RED TIES AND CASINOS DON'T MIX - TALES FROM THE ROULETTE WHEEL

This weeks blog was written by Ray Bertoia.  

When I returned from the Bahamas and the glamorous life of working in Freeport, I found myself jobless in Manchester so I went to at a dive in the center of town. Our clientele consisted of almost 100% Hong Kong Chinese.

One day we changed our uniforms from the traditional waistcoat to a red jacket and tie – a real tie not a clip on, which I immediately knew was a big mistake. My boss disagreed, “Red is a very lucky number to the Chinese he pointed out.”

It didn’t take long for my fears to come true. Only a week later I was dealing roulette on a heaving game on a Sunday afternoon. That was the big day out at the casino for the local Chinese.

The ball had just dropped into the slot for black four, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a middle aged woman in a smart jacket snatching her losing chips off the red betting square.

I politely told her that she had removed a losing bet.

She refused to replace the losing bet, and declared “I was in time.”

So I casually called, “Place you bets,” and reached in the wheel as if I was about to spin the ball again. At this point the same lady put her chips out again thinking she was getting a fresh spin.
As soon as I saw her place her chips, instead of spinning the ball, I said, “Thank you,” and reached over and took them!

The punter went crazy screaming at me in Chinese. I ignored her ranting feeling pretty smug. I felt like I had done a good job in outwitting a cheater.

Next, I called out, “Place your bets,” and leaned forward to spin the ball. Like a red flag to a bull, my tie dangled invitingly over the table. It was too much for the punter to resist; she grabbed hold of it with both hands under my neck, and pulled hard. I felt the tie tighten.

I grabbed her hands and a tug of war ensued with the tie gradually choking me. Everyone in the casino was shouting, the whole casino ground to a halt as they all came over to my table to watch me choke.

My supervisor yelled, “Let go.” But I couldn’t because I felt like I was really choking.

He jumped off his high chair, got behind me and tried to pull me away from her. At the same time the woman’s husband was pulling her from behind, too. We went to and fro several times when finally I pulled hard and lifted right off her feet until she was lying flat on the roulette table. Her husband pulled back and the sleeves ripped off her jacket.

He pulled out the paddle (that pushed the money into the drop box) and smashed it down on a glass ashtray. Pieces of glass flew everywhere including into my supervisors’ eye.

By this time the casino had erupted into a free for all with ashtrays flying, while punters were gathering up handfuls of roulette chips and flinging them around the room.

Finally I disentangled myself and ran the gauntlet past the irate players up the stairs and safely hid in the break room. On the advice of my supervisors I hid there for the next eight hours, fearing for my life if I went down the stairs or out the entrance as there was a mob waiting for me. Eventually management convinced the players that I had left by a back exit.

So the moral of this story is never wear a red tie while dealing, it gives the punters something to hold onto.

Check out our novel Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos And Cruise Ships

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BOOK TRAILER AND SLIDE SHOW FOR 'CRUISE QUARTERS - A NOVEL ABOUT CASINOS AND CRUISE SHIPS.'

BLACKJACK, WHO'S GOT IT WRONG?

This weeks blog was written by my co-author and husband Ray. He is the least superstitious person on the planet. And don't tell him the dealer is hot unless you want to listen to a thirty minute lecture on odds! So if you are visiting a casino in the near future read this and you may remain a little calmer.

