Some light reading just to keep the forum ticking over

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series_Cricket

yeah thats the one, cheers bandit

''kerry packers cricket circus'' almost wrecked test cricket for good...cheers buzzer

The story of Anargyros Karabourniotis (A.K.A. Archie Karas) reads like a story of an ancient myth, but it is both very real and of modern times.  Born in 1950 in Antypata on the island of Kefalonia, Greece, the man who would eventually win upwards of $40,000,000 had next to nothing as a youth.  His mom stayed at home and raised his brothers and sisters, while his father was a construction worker.  The relationship between Karas and his father was always a volatile one, so Karas didn’t mind finding ways to spend time outside of the house.  When he was a teenager his family was really struggling, and began missing a few meals.  In order to earn a few dollars for his family, and so he could personally eat, he began shooting marbles in the neighborhood.  From the start he was good at gambling, as he often left a winner.

When Karas was 15 years old, the relationship between him and his father became violent.  While working for his father, they got into a disagreement about some of the work that had to be done.  Unexpected to Archie, his father became instantly violent and picked up a shovel and launched it at his head, missing it by mere inches.  That same night Karas decided to run away.  He never talked to his father again, who died four years later.

Karas wanted to get out of Greece, so he took a job on a ship as a waiter.  The job earned him about $60 a month, and it also gave him a chance to explore the world, a chance he never thought he would get.  When Karas turned 17 he became bored with ship travel and the work that went with it.  On one trip to Portland, Oregon, he decided to literally jump ship.  Karas hitchhiked down the west coast, eventually settling in Los Angeles when he was offered a job as a waiter.  The money was decent, but the cash he made at the bowling alley next door would be a lot better.

Shortly after accepting the job at the restaurant Karas began going to the bowling alley after shifts.  In the back was a pool room, and despite never playing the game before he got very good very fast.  While playing pool, as luck would have it, there was also a poker table.  Again, he had never played the game, but again got very good at it in short order.  Karas is on record as saying that when he was just 19 years old he knew he would never have another “real” job in his life.  He was a gambler.

Over the next two decades Karas would build his bankroll over $1,000,000 an unknown amount of times, according to him.  He of course began playing for bigger stakes than he could get in the bowling alley, moving on to local casinos for high stakes poker games, and learning about big pool games during his travels at the casinos.  Around 1990 Karas once again found himself a millionaire, this time holding about $2,000,000 to his name.  However, in about two year’s time he would once again lose it all in high stakes poker games, eventually just leaving $50 to his name.  Never one to worry too much about these things, he decided to take a trip to Las Vegas to see what he could scrounge up from some poker friends.  What followed is now known in gambling lore simply as “The Run.”

When he arrived in Vegas he met a friend who agreed to lend him $10,000.  Within a couple of hours of playing a $200/$400 limit Razz game he was up $20,000.  Karas excused himself from the table.  He gave his friend back the money he owed him, plus $10,000 for staking him and was left with $10,000.  He was back in business.

With his new found bankroll Karas went on a scouting trip to look for juicy pool games.  He learned that a well known business man from the area was looking for some action.  Karas, while very open about many of his gambling stories, has never personally revealed the name of this person out of respect, and has simply referred to him as “Mr. X.”  Karas and “Mr. X” agreed to play 9-ball and despite only having about $10,000 to his name, they agreed to play for $5,000 a game - at least to begin.  Over the course of the next two and a half months the two played a marathon session breaking only for sleeping, and when “Mr. X” absolutely had to be somewhere business related.   Karas and “Mr. X” would get as high as $40,000 a game.  That was because “Mr. X” was trying to chase his losses.  Over that stretch Karas estimated that he won $1,100,000.

After “Mr. X” showed signs he was ready to go on a run, including hitting the nine-ball in on the break an unbelievable eight out of ten times, Karas felt it was time to put the cue stick down in favor of another game.  Karas wasn’t trying to get out of not giving “Mr. X.” a chance to win his money back.  In fact, he decided to challenge “Mr. X” in another game at which they both were very good: poker.

On top of being a world class pool player, “Mr. X was also a world champion poker player.  However, that fact didn’t stop Karas from once again getting the better of his man, this time to the tune of $3,000,000 before the business man decided to walk away. 

The next player to step up to the plate was Stuey Ungar.  Ungar, considered by many to be the best poker player ever, lost $1.2 million to the red hot Karas.  Then another person many consider to be the best poker player ever sat with him, Chip Reese.  Reese went on to lose over two million dollars, which prompted him to utter the now famous quote regarding Karas: “God made your balls a little bigger.  You’re too good.”  Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, and Puggy Pearson all lost an undisclosed amount to him.  At the end of his poker run he was up $17 million.

Archie was an action junkie.  He has said many times that it may take him 24 hours to win a million dollars at the poker table, while he can do the same with one roll of the dice at the craps table.  At the poker table he had beaten the very best, and the rest didn’t have enough money to hold his interest.  Archie was looking for action, and knew just the place he could get it.  At this time the Horseshoe Casino had a reputation of allowing the biggest bets, which was right up Karas’ alley.  On three separate occasions he booked wins of over a million dollars playing craps, including one amazing $4,000,000 session where he had every $5,000 chip the Horseshoe had in his possession.  In less than eight months Karas ran $50 up to an estimated $40 million. 

All good things come to an end, and in spectacular fashion, so did “The Run.”  It started with an $11 million downswing at craps.  He followed that by losing another million to his nemesis Reese.  He then lost $17 million playing baccarat.  After a quick trip to Greece, to take a breather, saying he needed a break from gambling, he went back to the Horseshoe to try to relive his magic.  It wasn’t to be.  His remaining $12 million dwindled to just one million after losing it all at craps.  He then challenged Johnny Chan to a $1 million freeze out match.  He actually won it, upping his bankroll to $2 million, only to lose it in a couple days playing baccarat and craps.  In just three weeks’ time his fortune was gone.  The rumor is that the only thing he bought out of the $40,000,000 was a car.

Karas expectedly resides in Las Vegas.  In addition to playing high stakes poker, he has also found some minor success in the World Series of Poker.  While he has yet to be able to win a gold bracelet, he has cashed in six events, with four of those being final tables.  His most recent WSOP cashes came last year, where he once again came close to a bracelet, and finished 5th in the $10,000 2-7 Lowball event for $53,783.

What might be most amazing about this story is to hear Karas tell it.  When telling his story he shows no remorse.  He has said time and time again that money doesn’t make him happy, and it makes no difference to him if he has a lot of it or not, he feels the same either way.

How about some fightin' words? Savor this tall-tale about Packer: A loud and obnoxious Texas high roller is playing at the same table as Mr. Packer. This man is being as obnoxious as, well, as the stereotypical obnoxious Texan in countless obnoxious Texan stories. [Why aren't there any obnoxious Rhode Islander stories?] Finally, Kerry asks the man to ease up. The man gets louder: "Do you know who I am? I am worth 60 million dollars, pardner!" He pauses to let this sink in, then says: "Sixty million dollars, pardner. That's what I'm worth." Packer eyes him and says: "I'll flip you for it!"

