3. Luck Versus Loss

Contrary to popular misconception, the game of Roulette was not originated in Monte Carlo, the place that made it famous, at least in song and story. What is more, the Double Zero, giv­ing the house a higher percentage, is not an American innova­tion as most people think, but was customary before Monte Carlo became the great gambling center of the world.

By then, smart operators had learned that by offering suckers a better break, the more fish they would attract and if it took them twice as long to go broke, that could be handled by in­stalling twice as many tables. Naturally, they offered other in­ducements to make the customers stay more pleasant and that is the rule today, despite the fact that it should warn away the wise player.

Here, for example, is a well-worded criticism:

"If the public were not such simpletons and the directors of casinos so brazen, people would make the mental comment that the luxury flaunted in these casinos, the percentage paid to the municipal authorities which tolerate them and the expensive theatrical performances given in them are proof positive that the player has not the slightest chance of winning a single cent.

"If the proprietors of these highly ornate ogres' dens were not so certain of their client's gullibility, they would house their croupiers in roughly white-washed barns and appear in the rooms with their clothes in tatters. This would be at least an attempt to persuade passersby that the players win so heavily as to reduce the staff at the casino to the direst poverty.

"But the flaunting of this daily outlay, this superabundance of amusements, these shows for which entertainers are engaged at $5,000 a night, can mean but one thing: 'What a lot of money we must get from you, if we can spend all this and yet have ten times as much left for ourselves!'"

That was not written last week in Las Vegas. It was penned a century ago in the German town of Homburg, where Rou­lette was played on a layout with a Double-Zero, before Monte Carlo had even become a dream. But the lavish surroundings and extravagant entertainment are still in vogue and always will be as long as such pleasure palaces flourish.

One purpose is to attract big spenders. That is the sure way to keep the play at a price level that will meet the heavy taxes, provide for necessary upkeep and pay the experienced personnel. When Homburg proved too greedy, Monsieur Blanc, the proprietor of the gambling casino, pulled out of the little Hessian state where the town was located and went to the principality of Monaco where he had already established Monte Carlo.

Not only did Monaco thrive; the principality and its ruling house have weathered hard times and three wars as solidly as the great rock on which the vastly enlarged casino stands. The very name "Monte Carlo" today spells charm, glitter and ro­mance; but when you speak of "Homburg" people think you mean a hat.

Importance of Capital

To analyze Roulette, we must first find out how far Luck can figure as opposed to Loss. That, in a way, means that the whole question must be studied in reverse.

Assume that a group of persons have pooled their resources and begin to play Roulette, drawing from the lump sum. Who will be the big winner? That's easily answered. The person who has the most luck will win the most money. That estab­lishes Luck as the basic factor.

Now comes the question: How long can such Luck hold out? It must hold out until all the other players have gone broke; otherwise, someone may stage a come-back. To do that, a player must raise or borrow extra capital.

But suppose one player goes in with more money at the start. What if he takes five shares instead of only one and plays them singly against, say, five other players? What are his chances then? That's easily figured: 5 to 1 where each individ­ual opponent is concerned; even money against the lot. But he needs more than that for a sure thing.

He wants odds like 10 to 1, or 50 to 1, or 100 to 1, or whatever is necessary to overwhelm the opposition. That extra "some­thing" is all the more effective if it can be kept in reserve and poured in as required. The way to beat Luck is with the sec­ond factor: Capital.

That still isn't enough around the gambling hells—excuse us, halls. Capital may win in the long run, but you can't finance a bank on the law of diminishing returns with a promise of a future come-back. It has to start by bringing dividends from the initial investment. That can be assured through the third factor: Percentage.

The average player hopes that Luck will maintain and in­crease his Capital, despite the bank's Percentage.

The house depends upon Percentage to maintain and increase its Capital while the player's Luck runs out.

That's the difference—and what a difference!

It explains why a legitimate gambling concession can always find backers to help it start in business, while no one will lend money to a player who thinks he can go buck the bank and break it. But remember: The house, like the player, still de­pends on capital. It is the biggest factor in the business.

Roulette Analyzed

Let's take some simple illustrations of how this all works out. Suppose that three dozen players should sit down at a Rou­lette table and each would pick a number from 1 to 36, backing it with $1 every play. The house would have its number 0 as an extra share and perhaps another, 00, giving it two shares, each representing a free ride.

Now suppose that each and every number, zero included, should show up with rather surprising regularity, thus eliminat­ing luck as a factor. With a Single-0 wheel, at the end of 370 spins, each player would have put in exactly $370 and taken out $360 as the result of ten wins. His loss during the session would amount to $10.

But the bank, putting up nothing on its figure 0, would have accumulated the $360 lost by the players. With a Double-00 wheel, a matter of 380 spins would put each player $20 out and the bank would literally double its nothing, picking up a total of $720.

However: The play seldom, if ever, levels off that neatly. Suppose the person playing number 23 should have five extra wins. He would take out $540 in return for an investment of $370 or $380, according to the type of wheel. Contrarily, a man playing an unlucky number, say 32, might pick up only five wins, bringing him a return of only $180.

The man playing 23 could quit a winner or could stay in the game a long while more; while the man who bet on 32 would either be "bust" or would be looking forward to a hard, hope­less haul in trying to get his money back.