Here are a few thoughts on Blackjack.
When dealing Blackjack how often do you hear the following 'You took the dealers bust card!' This situation sometimes gets very heated. Here is an example. Dealer is showing a 5 and one of the players hits on a hard 15. He receives a 10 and busts. Then the dealer goes on to make a hand when in fact he would have bust had the player played correctly and not taken that ten. Seems logical enough at first. But of course that is only that one particular hand out of thousands. People forget all the other times when another player makes a wrong move and it turns out to actually cause the dealer to bust. In fact you cannot take 'the dealers bust card' unless you know the value of the next card out the shoe. And of course even then it would still by no means be a certainty that the dealer would bust..
                                                Imagine the following situation. -
A full table, second last spot has a 10 and a 5. Last spot also has a 10 and a 5. So they both have 15. The dealer is showing a 5. Now, if either of those players draws to their 15s the rest of the players will get annoyed. But imagine, had the same cards been dealt but just in a slightly different order, giving the player on the second last spot  the two 10s and the player on the last spot receiving both of the 5s, now of course everyone wants him to hit his two 5s! In fact they will get annoyed if he doesn't! But in reality nothing has really changed, just the order of two cards. The next card out of the shoe is still the same card as before regardless of whether the player takes it or the dealer takes it. Of course I realize it is bad play to hit on a hard 15 against the dealers 5, but that bad play rule only applies to the player actually making that particular hit. Nobody else is affected one way or the other by anything any other player does. Since the cards are random, the second card out of the shoe is just as likely to be the dealers 'bust' card as the first card out of the shoe. All of this assumes no card counting techniques, just straight play.

About the author:

Ray and Cara Bertoia are the authors of Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships. Her novel is really a travelogue, a narrative, a romance, a self-help manual for gambling and cruising, and a real-life story all rolled into one funny, obsessive, and entertaining story of two people whose separate life journeys meet at a crossroads. Kindle Fire Dept. says, "This novel is a gem that is nothing short of a vacation in a book!"

Below is the links to Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships

Click the link to find at Amazon.com
Click here to find at Amazon Canada
Click the link to find at Amazon United Kingdom
Click the link to find at Amazon Germany

Click the link to find at Amazon France

Click the link to find at Amazon Italy

Click the link to find at Amazon Spain 

Click the link to find at Amazon Brazil

Ray and Cara have also produced the number one guide on walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
The Desert Woman calls it inspiring. 
Click the link to find the DVD Camino de Santiago a Walkers Guide at Amazon

WRITING CRUISE QUARTERS WAS A 'NOVEL' WAY TO RELIVE OUR CRUISE SHIPS DAYS

Here is an excerpt of the interview I gave for THE BOOK BLOG. It is British blog about publishing and writing and has a section on featured authors. 

Tim I am so happy to be appearing on a British blog because my book is such a blend of the British and Americans. It is set on a British ship with many nationalities in the crew.

The road to my novel, Cruise Quarters – A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships, is a long journey with lots of twist and turns much like a good story. After I graduated college I got a job teaching high school in North Carolina. On a summer break I drove across country with two friends and we all got jobs in a casino in Lake Tahoe. Tahoe was a beautiful place and casino jobs were the best ones to have, especially dealing. Well they all soon went home but I stayed. I worked at Caesars Palace for a few years but then I moved to the North Shore of the Lake. The place I worked at was an “old school” casino, it had been a rat pack hangout in the old days and even now autographed photos of movie stars still adorn the walls. The casino overlooked the lake and as I dealt I would look out at a beautiful view of the crystal blue water.  The border between Nevada and California runs down through the middle of the casino.

The owner was a plumbing contractor from Fresno. The head of security was an ex-Mossad officer and every few weeks we would be strapped down and given lie detector tests. They let porn movies be filmed in the casino and there were rumors that he rigged the slot machines. I’m not sure if that was all true but he did manage to get his casino closed down by the Nevada gaming commission, no small feat. One day a sports agent with Hollywood connections played on my game and encouraged me to write down all my great casino stories. That was the day I became a writer, well my script got as far as HBO where it was eventually rejected but that didn’t matter to me. I was a writer.

A year later I went back to the real world and became a systems analyst by day, writer by night. I lived in Boston, the home of perpetual students and so I was able to take writing classes, join critique groups and improve. After a few years I began working on an MA in writing at Emerson because it had connections in Hollywood. Well, just before I was scheduled to intern in Los Angeles as a script reader I got the opportunity to join Princess Cruises as a croupier. My choice was spend my dwindling savings on an internship or get paid to see the world. I wasn’t scared of going - only staying. The Germans have a word for it torschlusskpanik, the fear of missing the boat.