Would be fantastic if it were true.

That story has been in the Aussie press a number of times, which of course doesn't guarantee its veracity.

One Packer story that is true, is the one where Packer sold his Channel Nine television network to Allan Bond for a Billion dollars.

A few years later he buys it back after Bond fcuks it up, for a bit over 100 million.

Packer was quoted as saying " You only get one Allan Bond per lifetime ".

There's a lot to be said about Alan Woods but this is fairly to the point

Born in Australia in 1945, Alan Woods, as a child, has a passion for bridge and was gifted with brillance and aptitude for mathematics, which fascinated him.  But it wasn't until his 30s that gambling took a major part of his life.  In the late 70s, Alan Woods was a mathematician working as an actuary, he learned to count cards at blackjack then became a pro gambler travelling casinos around the world for three years.

In 1982, tired of the risky business of blackjack card counting, Allan Woods headed to Hong Kong, China with fellow card-counters, Bill Benter and their Vegas friend Walter Simmons.  As Woods would say:  "The beginning were nightmarish" but the trio finally devised a software program that gave them the edge in horse racing.  After losing their $150 000 bankroll in the first two years.  He had his first successful year in 1986-1987, winning $100 000.  Years later, all three of them were multimillionaires.

And for the next twenty years, he and his team of computer wizards, racing analysts, accountants and money runners rocked the Hong Kong Jockey Club's world.

He was strictly a number guy.  He had not been on a racetrack for over twenty-five years.  His job ressembled more that of an accountant and computer programmer.  For him, it was all about statistics, numbers, and computer calculations.  His advice to someone who wanna be a pro gambler would be: "Don't do it unless you want to be a computer programmer."

Most remembered as an horse bettor extraordinaire, Alan Woods was a great all-around gambler.  He has been a world-class bridge player, a sports bettor, a globetrotting blackjack player, and a stock market speculator.  Horse betting was his main job and the stock market was were he did his "gambling".  In the late 90s, he took a $100 millions plunge when he attempted to short the NASDAQ stock market index just weeks before the dot.com bubble burst.  Bad timing!  Sixty days later he would have been a multi-billionaire.

Passed away on January 28, 2008, at 62 years old from an appendiceal cancer.  Allan Woods, aka Mr Huge, built an estimated fortune of $670 million before his death.  Which make him the world's greatest horse racing handicapper.

nice one buzzer keep 'em coming

Titanic Thompson, aka Alvin C. Thomas (1892-1974), grew up in rural Arkansas in a gambling family. As a child he pitched pennies at the line, hunted small game with his .22 rifle, threw rocks at targets, hunted birds by throwing rocks and played poker, dominoes and checkers.

He invented his own proposition bet, where he threw pennies into a small box. As he would his whole life, Titanic spent hours practicing and always looking for a gaff, a gimmick, or a way to cheat.


He’d practice long hours cheating with a pair of dice or a deck of cards. He could do the standard mechanic’s moves, but it was his supernatural vision that made him millions at poker and golf; millions he lost on the horses and baseball bets to bookmakers.


With the sharpened nail on his little finger, Titanic could make marks, dents and crimps on paper playing cards that only he could see with those amazing eyes. He could bend the cards where the slight wave would catch a glint of light. Titanic was able to play in the largest poker games all over the country and mark the old paper playing cards during the game against some top gamblers who were very alert to cheating and the standard mechanic's moves.


Titanic left home at age 16 to haunt the pool halls, domino games, bowling alleys, dice games and poker games. He learned to cheat at dice. He'd start with the aces or sixes, or any combination of those touching, give a few false shakes that made a sound, and then roll stiff-wristed, straight down the table to avoid craps. If you were accurate twice in a hundred times you had way the best of it. Titanic made most of his money from dice and poker before he took up golf, and he made millions. He was cheating top gamblers.


As a teen, Titanic got a job as a trick shot artist with a travelling medicine show, which helped him learn the con. He won $2,000 and a small river boat shooting dice but killed a man in a fight on board in self-defence. Within a few short years, Titanic had made a huge fortune. He'd travel in a huge, nickel-plated Pierce-Arrow automobile with the tools of his trade in the trunk: right and left-handed golf clubs, a pool cue, a bowling ball and horseshoes. He was ambidextrous, and had many proposition bets to make all through any game. After winning at many changing props, he'd offer to bowl, play golf, shoot targets or shoot pool left-handed. He was a natural lefty.


Titanic wore loose custom-tailored suits, made to partially conceal the .45 pistol he carried in a shoulder holster. There have been three poker robberies here in Lubbock Texas recently, and gamblers are carrying guns inside gambling joints as they did back in Ty's day. Titanic hired a bodyguard to drive and carry an extra gun for 10 per cent of his winnings. When a dice game owner set Ty up for a robbery, he killed two more men, shooting the masked and armed robbers, even though he had a bodyguard. Later, an alarm bell at a poker game alerted them. Ty turned over the poker table to use as a shield. He and his bodyguard each shot a robber dead.


In 1932, in Tyler, Texas, Titanic killed his last man. When a man in a ski mask pointed a gun at him, Ty dropped to one knee, presenting a smaller target, and shot him twice. It turned out to be his 16-year-old caddy. The caddy lived long enough to tell the police he was a robber in his spare time. Unlike the first four men he had killed, Titanic felt deep remorse over the death of the young caddy, but the fact that he had killed five men made Titanic most fearsome around the gambling halls of America.


In Missouri, he trapped two of the biggest gamblers on a proposition bet by moving a road sign that said “20 Miles to Joplin” five miles closer to town, and betting the sign was wrong. These propositions became tales shared by gamblers, who love to swap stories, and Ty became famous.


Ty married five women, all teenagers at the time of the marriage, so the age gap between him and his wife kept getting bigger. The gamblers and the women could tell you that Titanic Thompson's dark eyes could be gullible, child-like, confused, bemused, charming, magnetic, penetrating, predatory, all-knowing and scary when need be.


In the early twenties, Titanic went to Chicago where he met Nicholas "Nick the Greek" Dandalos, America's most famous gambler at the time. He asked the Greek to flip a coin for $15,000 at the first meeting. He sent his two-headed quarter into the air and grabbed it when the Greek called heads. Later, he tried to bet Nick Greek on the weight of a large rock they saw when out driving. The Greek pointed out that this rock looked very different to all the others and Titanic admitted he had pre-weighed it.


Al Capone was the absolute mob boss of Chicago and a big admirer of Nick the Greek. This was in prohibition when the mobsters had tons of money. Capone got Nick the Greek and Titanic in some large poker games and they played partners. It was in these games that Titanic announced he could drive a golf ball five-hundred yards, when he “felt like it”. After one poker game, Titanic bet Al Capone $500 he could throw an orange over a tall building. He palmed the orange and threw a lemon filled with lead bird shot. This was one of Titanic's regular propositions. When winter came, Titanic took the gamblers out to a golf course next to frozen Lake Michigan when “he felt like” driving a golf ball 500 yards. He turned toward the lake and sent his golf ball flying unto the ice. Reportedly, he won $50,000. With Titanic, the myths, legends, and stories may or not be precisely true.