But the bank would roll merrily along, its own luck depend­ing upon how often its free numbers (0 and 00) appeared. They might fall off one night only to pull more strongly on another. Even a crazy behavior by the wheel would cause no banking problems, providing players were equalizing their bets and thereby nullifying one another in the manner just described. But suppose they don't play that way. Here is what might happen:

The man playing number 23, acting on a hunch, decides to play $10 every turn and stays with it. The 32 player, after, say, fifty straight $1 losses, decides to quit, which does not par­ticularly matter. What does matter is the luck of Mr. 23. He puts up $3700 or $3800, according to the type wheel; but he scores $5400 as the result of fifteen wins.

That means the bank must pay out $1600 or $1700 to that one player from its own "take" of an estimated $360 or $720. The bank needs a few thousand dollars to handle that one player and if several others should begin combining luck with big bets, the bank can find itself in deep, indeed. Big winners are often big plungers and while their lucky streak lasts the bank must bear the brunt of it.

Breaking the Bank

Obviously, the bank requires capital to stay in business and even with a huge amount of cash on tap, it can still encounter problems. In the old days, wealthy patrons would show up at Homburg with more money than the casino and on several occasions they "broke the bank" through the sheer size of their bets. In brief, the overwhelming power of big capital is too great in proportion to the small percentage that must counteract it, provided, of course, that the third element, luck, favors the player.

For example: If a big money man bet all the bank could muster—say $10,000—on one spin of the wheel and the ball hit his color, such as red, the bank would be "broken" then and there. If it went black, the player could still break the bank by hitting red on the next two plays. It might take several more plays for the big money man to come "one ahead" but as soon as he did, the bank would be a goner.

Of course it might go the other way. Assuming that the player has unlimited capital, he might lose one $10,000 bet after another if the wheel kept going black. But luck would still be a necessary factor, in this case working in the bank's behalf. But the whole thing could be over before a green 0 or 00 showed to prove that there was a percentage in the bank's favor.

By using a "double-up" system as will be explained in the next chapter, the player with unlimited capital simply could not lose. So to guard against that, the gambling casinos impose a "limit" to every bet. At Monte Carlo, the limit was $1200 at the period when a plunger named Wells became famous as "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo."

Actually, Wells did not "break the bank" but simply cleaned out the fund allotted to the table at which he happened to play, a sum of about $20,000. But he repeated the feat at other tables, winning $200,000 in a three-day stand. At a later date, the limit was boosted to $2400 a play, on "even chances" such as Red or Black, other combinations having correspondingly lower limits.

In the meantime, however, Canfìeld's famous gaming house in New York was advertising a $5,000 limit at its Roulette tables. Today, limits vary according to the particular gambling house, its location and the type of clientele. But the big plun­gers who play the limit are not the customers that the gambling casino wants.

They prefer the repeat patrons who try their luck on a sizable yet reasonable scale, the kind who boast about their winnings and whose losses only spur them into coming back for more. The longer the play, the better it is for the house and any interruptions do not matter. The player who quits while his luck is running good may pick up the play the next day and hit a bad streak from the start.

Naturally, stories of wonderful luck are encouraged around gambling casinos and stooges are even hired to go around telling such tales.

Tales of Monte Carlo

In Monte Carlo they used to tell about a woman who lost all her chips and went up on a balcony to have a drink and forget it. In her purse she found an odd chip and, to show her disgust for the whole thing, she flung it over the rail so that some at­tendant could pick it up from the floor and keep it.

Instead, the chip landed on a roulette layout and rolled to rest on Number 17 just as the croupier was about to spin the wheel. The ball landed on 17 and, to the woman's astonishment, a stack of thirty-six chips was delivered to her on the balcony. That put her back in the game, where her luck turned good and she won a few hundred chips more.

Proof of this story was backed by the fact that from that day on, the balcony had to be screened off to keep other disappoint­ed players from going up there and tossing their last chips on the tables hoping for a change of luck.

Actually, the balcony had to be fenced so that disgruntled players would be unable to throw heavier things than chips-empty bottles, for instance—not at the green cloth on the Rou­lette table, but at the wheel that had caused them their mis­fortune.

From Monte Carlo also comes the account of the inveterate gamester who liked to let his money ride on a winning number, hoping it would repeat. Always he would sit there in dead-pan style, waiting for his luck to click. On this occasion it did, so he let the bet ride again. When it hit, he simply waited and it hit again. So he sat and waited.

Once more it hit and still once more with the chips rising to huge stacks as the croupier counted out new winnings and pushed them over to the lucky square. When the player let them stay there, the croupier was forced to ask him politely if he intended to play the number again, as the chips were edging into other squares.

The player didn't answer. He couldn't because he was dead. Somewhere along the line he had succumbed to a heart attack. That explained why he'd stayed on the same number. It also raised the question: How many bets had the dead man really made?

Since he never before had let a bet ride more than once, it was probable that he had died after the first repeat, but there was no way of proving it. So the casino paid the full amount to the man's heirs.

That story, too, was good propaganda. It stressed the fact that the casino is honest, which it presumably must be to hold public confidence. It also drove home the fact that the same number can turn up five times in a row, thus creating the im­pression that anything is possible in Roulette.

Official records show that two such runs did occur within a ten-year period, Numbers 22 and 32 each hitting five times in succession. That, according to a competent estimate, covered a total of about 1,250,000 throws, based on an average of 125,000 a year.

That would take a lot longer than we can afford to wait and, besides, the house limit would curtail the profits of a coup in which the player would aim for a 35 to 1 payoff, five times over. As one old roue of the Roulette table put it: "I'd drop dead, too, if I even thought I had a streak like that one coming up!"

So let's live and learn along simpler but equally progressive lines, according to the types of System Play that follow.

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