I stayed at sea for five years and I would like to say that I wrote everyday but I didn’t. I spent those years soaking up all the history I could. The ship was my home and the crew bar was my living room and the nights I spent there were research since I planned to tell the story of all my crewmates someday. And then on my last contract I met Ray and my novel became a love story and that surprised me more than anyone else.

We settled in Palm Springs and I began my book. I had written most of it when I decided to test it out by taking a novel writing class at UCLA. One of the exercises in the class was to try out five opening lines, well the whole class voted for my current opener. My professor liked it so much she became my first editor. I started it in first person, but when I decided to include Ray we switched to third person. Ray’s adventures dealing around the world were just too good to leave out, and I really wanted to include the male point of view.

The goal of our book was to tell our story in a realistic way. After so many ridiculous casino movies like The Cooler, I had had enough.  I am the cynic and Ray is the happy chappy but we both wanted a book that rang true. We wrote down all our ship and casino stories in a book and then built a novel around them.

I casually handed our manuscript to one of my ship friends and asked her to read it. The next day she called me raving about our book. In fact she had already run off three copies for her co-workers. Then I knew that we had nailed it. My biggest beef with the books I had been reading for the last few years were that they all sounded alike. Especially the love stories, I didn’t need to dress ours up it was exciting enough. Our book is based on true stories but it is still a novel. I was so disappointed to learn that Three Cups of Tea was a lie. Surely Greg Mortenson knew that when you elaborate or move events around for dramatic effect it makes your book a novel.

I was always afraid of showing my friends my book but they turned out to be my best readers offering great criticism. I don’t know why I hesitated, dealers are avid readers, with a break every hour they always have book on the go.

Below is the links to Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships
Click the link to find at Amazon.com
Click the link to find at Amazon United Kingdom
Click the link to find at Amazon Germany

Click the link to find at Amazon France

Click the link to find at Amazon Italy

Click the link to find at Amazon Spain 

 
Click to find Cruise Quarters at Barnes and Noble

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WHAT SIZE IS THIS?

 I was dragging my husband with me shopping the other day. If he doesn’t like something I wear he lets me know it so I decided he should go with me while I picked an outfit out, to bypass the insult. We were wandering around the department store where I was trying to find some new t-shirts. Well that might seem easy enough but I wanted a shirt that you couldn’t see through, that you could wash and that came past my belly button so that the top of my ass wouldn’t show every time I bent down. 

My sweet husband picked up a t-shirt and held it up for me, “I like this it must be about your size.” 

Bless his heart he had picked up a small. “A small are you kidding, have you looked at that shirt.” He held it up and I would have sworn it wouldn’t fit a young child but I looked around and we were in the women’s department.

“Well how about this one,” he reached for a medium.

“A medium, who do you think I am, Paris Hilton?’

“What do you mean you aren’t a medium?”

“A medium, I hate to break it to you but for the last five years I have been an extra large, not a large but an extra large, and god forbid I ever throw it in the dryer.” I grabbed an extra large shirt and held it up to me.

I could see his confusion. I am 5”5’ and weigh 135 pounds on a good day, 137 on a bad one. A weight that shouldn’t be considered extra large. A weight that wasn’t considered extra large ten years ago. But that was before the conspiracy.

I am convinced that all the clothing manufacturers got together and said. Hey, how can we make the American woman feel even worse about herself? We can resize all her clothes. We will base all our measurements on a thirteen year old girl. And since everything is manufactured abroad the manufacturers can send anything over here slap any old size on it and save on materials! It doesn’t mean that the clothes will be cheaper. I keep hoping that since everything is made in China this is only a translation problem and XL really means Extra Lucky.

In the meantime, we the American consumer will grit our teeth and swallow a Zanax every time we have to go to the mall. It just means that if we find anything that fits we will wear it until the seams dissolve. As for gifts I never give anyone clothes anymore, I don’t want my friends to unwrap something labeled XL and get insulted.