Nick the Greek and Titanic went to the lucrative poker games in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. As partners, they made a fortune. It was here Ty took up golf, and very quickly he was terrific at it. He won $56,000 his first day gambling at golf. The Greek could get them into the poker games, and Ty's eyes would beat them. However, Titanic lost millions on horses and sports bets. He followed the horses that followed the horses.


In Tijuana, Mexico, Titanic attempted to fix a six-horse race. He bribed five of the jockeys, but one refused to go along. Titanic told him he had a man in the grandstands with a high-powered rifle and a scope. He would shoot any jockey whose horse got in front of Nellie. With Nellie nearing the finish line with a comfortable lead, she fell and broke her leg. That cost Titanic $1.5 million and broke him. He had bet with bookies around the country. Nick the Greek sent a fresh bankroll, and Titanic was playing poker that night. He bragged he never stayed broke over six hours.


Titanic would sit in a hotel lobby kicking his house shoe up into the air and catching it on his foot. He had some props! He could throw the hotel keys into the lock, and Doyle Brunson swears he saw him do it. He would bet on how many cards he could throw into a hat at 20 paces. Of course, he could always throw what he needed to win a bet, right or left-handed. Titanic would set the horseshoes stakes 41 feet apart, when regulation was 40 feet. The longer distance would fool champions at horseshoes. When future legendary gambler, Hubert Cokes was 14-years-old, he assisted Titanic by hiding in a hotel room next to his. Titanic would bet he could throw cards under the hotel room door and have them bounce into a hat. Hubert was hiding in the closet to place the cards in the hat. These two became lifelong friends.

Titanic, Nick the Greek, and Hubert “Daddy Warbucks” Cokes were all in New York at the end of the 1920s, a golden time. Titanic and Cokes were backing a teenage New York Fats, later to become Minnesota Fats after the movie The Hustler came out in 1961. Cokes was called Daddy Warbucks after the character in Little Orphan Annie. He was tall, bald, very rich and had an ever-present cigar.

They taught Minnesota Fats "the conversation" and he became world class at it. The challenge, the proposition, the negotiation, the bragging, the con, the spots. They'd make the sucker really want to beat them and think he could. At pool and later golf, they'd go after the best pool player in any town and hope he had the biggest gambler to back him. Ty would win a series of bets. First he'd get a spot and win by one stroke, then play even, then give spots, bet on several trick shots, and play left-handed or one-handed.


Tommy Thomas, Titanic's son, wrote me this:


Hubert Cokes was my godfather and I spent time with him when I was growing up and knew him very well ... He was not a capable card man like Ty but used some of the gaffs. I still have a leather cup he gave me where you twist the bottom and the dice are switched. Used it playing backgammon, another cup just like it that was straight for your opponent ... I would go down to the Elks in Evansville and watch Hubert play one-pocket for hours. He would always get on Ty's case just like Ty would do when we were talking about him. Ty said Hubert was the most dangerous smart man he ever knew. He would carry two .45 pistols and walk into any pool hall and challenge anyone to a game of one pocket or a fist fight for any amount of money.


Over the years when I would call Hubert he would let me know he was following my career as a gambler and always seemed to know when I took off a big score. He did not teach me about cards but did teach me about life.


Hubert told me a story about Ty you might like. He said they were in Kansas City and he bankrolled Ty to go to Evansville … where they were playing poker for high stakes because of all the oil money. Hubert had not heard from Ty for weeks and thought he would call him to see if he was winning any money. He talked to Ty and he told him things were so bad everyone was soaking watches just to get by. Hubert knew Ty well enough he caught the next train to Evansville. He walked into the poker game and saw that Ty was winning thousands of dollars. They both took their winnings and bought up oil leases and became wealthy in the oil business. Cokes kept his, Ty ended giving my mother all producing income and half of all mineral deeds when they divorced. That was about ten grand a month for Mom in the forties.


Ty and Hubert were always going to kill each other but really were good friends. The last serious beef they had was in the McCurdy Hotel. Ty was so angry at Hubert he waited in the hotel lobby for him to come down the elevator and was going to shoot him. Cokes figured Ty would be waiting for him and came down through the kitchen and walked up behind Ty and said, "Slim, are you ready to go to the golf course?" After that they managed to get along.


In New York Titanic was courting the biggest mob boss and gambler, Arnold Rothstein. The two became close friends. Damon Runyon, one of America's most famous writers was also there, hearing all the Titanic Thompson stories. His character, Sky Masterson, patterned on Titanic, was in a short story that became the hit play and movie Guys and Dolls. Arnold Rothstein was the model for the Nathan Detroit character. Like Ty, Sky was a fabulous dresser, very handsome, a lady’s man, and a huge proposition bettor to whom the sky was the limit. Marlon Brando played Sky in the movie, while Frank Sinatra played Nathan Detroit.


Titanic once won a bet with Rothstein throwing a heavy peanut across Times Square. He had packed the peanut with birdshot, lead. He did this with walnuts, pecans, oranges, lemons, and he was always ready. He won a bet on license plate poker when the car he had pre-arranged had 333 and drove by when Ty doffed his fedora. Ty hired an ex-math professor to teach him the odds on many dice, poker, and prop bets. He won a bet from Rothstein betting two of the next thirty people to walk by would have the same birthday. Ty learned a great many props from the professor. At any game, Titanic kept up a steady stream of challenges that he could keep in his head, but made other gamblers dizzy.


On a train ride to the track the gamblers bet on how many white horses they would see. The next day, Rothstein had hired a man to plant extra white horses. Ty had hired a man to plant even more. Ty won the bet by guessing a number higher than Rothstein’s and then admitting what he had done.


Ty finally got Rothstein in a three-day poker game where everyone was cheating Rothstein, especially Nate Raymond, Ty, and Joe Bernstein, now in the Poker Hall of Fame. Rothstein lost $500,000 and was very slow to pay. The houseman for the game, George “Hump” McManus killed him. The publicity for McManus' murder trial made Titanic Thompson a nationally-known name. The public saw newspaper pictures of a rail-thin, 6'2" movie-star-looking, handsome, tall man, with thick, jet-black hair. Ty was immaculately dressed in expensive clothes, with big sparkling diamonds on several fingers. While testifying, Ty was asked if poker is a game of chance. “Not the way I play it,” Ty said.


The stock market crash sent Titanic roaming all over America in the 1930s, often with Hubert Cokes or Minnesota Fats. He came here, to Lubbock, Texas, from the 1930s until the early 1960s. Johnny Moss was living here in 1938, when Ty offered a proposition that Johnny could not shoot a 46 with only a four iron on nine holes at Meadowbrook, our local golf course. Moss had his four iron welded down into a two iron, but he couldn't sink putts because Titanic had paid a man to raise the lips on each cup. Moss snapped and had a man go around and tap them back down. Moss had his whole bankroll bet, $8300, and won.


