nineteenth century,
you have Francois Blanc and he runs a bunch of
incredibly successful casinos. He's the guy that made Monte Carlo
luxurious gambling location, right, and he's visited by Napoleon's nephew
(45:06):
and he's a big celebrity. They can't wait to have him.
And he rolls up and bets only the table maximum
for like three days, and he kicks the shit out
of the casino. He wins an absolute fortune, and then
before they can win it back, he just pee packs
his stuff and leaves very abruptly. They could barely make
make the payment he took like basically all their cash
(45:26):
on hand. But in the all that is old is
new again. They were like, what are we gonna do?
He goes, here's what we're gonna do. Tell every person
in every contact that we have across Europe that this
guy cleaned us out. We are total dopes. Tell him
exactly how much you want, tell him how easy it
was for him. Let everybody know we are right for
the picking looses slots in town kind of mentality.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
And it worked.
Speaker 5 (45:50):
The next year was their most profitable year on record.
It feels like the sports book's helping to promote the
long shot parlays that hit that like there's a universal
there's a timelessness to all these tricks. I'm sure you
have a million examples.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
Oh yeah. And it is just that basic psychology where
people report the big wins but nobody reports the losses.
We assume everyone else is winning but me, So I'm
gonna win soon because that's all I hear about. And
you know, in Vegas, when somebody wins at the airport slots,
that makes local news, like somebody wins, you know, fifty
thousand dollars in slots. It's like, what about all the
people who didn't win today at the slots? How come
(46:27):
that's not newsworthy? So, yeah, that is a that is
a thing. I don't think that's ever going to go away.
Speaker 5 (46:33):
Yeah, people think all these things are new inventions. It's
like they've been doing They've been following a playbook that
is hundreds of years old.
Speaker 3 (46:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
All I heard from that Matt is that guy won
a lot and the casino lost a lot, and the
next year the casino made it back, which means Simon
and I next year, we are freaking.
Speaker 5 (46:54):
Do I mean the advertising obviously would have worked on me,
So I can also appreciate the universality of the advertise
because I definitely would have been like, all right, pack
our buggies or whatever, the get on the railroad. We
got to hit this casino in France.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
Dave, I want to thank you for coming on Roll
the Bones, which is a great book, a great reference book,
full of amazing anecdotes. Something for your money, another fabulous book.
Congrats on the release earlier this year. And that's not
wrong when he tells me to say you are the
pre eminent Vegas casino historian.
Speaker 4 (47:31):
You got it all. Thanks for providing so many good stories.
Speaker 3 (47:35):
Thanks. It means a lot coming from you guys too,
you know, humbling and gratifying. Yeah, I'm glad, you know,
And I hope people do like the books. It's just
trying to share a little bit of that excitement and
some of these cool stories that have happened.
Speaker 4 (47:46):
Everyone go buy the books.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
As a reminder, the Favorites podcast is presented by Bet
three sixty five and now new Bet three six five.
Customers get one hundred and fifty dollars in bonus bets
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Speaker 4 (48:06):
Whatever the moment, It's never ordinary. At Bet three s five.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Must be twenty one or older and present in Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana,
North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or eighteen and
older in Kentucky gambling problem called one eight hundred gambler
or one eight hundred bets off in Iowa terms. Conditioned
restrictions apply. Simon and I will return worth our next
episode of the Favorites on the Action Network YouTube page
(48:29):
This Thursday, eleven am Eastern talking Free agency in the
NFL with Chris Raybond. Download us from Spotify, Apple Pods
wherever you get your pods, Rate review, Subscribe leaves five stars,
say whatever you want feedback as a gift till next time,
Love you.
Speaker 5 (48:52):
Action Network reminds you please gamble responsibly.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
If you or someone you care about has a gambling problem,
help is available twenty four to seven at one eight
hundred Gambler
Hosts And Creators
Chad Millman
Simon Hunter
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