Cara Bertoia

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

Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. Well, I can tell you that after teaching high school, handling an unruly gambler was a piece of cake. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." I wanted to write the first realistic novel about casino life from the perspective of an experienced table games dealer. I spent the next five years circling the globe for Princess Cruises. Sometimes life exceeds your dreams. I was awed by the wonders of Venice, the fjords of Norway, and the Northern Lights in Leningrad. I returned from ships with a very special souvenir, my Scottish husband Ray. We went to work in Palm Springs. We now live in Hollywood, Florida, where I write about my casino years while wistfully gazing out at the ocean.

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 to find Cruise Quarters at Barnes and Noble

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

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

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:

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

HURRY UP, MY DATE METER IS RUNNING

This is an updated version of the first newspaper article I got paid for!! I am including it in my blog because I want to know if dating is easier in the Internet age does it make finding a relationship harder?

I was sitting at a table in a restaurant last week, answering typical questions. Where did I go to school? What is my present job like? Where do I see myself in five years?
I congratulated myself on how well the interview was progressing, and then I had to remind myself that I was on a date.
In this world of fast foods, ATM machines and high speed cable, what could make more sense than the 45-minute date?
What is the 45-minute date? It's the sanctioned time to meet a person of the opposite sex at a sanctioned place. The place should be public, in case he or she exhibits psychotic tendencies, and should be open, in case someone needs to make a fast getaway.
Ladies, if he suggests you go Dutch, my advice is don't wait by the phone.
The purpose of this meeting is to decide if this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. At first blush, 45 might not seem like a long time to devote to this search. But professional daters have told me "that you know, you just know." Some theorize that "you know" within five minutes, but you stay the full 45 minutes.
How did the 45-minute date get to be so popular?
My own personal theory is that it started sometime after school.
Your college relationship breaks up or you get divorced, so you look around and realize you don't know anyone want to date.
There are several routes you can take to reach the same end. Some people turn to match.com or e-harmony, organizations designed to promote the 45-minute date.
A dental hygienist told me last week she goes on 45-minute dates all the time. She said it takes the same amount of time as cleaning teeth, and during brief interludes she pretends she's cleaning teeth. She also makes plans before or after because she has already put on mascara and doesn't want to waste a good outfit.
Of course, this is a two-way street. She once met a lawyer who spent the entire time looking at his Rolex. At the end of the date she was surprised that he didn't present her with a bill for the hour.
A guy who belonged to an internet dating site for a while said there were so many more women than men that he could have met someone new every day. He finally got tired of having the same conversation.
There lies the failure of the 45-minute date. It's impossible to make conversation, impress someone with your wit, look great and check them out all at the same time,
Remember the good old days, when you sighted someone on campus you were attracted to. You studied them for a few days, asked around and found out who they were. By the time a full-length date came around you usually felt somewhat comfortable. I even recall having fun. Fun, I believe, was the reason I used to date in the first place. (although it's been a long time so I can't honestly say for sure).
Can you meet your true love in three-quarters of an hour?
My second cousin is living proof that this method shouldn't be dismissed so lightly. She decided she wanted a doctor, and fifty dates later she met the right doctor.
A very attractive former boss of mine who was meeting all the wrong people went on the radio and asked for a nice Jewish girl, Well, a nice Jewish aunt heard him, called her niece and begged her to give it a try. I mean, what the hell, it was only 45 minutes - halfway between a sitcom and a drama. It worked out, and now the happy couple live in Queens.
The record though was a woman I saw on a national talk show. She went on 500 dates before she finally found HIM.
I love the advice you get from married friends. Date someone you work with. We all know what that leads to - you either get married or one of you has to quit. Date a friend of a friend. When it doesn't work out, there goes the friend.
What's the answer? Do you walk around with a sign that says "I'm single."
Okay, I'm exaggerating, but not by much. Face it, dating sucks. At least the 45 minute date doesn't discriminate.
My research tells me both sexes find dating awkward as hell, but I guess it will be around until someone comes up with a better idea - or hell freezes over.

Click to find Cruise Quarters at Barnes and Noble