At draw poker Ty's prop was that Moss did all the dealing, but Ty could cut anytime. He had the aces crimped and could cut to one as needed. In his biography, Moss said he won all his money back and a Cadillac after he figured it out.


When Ty returned to Meadowbrook when he was older, he'd have a top golfer as a partner or do prop bets of throwing half dollars into a cup, or pitching golf balls into a shot glass. He’d bet he could make two balls in three strokes from 25 feet. He'd hit both balls at the same time on the first stroke. At other golf courses, he'd bet he could chip into a row boat or bet he could shoot flying birds out of the air with his pistol. Like his peanuts, the pistol was loaded with bird shot.


I caddied at Meadowbrook as a teenager in the early fifties. Sometimes, on a full moon, called a Comanche Moon in Texas, the gamblers played by moonlight. Once, a rich-looking, tall man hired me to retrieve golf balls while he was trying to teach a Doberman Pinscher to catch balls he had lofted high into the air. The dog was trying, but would usually drop the golf ball. This guy would hit a hard, low line drive and hit the dog in the side. When I told people about this, they said it had to be Titanic Thompson, but I'll never know.

In 1939, there was an oil boom in Evansville, Indiana, and the poker game at the McCurdy Hotel had $25,000 pots. Name gamblers playing included Titanic Thompson, Hubert Cokes, Minnesota Fats, and high roller Ray Ryan.

Both Cokes and Ryan got very rich from oil royalties, while Titanic made a lot of money on royalties but gave his mineral interest to his wife when they divorced. Neither Titanic nor Ryan could ever beat Minnesota Fats at one-pocket, however, and they lost a lot of money. In his delightful biography of Titanic, The Man Who Bet on Everything, Kevin Cook said Fats won a million dollars from Titanic playing pool.


Maybe…


It was in Evansville that Titanic made a famous prop bet. He hired a farmer to count the watermelons on his truck and park near the McCurdy Hotel. He got the gamblers on the porch involved in the conversation and bet he could guess very near the exact number of watermelons on the truck. As he did in golf, pool or horseshoes, he only won by one. Just one, as always.


Golf was Titanic's best game and, without cheating, he was one of the very best in the United States. He never entered golf tournaments, saying he could not afford the pay cut, because he played for more on one hole than top pros made in a year. When Nick the Greek got him in the country clubs of California, Ty beat some the well-known golfers. He stayed one of the best for 20 years.


The conversation never stopped. A million props: the math props he’d learned; the eye-hand coordination props he’d practiced hours on end. He'd bring in a “ringer” – a pro such as Ben Hogan, Raymond Floyd or Lee Elder – after he had worked up the bet.


Ty always put grease on the club face to improve distance and control, and when Jack Binion had a professional gambler’s golf tournament, they allowed grease.


Ben Hogan, one of America's greatest golf legends, said Ty was the best shot-maker ever and also the best short game player, and that he could beat anyone right- or left-handed. Ty would join a country club, lose on the small, appear a braggart, and work up a really large bet. It might take weeks.


When Lee Trevino refused his invitation to go on the road, Ty came back to El Paso with Raymond Floyd and he “barely beat” Trevino. This was when Ty was old and had $20,000 on the match.


Next Ty played Byron Nelson, then America’s leading pro, in Dallas in 1933 for some big money, with many people betting on Nelson, while Ty “moved in” to take all bets. The conversation had Ty getting a three-stroke handicap. Nelson shot a 67. You know what Ty shot? Exactly what he needed to win the bet, a 69.


At times he was near the course record, if he got in a jam. His years of throwing and practising hand-to-eye coordination came in handy. He used slices and hooks as he needed them, and put a lot of “English” down when he needed it too; be it in pool, golf or capturing another teenage bride.
Titanic Thompson played partners with some of the most famous golf pros.


He’d try every kind of bet with Lee Elder as his caddy, the first prominent African-American pro golfer. Elder would wear overalls and appear a little slow, then Titanic would offer to take his caddy as partner and play the best two golfers in town, and Ty would play left-handed. To his credit, Titanic made Elder a full partner and gave him an even split of the money.


As Ty became older and more famous, folks would ask if he was Titanic Thompson whenever he laid out a proposition, and gamblers would make small bets against him just to see him do his legendary throwing props. And when plastic cards replaced paper cards, his big poker advantage vanished, while casinos, with their long dice tables, could prevent his control of the dice.


And so, like many of the great gamblers who had a lot of gamble in them – Johnny Moss, Nick the Greek and Minnesota Fats – Ty didn't have much money at the end of his life.


Tommy Thomas, Titanic's son, was born in Evansville in 1944. After Titanic left, Tommy read about him as he grew up and began to practise long hours with a deck of cards. He became a master-cheater, travelling the country, practising hours and hours until he became an even better card mechanic than his father. Ty and I both said so. I caught Tommy cheating in a huge Hold’em game in 1975.


When Tommy and an ageing Titanic were finally reunited, they began to play against each other for the remainder of Ty’s life, and to cheat each other. Ty helped his son get in poker games and sent him back to Evansville to be tutored by Hubert Cokes. I asked Tommy about the end of Ty's life, spent in a nursing home. He wrote me this.


Every week I was in town he would call every day, saying, "What time will you be here?" I rarely missed a day being with my dad. Ty and I loved to gamble with each other, playing heads up poker. Whoever won the other's stack of chips got a hundred dollars.


The only difference was Dad didn't have much money and we played his best game, Pitch. I reminded Dad he had loaned me money to go to Tyler Junior College when we first met, and, after all the years of gambling with each other, I felt like I still owed him $500.


If Dad lost [the game], I would take it off the $500; if he won, I would pay him. We played for $25 a game and he was very sharp and the best player. Make no mistake, Dad and I took no prisoners and would win at any cost. If we could cheat and get away with it, so be it.


I remember our final game and the last time I would see Dad. Over the months, the $500 I owed Dad from college had been reduced to $200. Dad knew he was the best player but couldn't figure out how I was winning. Later that night I would be on my way to Cincinnati to play poker for several weeks and knew Dad would miss me. But there was something different about today.


I knew Ty had the cards on the bed waiting for me. I don't think he knew that, weeks before, I happened to look in the empty card box and saw that he had left two tens in the box. This gave him a big advantage in the game of Pitch. As I walked into the nursing home, he walked up and put his arms around me. He said, "Son, I think I am going to die here." Then he said what I had been waiting my whole life to hear. "Son, I love you." We hugged each other and went to the bed for what would be our final game. While I was gone Ty had two strokes and died.


During that final game we were sitting on the bed and I dealt the cards for both of us. Knowing the advantage he had with the two tens in the box, he said, “Son, something is not right. You should not be winning.”
I said, “Dad, I have been cheating you.”
He said, “Impossible, no way.”
I said, “If I can prove it, can we call the debt I owe you after 12 years all even?