Yes, our destruction is complete, the sexy, curvy American woman has been replaced by a botoxed, bleached, anorexic model. So I give up and surrender and wait for the day when I become an extra, extra large or extra, extra lucky.

About the author:

Cara Bertoia is the author of Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships. Her novel is really a travelogue, a narrative, a romance, a self-help manual for gambling and cruising, and a real-life story all rolled into one funny, obsessive, and entertaining story of two people whose separate life journeys meet at a crossroads. Kindle Fire Dept. says, "This novel is a gem that is nothing short of a vacation in a book!"

Below is the links to Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships

Click the link to find at Amazon.com
Click here to find at Amazon Canada
Click the link to find at Amazon United Kingdom
Click the link to find at Amazon Germany

Click the link to find at Amazon France

Click the link to find at Amazon Italy

Click the link to find at Amazon Spain 

Click the link to find at Amazon Brazil

Ray and Cara have also produced the number one guide on walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
The Desert Woman calls it inspiring. 
Click the link to find the DVD Camino de Santiago a Walkers Guide at Amazon

ROULETTE, CAN YOU SPIN IT TO WIN IT?

This weeks blog was written by Ray.
I just found an interesting article and experiment on spin control with roulette wheels. I for one don't believe that any dealer can control the ball to the degree required to hit a specific number or section. If it were really possible to do this, then the game of roulette as we know it simply could not exist. And that for me is a very simple proof showing that spin control is all in the dealers head.
I started in the casino business at a major London casino, and the standard spin was very slow, only about 4 or 5 times around the wheel, and also with the wheel just turning at a fairly leisurely speed. The idea was to get as many spins in a day as possible. We never reversed the spin either, and guess what, it made not a whit of difference in anyone's ability to predict the number. The casinos P/C was the same as anywhere else. I was very surprised when a few years later I started work at another casino and discovered the dealers whacking the ball around at a hundred miles an hour, changing the spin direction and also using such high wheel speeds that the ball would sometimes bounce clean out of the wheel! No doubt this was all mandated by management’s belief that this would prevent players/dealers from predicting the outcome, or that it would make the result more ‘random’ in some fashion.

Modern wheels and even the balls are highly sophisticated pieces of fine engineering. Also nowadays the separators between the pockets are very low, ensuring that the ball will jump into and out of many pockets before coming to rest. Generally the ball will fall into a pocket when it begins to slow down, but then the ball will bounce out and around the pockets landing in many numbers until the ball finally stays in one pocket. If you spin the ball enough times a pattern will ‘seem’ to develop, just like when you flip a coin a hundred times, it will very rarely land on fifty heads and fifty tales. So some numbers will win more often on the wheel but that pattern can not be predicted. That is just the randomness of numbers and the proclivity of the human brain to see ‘patterns’ where there are none. It is simply how we have evolved to make sense of our big scary world.

About the author:

Cara Bertoia is the author of Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships. Her novel is really a travelogue, a narrative, a romance, a self-help manual for gambling and cruising, and a real-life story all rolled into one funny, obsessive, and entertaining story of two people whose separate life journeys meet at a crossroads. Kindle Fire Dept. says, "This novel is a gem that is nothing short of a vacation in a book!"

Below is the links to Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships

Click the link to find at Amazon.com
Click here to find at Amazon Canada
Click the link to find at Amazon United Kingdom
Click the link to find at Amazon Germany

Click the link to find at Amazon France

Click the link to find at Amazon Italy

Click the link to find at Amazon Spain 

Click the link to find at Amazon Brazil
Click to find at Barnes and Noble
Ray and Cara have also produced the number one guide on walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
The Desert Woman calls it inspiring. 
Click the link to find the DVD Camino de Santiago a Walkers Guide at Amazon

THE TEN TOP REASONS TO WORK IN A CASINO

When I was younger and working at Caesar’s Tahoe, players would sit down at my game and invariably the following question would come up. “What’s a nice girl like you doing working in a joint like this?” I would always look around me where there were rows of dealers just like me, fresh-faced recent college grads trying to postpone adulthood as long as we could and Lake Tahoe (America’s all year playground) is a great place to do it.  Over the years at one time or another most of us have left the casino business, but in the end the majority return. So let me tell you the top ten reasons for working in a joint like this.