We agreed and, after showing him, we were now even for the first time since he helped me go to college. What a day. Dad said he loved me and the debt was cancelled.


By the way, it’s easier to cheat the greatest gambler in the world when he is in his eighties with failing eye sight. Ty was the best hustler the world has ever known. He would win all your money and turn around and give you the shirt off his back. It was always about winning, not the money.
For the last 16 years I have ministered in the maximum security prisons and know most of the men there have never heard the words that I have come to cherish, "Son, I love you."
Thank you Dad, I love you too... Tommy Thomas

We'll see if this stays up this time. No reason why it shouldn't!

yup dont see why not..great stuff

A man who became almost as legendary as any man in romantic fiction and certainly America's most famous gambler.

He was born in Rethymnon, Crete, from which his father sent him to live with a wealthy godfather in Smyrna, Turkey, where attended the English run Baxter school. He was later educated at the Greek Evangelical College there. He spoke English, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and Yiddish as well as being a talented poet. After travels in America he had planned to study at Oxford and graduate to a Donship in Philosophy.

Nick ( whose real name was Nicholas Andrea Dandolos ) was the son of a rug merchant and the godson of a wealthy shipowner. When he was 18 years old, his grandfather sent him to America, giving him an allowance of $150 a week. In Chicago he met and fell in love with a girl, but they quarreled and Nick moved on to Montreal. There he became friendly with a leading jockey of the day, Phil Musgrave; assisted by the jockey's advice and his own natural ability for working out odds, Nick won $500,000 in six months' betting on horse races.

Nick then went back to Chicago and promptly lost the entire amount playing card and dice games that were unfamiliar to him. But he was not at all deterred from continuing in his chosen profession. He began to study these games assiduously and in a few years had become so well known as a freelance gambler that casino proprietors were offering him large salaries to work for them. He usually refused, but became an enormous attraction at the casinos nevertheless merely by playing - partly because he would seldom stop gambling even after losing (as he frequently did) as much as $100,000 in a single session at the tables.

Naturally this unpredictable gambler with a knowledge of philosophy and a passion for Aristotle & Plato was the source of endless speculation and rumour. It is widely believed that he once won a city block in Los Angeles, that he challenged an arrogant opponent to draw one card for $550,000 (the other man backed down), that he played faro for 10 days and nights without sleep.

In the January of 1951, as the story goes, Nick the Greek approached Benny Binion with an unusual request-to challenge the best in a high-stakes poker marathon. Binion agreed to set up a match between Dandolos and the legendary Johnny Moss, with the stipulation that the game be played in public view.

During the course of the marathon, which lasted five months with breaks only for sleep, the two men played every form of poker imaginable. Moss ultimately won "the biggest game in town" and an estimated $2 million. When the Greek lost his last pot, he arose from his chair, bowed slightly, and uttered the now-famous words, "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go." Dandolos then went upstairs to bed.
He was enshrined in 1979 as a charter member of the Poker Hall of Fame.

Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman also met Nick the Greek, according to the autobiographical Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Nick explains to Richard how he wins big not by playing the tables, but by knowing the odds at the tables and betting against others who have superstitious beliefs about the outcome.

Albert Einstein stopped of in Las Vegas on a coast to coast journey. It was Nick who met him at the airport and chaperoned him around the Vegas casinos in a story told by Nick himself. Einstein was famous for saying that no one could win money at the roulette table, 'unless he steals money from the table while the croupier isn't looking'. So during a visit to the Tropicana Casino Nick approached a roulettte table and placed a handful of chips on red. It won and he let it ride and after winning again he did the same to further success. He then cashed in his chips, pocketed the cash and turned to grin at Einstein.

Nick then said, "Any questions?"

"One", said Einstein.

"And that is........?"

"I was wondering if you would be kind enough to wash my mouth out with soap?"

During his life Nick Dandolos donated more than $5,000,000 to charity and more than $2,000,000 to 'friends' in need. He sent 29 chilrdren of friends through college, paid hospital bills for 1,000 or more individuals and set up non-interest loans enabling another 300 or so to launch businesses of their own.

"He lived the life of a modern Socrates," a friend said shortly after Nick's death. "He believed in absolutely nothing material. His sum total of possessions at the time he died would have fitted handily into a shoe box. His most valuable presonal effects were the kind he could take with him. And he did...!"

Nick Dandolos claimed that he went from rags to riches over 73 times and near the end of his life Dandolos was reputedly near broke and playing $5 limit Draw poker games in Gardena, California.

Nick The Greek was, allegedly, cheated by this man. I wont go into all the details/rumours/counter rumours and eventual death which was supposedly linked to the cheating many years before and will just put a bit up about Ray Ryan.

Ray Ryan already had headed west in the late 1940s to Los Angeles, Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs. In LA, he rented a suite at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel for extended periods. Old and newly acquired friends stopped by. Card-playing went on all hours of the day, and he was betting heavily on horse racing. No one could miss him.

Allen Smiley, always looking for the next rich “sucker” to take for a bundle, heard of Ryan’s heavy betting and asked about him. Smiley once chaperoned a wealthy oilman to the New Orleans-area Beverly Club owned by Frank Costello and Philip “Dandy Phil” Kastel, then to a Las Vegas casino, and finally a gambling den in the Midwest. In the process, the oilman lost “a small fortune” of $100,000 or more in each place. Smiley hoped Ryan might be his next victim.

Tommy Guinan, whose sister was Prohibition-era actress and New York nightclub hostess Texas Guinan, knew Ryan betted as much as $125,000 a day, but warned Smiley to stay away from him. Ryan liked to place large bets at post time and often made a killing when he could get a bet down.

Ryan, hoping an unsuspecting bookie might be willing to accept his bets after post time, developed elaborate schemes to learn the race winners. One scam was to sequester himself in the shower in his hotel suite while his friends — gamblers and bookies — waited in the living room to go to the track. Meanwhile, Ryan sneaked in a phone call to a spotter at the track to find out who had won the first race.

When he left the bedroom, Ryan apologized for making the guys miss the first race, adding he really had a favorite horse he wanted to bet on. Usually one of the waiting bookies — certain Ryan had no idea who actually won — accepted his bet on the race. Ryan picked up thousands of dollars in the process.
Another scam involved his frequent lunches with bookies, who never turned down a meal with one of their biggest bettors. They’d meet before the races began and never were out of each other’s sight before lunch.

As the waiter passed out the menus, inside Ryan’s was a piece of paper listing the winners of the first two or three races. Ryan pretended to scan the menu while memorizing the note. He earlier had slipped the waiter $500 to pass the information to him.

During lunch, the men talked about a lot of things, and eventually Ryan casually mentioned he’d like to place bets on the early races at the track. Some bookies never suspected anything, believing he couldn’t know which horses won because he was with them the entire time. Bookies who took the bets of $10,000 or more on each race soon discovered lunch was a costly affair.

That wasn’t cheating to Ryan. It was just being smart enough to get the edge on the next guy — something they were trying to do to him.

Early on, he managed to pull off the charade numerous times, but later most bookies shied away from taking his bets after post time regardless of whether they had been with Ryan the entire day. He never bet huge bundles of cash on the scams ($10,000 wasn’t a large bet for Ryan) because he considered it a practical joke rather than a money-making scheme. He loved to amuse his friends with stories of how he put one over on a bookie.

His enormous personal appeal also brought him into contact with movie stars, studio executives, and producers in LA and Palm Springs. Hollywood folks flocked to Palm Springs to get away from prying eyes and the hubbub of sprawling LA. The pace in Palm Springs was slower, the weather milder, and no one cared what anyone did behind the walls and iron gates of the mansions.

Ryan relished being around movie stars and executive moguls, cementing friendships with Johnny Rosselli (an influential mobster) and other hoods who made California their empire and Palm Springs their pleasure palace, and drawing into his sphere of influence wealthy businessmen in the relaxed atmosphere of dinners and galas in Palm Springs and LA. Ryan would collect hundreds of photographs of himself with movie stars and other new friends.

One of Ryan’s famous acquaintances was Phil Regan, a well-known tenor who had appeared in two dozen motion pictures in the 1930s and 1940s. Regan had just starred in the role of Lucky Ryan in the 1946 movie “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” when they met. Born in 1906, Regan grew up in a cold-water flat in Brooklyn, the son of Irish immigrants. He later joined the New York City Police Department, and at a party given by a vaudeville producer, he went to a piano and sang. A radio executive hired him and his career as the “singing cop” began.

Through Regan, Ryan would meet young multimillionaire Chicago businessman Ralph E. Stolkin, and that partnership would lead to one of the largest oil strikes in West Texas, the financial backing of a Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis movie, and going head-to-head with Howard Hughes for ownership of a major Hollywood studio.

People often ask on here about good books to read about gambling and whilst not giving away anything that will give you an edge these days Mob Murder of America’s Greatest Gambler is one of the best books I've read.

During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million.

The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history. It devoured much of Mr. Watanabe's personal fortune, he says, which he built up over more than two decades running his family's party-favor import business in Omaha, Neb. It also benefitted the two casinos' parent company, Harrah's Entertainment Inc., which derived about 5.6% of its Las Vegas gambling revenue from Mr. Watanabe that year.



Terrance Watanabe, 52, is believed to have the biggest losing streak in Las Vegas history, losing $127 million dollars in one year. Mr. Watanabe, who now lives in the Bay Area, stands near the entrance to Stanford University on Dec. 3, 2009.

Today, Mr. Watanabe and Harrah's are fighting over another issue: whether the casino company bears some of the responsibility for his losses.

In a civil suit filed in Clark County District Court last month, Mr. Watanabe, 52 years old, says casino staff routinely plied him with liquor and pain medication as part of a systematic plan to keep him gambling.

Nevada's Gaming Control Board has opened a separate investigation into whether Harrah's violated gambling regulations, based on allegations made by Mr. Watanabe.

In April, the Clark County District Attorney's office charged Mr. Watanabe with four felony counts in district court for intent to defraud and steal from Harrah's, stemming from $14.7 million that the casino says it extended to him as credit, and that he lost. Although Mr. Watanabe has paid nearly $112 million to Harrah's, he has refused to pay the rest. He denies the charges, alleging that the casino reneged on promises to give him cash back on some losses, and encouraged him to gamble while intoxicated. If convicted, Mr. Watanabe faces up to 28 years in prison.

Jan Jones, Harrah's senior vice president for communications and government relations, says Mr. Watanabe's civil suit and his defense against the criminal charges are attempts to get out of paying a debt and to avoid accepting responsibility for his own actions. "Mr. Watanabe is a criminal defendant who faces imprisonment," Ms. Jones says. "All of his statements need to be seen in that light."

Several former and current Harrah's employees say their managers told them to let Mr. Watanabe continue betting while he was visibly intoxicated, even though casino rules and state law stipulate that anyone who is clearly drunk shouldn't be allowed to gamble. These employees say they were afraid they would be fired if they did anything to discourage Mr. Watanabe from gambling at the casinos.


Just as in civil cases, people with alleged unpaid debts sometimes try to get out of criminal charges by claiming that casinos had a hand in keeping them intoxicated. Although Mr. Zadrowski declined to comment specifically on Mr. Watanabe's case, he says this kind of defense never works in criminal court: "Uniformly, the rule is nobody made you drunk."

State regulators have the authority to fine casinos for letting people gamble who are visibly intoxicated, but such fines haven't been levied, says Brian Duffrin, executive secretary to the Nevada Gaming Control Board and the Nevada Gaming Commissions.

Still, casinos will sometimes bar gamblers who are behaving erratically or whom they suspect won't pay their debts. "It almost becomes a cost-benefit decision," says Glenn Christenson, a former Station Casinos executive who is chairman of the National Center for Responsible Gaming, an industry-funded addiction organization.
Journal Community

 
Mr. Watanabe says in court documents that he was barred from the Wynn casino in 2007 because of compulsive drinking and gambling. A Wynn spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter.

Harrah's Caesars and Rio casinos continued to put out the welcome mat. As part of the criminal case against Mr. Watanabe, Wilson Ning, a Harrah's marketing executive, testified before a grand jury in April that he didn't see Mr. Watanabe intoxicated at Caesars or Rio casinos, according to Mr. Zadrowski, the chief deputy district attorney who runs the bad-checks unit.

In 2007, Mr. Watanabe's prodigality became almost as legendary as his gambling. According to court documents, Mr. Watanabe says he regularly handed out to Caesars employees bundles of $100 bills that could total as much as $20,000.

Al Deleon and Kristian Kunder, two of Mr. Watanabe's personal handlers at Caesars, say he had thousands of Tiffany gift boxes filled with $50 gift cards or $100 gift coins that he would hand out to bartenders, nightclub operators, security guards and others. They say he once told a security guard to go to a supermarket and buy every cut of steak, and then proceeded to hand them out to employees.
The Trinket Empire

A native of Omaha, Neb., Mr. Watanabe built his fortune on plastic trinkets, the kind given away at carnivals and church fund-raisers: batons filled with tinsel, magic wands that light up, plastic spider rings that cost $1 for a bag of more than 100.

His father, Harry Watanabe, founded the import business, Oriental Trading Co., in 1932, after immigrating to the U.S. from Japan. As children, Mr. Watanabe and his younger sister and brother worked with their father after school. His mother, Fern, a Nebraska native, was a secretary there.

When Terrance Watanabe was 15, his father asked him if he wanted to take over the business, as is Japanese tradition for the first-born son, says his sister, Pam Watanabe-Gerdes. By the time he was 20, he was chief executive.

Some who knew Mr. Watanabe in Omaha describe him as guarded and shy. But he was also savvy at both marketing and selecting merchandise, says Bob Thomas, a chief operating officer at the company. It was those skills that helped Mr. Watanabe grow a modest toy business into a catalog empire that raked in $300 million in revenue by the time of its sale in 2000, Mr. Thomas says.