1. You get paid for playing games all day but you really don’t get paid much. The majority of your income comes from tips. Remember punters there is one person in the casino that wants you to win, and that person is the dealer. Because if you don’t win she won’t make tips and everybody likes to eat. There is nothing more exhilarating than sharing in a big win with a player.

2. Every casino that I have ever worked in provides health insurance because we are all going to get carpel tunnel from pitching cards for years.

3. You can work any shift that you want to. Can’t stand sunlight, you just sign up to work the graveyard shift. A morning person, well day shift is for you. With casinos open 24 / 7, including the holidays there is a perfect shift for everyone. Dealers who have children don’t need child care they just work opposite shifts.

4. Gambling is a growth industry. With more states and cities in desperate financial straits, they are turning to casinos. Fifty years ago there were casinos only in Nevada now according to Wikipedia there are casinos in 19 states.

5. You can’t be outsourced. Someone does have to actually pitch those cards on a blackjack game. I know they have been working on perfecting a blackjack machine, but then you might as well-just play the slot machines, Table game gamblers don’t trust machines. So we’re safe for a while.

6. You can get a job at almost any age. I have seen dealers in their sixties get hired. This is great because at some point most people in the casino get fired. But it is a small enough industry that you probably know someone in management somewhere, and they will juice you into a job.

7. Free food is a great incentive. Most casinos I’ve worked in have provided free meals and drinks and if they do charge the cost is minimal. If going out to lunch costs $5 a day, then that is like a $25 raise every week. It can get even better, when I lived on a ship I also got free room and board.

8. You don’t have to buy clothes, because your company will gladly provide you with a uniform. It will be ugly, it will be made of polyester, but it will be free.

9. You get to live in nice places which is what got me into the business in the   first place. Besides Tahoe, I have lived on a cruise ship circling the world and  I now live in Palm Springs. My husband has worked in Moscow, London, the Czech Republic and the Bahamas.

10. You get to meet celebrities. I am just thrilled whenever anyone from General Hospital plays on my game. Well, okay to me they are big celebrities. My husband dealt to Pamela Anderson and Kirk Douglas. Some of them are nice, but you soon realize that the rich and famous aren’t “all that.”

The next time you play at a table you don’t have to ask, you will already know why that dealer is working there. Read my suspense novel Casino Queen if you want to find out what it is really like to work in a casino.

Cara Bertoia is the author of the critically acclaimed Casino Queen, a new suspense novel published by The Wild Rose Press. She has drawn from her years in the casino industry to create a fascinating thriller. It is all true although the names have been changed to protect the guilty. It had been featured at The Big Thrill and Women Writers Women's Books and at many other sites. Read the blurb here.

Click the link below to order at Amazon

Casino Queen (Night Hawk Casino Series Book 1) - Kindle edition by Bertoia, Cara. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Click the link below to pre-order at Barnes and Noble 

Casino Queen by Cara Bertoia | NOOK Book (eBook) | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)

Caroline Popov, alone, heartbroken, and deeply in debt ends up in glamorous Palm Springs, California where Native casinos have just opened, offering employment to thousands. She lands a job at the Palm Oasis Casino and is mentored by the charismatic tribal chairman, John Tovar.

Embraced by casino culture, Caroline works her way up to casino manager of the Night Hawk, in the High Desert town of Joshua Tree. There, she is responsible for managing multicultural team members, satisfying the demands of challenging guests, growing revenue while rooting out corruption.

In the process of rediscovering her inner strength, she learns, you have to gamble like your life depends on it. Because it often does.

 

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