The job was all-consuming, say former associates. He traveled for long stretches of time examining merchandise in Asia. He never married. His sister and others who know him say they don't believe he ever had a significant romantic relationship. "That was his life, that company," Mr. Thomas says. "It engulfed him."

In 1995, Mr. Watanabe bought an 18,000-square-foot mansion on four acres for $1.8 million, according to RealQuest. A major Omaha philanthropist, he gave millions to AIDS services, according to his foundation's records. He also donated nearly $500,000 to political causes, mostly to the Democratic National Party.

In 2000, Mr. Watanabe sold his company to Brentwood Assoc. of Los Angeles for an undisclosed sum. Oriental Trading has since been acquired by the Carlyle Group.

After the sale, Mr. Watanabe said his plan was to throw himself into his philanthropic work and have more fun. "If it's not fun, it's not worth doing," Mr. Watanabe told his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, in 2000.

Donations from his foundation grew, but he soon became restless. Several business ideas, including opening a restaurant, went nowhere. "He didn't know what to do with his time," says his sister.
Betting the House

He found an answer at a Harrah's casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the river from Omaha. He started gambling there in 2003, according to documents filed in Mr. Watanabe's civil suit. He became one of the casino's top customers, says Gabe Sullivan, a former Harrah's host who attended to Mr. Watanabe there.

Once he began traveling to Las Vegas frequently in 2005, Mr. Watanabe's gambling and drinking intensified, according to his civil suit.

In 2006, Mr. Watanabe resided primarily at Wynn Resorts' Wynn Las Vegas casino. But, he says, his heavy betting drew the attention of Chief Executive Steve Wynn. After meeting with him in June 2007, Mr. Wynn concluded that he was a compulsive gambler and alcoholic, and barred him from the casino, according to a letter to the Nevada Gaming Control Board drafted by Mr. Watanabe's attorney, Pierce O'Donnell.

Ms. Jones, the Harrah's vice president, says, "It was not our understanding that he was kicked out of Wynn because of problem gambling."

The casino operator offered him lucrative terms to gamble at its casinos, according to Mr. Watanabe's letter to the Control Board and copies of emails sent from Harrah's to Mr. Watanabe's assistant that were included in the court filings.

In a series of emails signed by Mr. Ning, the Harrah's marketing executive, the casino company laid out the terms that it was willing to offer him, which included "a special formula just for Mr. Watanabe."

Mr. Ning specified such offers as tickets to the Rolling Stones, $12,500 a month for airfare and $500,000 in credit at the gift stores. Harrah's also offered 15% cash back on table losses greater than $500,000, special high-limit games and other incentives. Mr. Watanabe alleges that Harrah's later rolled those terms back.

Mr. Ning didn't respond to requests for comment. Ms. Jones declined to comment on whether the company rolled back any incentives, but says "the practice of offering incentives and discounts to significant players is not unusual."

Harrah's Total Rewards Player's Club system, a loyalty program similar to that of other big casinos, created a special rank for Mr. Watanabe, "chairman," according to the filing and several employees. Before Mr. Watanabe, the most exclusive rank was "Seven Star."

Mr. Watanabe resided for free in a three-bedroom suite at Caesars, had access to his favorite bartender, drank a special brand of vodka, Jewel of Russia, and was constantly surrounded by attendants to serve his every need, such as a seven-course meal from the casino's Bradley Ogden restaurant delivered to him while he was gambling, according to the court filing and employee accounts.

Ms. Jones says Mr. Watanabe was treated just like any other high-end gambler: "When his requests were appropriate we met them."
Losing $5 Million in a Day

One reason Mr. Watanabe was seen as so valuable to Harrah's, say Messrs. Deleon and Kunder, two of his handlers, is that he gravitated toward games with low odds, including roulette and slots. "He was considered a 'house' player because slots and roulette are house games -- they have terrible odds for the player," says Mr. Kunder. "And the way he played blackjack, he made it a house game. He made such bad decisions on the blackjack table."

Ms. Jones disputes this interpretation. "I don't put a lot of credibility" in that, she says.

Several employees say Mr. Watanabe would stay at the tables for up to 24 hours, sometimes losing as much as $5 million in a single binge. He was allowed to play three blackjack hands simultaneously with a $50,000 limit for each hand. At one point, the casino raised his credit to $17 million, according to court documents.

Ms. Jones says for high rollers, the company will often extend credit.

When Mr. Sullivan, the Iowa casino host, visited Mr. Watanabe in Las Vegas during the height of his binge in 2007, he says, Mr. Watanabe appeared incoherent and had trouble remembering details of conversations. Other employees recall Mr. Watanabe stumbling around and dozing off at casino tables, some of which were located next to a nightclub blaring loud music.

Mr. Kunder and Mr. Deleon say they both voiced concerns to managers that Mr. Watanabe was too intoxicated, and were told not to get involved. "Nobody wanted to be the one to cut him off," Mr. Kunder says. "We were afraid of what upper management would do if he left because of our actions."

Mr. Kunder left Harrah's in the summer of 2008 to work at nightclubs. He has since moved to Chicago and works at a cell-phone company. Mr. Deleon left the casino in March 2009 to do similar work at Red Rock casino, owned by Station Casinos. Mr. Sullivan left Harrah's in March 2008 when his contract wasn't renewed by Harrah's. Ms. Jones says the departures were not related to Mr. Watanabe, but declined to further discuss the situations of individual employees.
Looking the Other Way

Mr. Watanabe alleges that during this period Harrah's not only didn't make him leave when he was drunk, but it plied him with alcohol and prescription drugs to encourage him to stay and gamble.

Several Caesars employees say there was no policy to keep Mr. Watanabe drugged or drunk. But, they say, staff knew the company wanted to keep one of the Strip's most lucrative customers, and so looked the other way. A picture of him was hung in employee back rooms, they say.

Ms. Jones says there was nothing inappropriate or unusual about fulfilling the reasonable requests of a good customer.

"We're in the gambling business," she says. "We had no reason to believe that Terry Watanabe was anything other than a big player with huge resources who made an adult decision to bet the money he did. Are we going to provide an environment that keeps him very happy? Of course we are."

Regarding Harrah's alcohol policy, Ms. Jones says, the company tells its employees to ask people who are clearly intoxicated to refrain from gambling, as required under state regulations. Employees attend a responsible-gaming class every year where they learn how and when to tell gamblers to leave the casino. The company has a phone number that employees can call to anonymously report unethical or improper behavior by other employees. There are no reports that anyone called the number regarding Mr. Watanabe, Ms. Jones says.

In its marketing materials, Harrah's reports its record as an early advocate and funder of organizations that help gambling addicts. Among other measures, it honors requests from addicts that they be barred from all casinos run by the company.

In September 2007, Mr. Watanabe fell in his room and hurt his back. He says his handlers -- including Mr. Kunder and Mr. Deleon -- supplied him doses of the prescription pain medication Lortab without a doctor's prescription, his court filing says.

Mr. Kunder says he gave Mr. Watanabe prescription pain medication from his personal supply a single time on the day after the fall upon Mr. Watanabe's request. Mr. Deleon says he never gave Mr. Watanabe drugs.

Ms. Jones said that if employees ever provided Mr. Watanabe drugs, it would be against company policy.

Mr. Watanabe's sister says she and her brother and sister-in-law weren't aware of how much money he was losing until a 2007 Thanksgiving visit, when he opened up to her about the depth of his losses. "It was embarrassing for him," she says.

Two weeks later, she says, she returned to Las Vegas and brought him home. Mr. Watanabe was back in Las Vegas gambling for a period in 2008. But he entered a residential treatment facility that year and hasn't entered a casino since, Ms. Watanabe-Gerdes says.

In July 2008, Mr. Watanabe sold his Omaha mansion for $2.66 million to a developer, according to Douglas County records. He now lives near San Francisco.

Next summer, Mr. Watanabe is due to stand trial on the felony charges stemming from his debts. In May, he pled not guilty.



The conclusion was..



Dramatic developments were announced Thursday in a Las Vegas courtroom in the criminal case against Terry Watanabe, Omaha philanthropist and former owner of Oriental Trading Company.

Criminal charges are dropped against Watanabe and civil lawsuits have been stopped dead in their tracks.

Harrah's Entertainment had accused Watanabe of failing to pay $14.75 million in gambling debts that he ran up in Las Vegas casinos.

Following the complaint, prosecutors in Clark County, Nevada filed criminal charges against Watanabe that could have put him in prison for 28 years.

Watanabe filed a civil suit against Harrah's Entertainment in which he alleged Harrah's employees had supplied him with liquor and prescription painkillers while he lost tens of millions of dollars. In court papers Watanabe said he had lost nearly $190 million.

But it all ended when Clark County District Court Judge Donald Mosley on Thursday accepted a confidential deal between a prosecutor and lawyers for 53-year-old Watanabe. Trial had been set for next week.

Attorney Pierce O'Donnell says Watanabe didn't intend to defraud Caesars Palace and the Rio hotel-casino or their corporate owner, Harrah's Entertainment.

Watanabe agreed to drop civil lawsuits against Harrah's, and Harrah's agreed to freeze counterclaims pending binding arbitration.

I love these stories - thank you for sharing.

I'll tell you one not in the same league but true of human nature and gamblers.

The dream of many is to learn to card count, and although its widely known and difficult to get away with these days you can make fair money at it.

So, how does one card count. You need a system - a method to improve your memory. There is such a book that you can buy now. Its one of the original 'memory' books.

How to Develop a Perfect Memory (1993) ISBN 1-857931-06-8

When given the chance of riches and a high roller life by the author to his student, the student said 'looks like hard work to me.'

20 years later, I'm still too lazy to study it. True.

Slightly off topic but when tepmtation raises its head, in the hands of a compulsive gambler this would have been 'interesting'

You may struggle to believe this. Even while it was happening to me, I struggled too. One morning before Christmas, I checked my online bank account and noticed – although that seems too mild a word for it – that someone had just given me a quarter of a million pounds.

A woman with an unfamiliar name (which it feels unfair to mention) had, without warning, paid £250,000 into my current account. It was an exciting moment. This is not the kind of figure that a writer for the Guardian gets blasé about.

I assumed there was a glitch in the website; but when I logged off and on again, the money was still there. An hour later: still there. It had been deposited the day before, but there was no sign of anybody looking for it. I  Googled the woman, and found several people with her name, but decided that I couldn't contact them. This was very private business that I wouldn't want to spread around. (Nor can you assume you'll get an honest answer to the question: "Excuse me, is this gigantic sum of money yours?")

Besides, maybe it was my money now? If £10 notes are the property of the bearer, would the same apply to all those zeroes? Should I put it into a high-interest account until the matter was resolved? (There didn't seem to be quite enough to run away with. Nowhere near enough if I took my wife and children, which ideally I would.) Maybe there would be a reward, ahem, for giving it back? Or might this all be some ingenious scam? It would have to be very ingenious indeed, because I couldn't work out how anyone might profit by giving me a quarter of a million pounds.

Of course there was the slim chance that this money had been given to me on purpose. I focused on that. In March I'd published a novel, so I took to wondering if some shy patron of the arts had loved it and gone frankly rather overboard. (Her shyness would be so pronounced, of course, that she'd prefer to ferret out my bank details rather than post me a cheque.) Maybe the eccentric companion of a deceased forgotten aunt was giving me my legacy? I tried strenuously to believe so as I typed an email to my bank explaining things.

Later, I rang the UK Payments Council, which oversees the payments system, in search of answers. It turned out that it is familiar with "erroneous transfers", which occur when somebody mistypes an account number or a sort code. "If that combination happens to belong to someone else, then that payment will go through to a third party," a spokewoman confirmed. "Although if they use that money, essentially they are committing theft," she warned. "No matter how much you need it or how much you want it, that money doesn't belong to you." Not even the interest? "No."

This was a blow. It was softened, however, by the news that my case was the largest that she had heard of. "I've seen it happen with £10,000 or £20,000, but you're the first in my time with a quarter of a million," she said

Days passed, and still the money didn't move. I checked continually. There was something hypnotic about the sight of my usual domestic debits splashing on the surface of that enormous balance. Between checks, I kept forgetting that the money was there, and then – perhaps when an Aston Martin drove past – remembering.

Another thought occurred to me. What if I just borrowed the money for a few hours, and gambled with it? I would return the full amount afterwards, providing I won. A friend suggested that I would be in breach of trust law, but I found it hard to believe that anyone would prosecute me if they got their money back. All I'd need would be an online betting account, an odds-on certainty and a stiff drink. I'd get £50,000 richer in five minutes if a 1-5 shot came home. If it didn't, admittedly, I'd get prison.

At last, just over a week after the money had arrived, my bank called. It was as I'd feared: I'd have to give everything back – although they needed my approval to transfer the money. (The results of saying no were not explained.) In the process of typing a sort code, the bank explained, this mysterious woman had pressed "6" when she meant "8", and lost a fortune.

I've tried to trace her since, without success. I'd like to tell her about the interesting week I had with her money. I'd also like to find out what her week had been like. Rather fraught, I'm guessing. Finally, I'd thank her for ensuring that I'll never make that same mistake – mainly because I no longer have a quarter of a million pounds.

Yes it's long but it's well worth the read

He was in the bed sleeping when the two men walked into his bedroom. Billy Walters sleeps in a big clean bed in Las Vegas, in a small but elaborate home renovated to his liking, with palm trees and white flowerpots and two satellite dishes in the yard, and four large televisions in the den, and a security guard who sits just out of sight behind the shrubs across the street. This environment was disrupted early last Jan. 5, when the two strangers introduced themselves to Billy Walters with all the subtlety of an alarm clock. He greeted them by sitting up in the bed, blinking. His wife wasn't in the bed with him. They already had her, probably.



"You're going to have to get dressed," one man said. Billy Walters reached down for the pile of wrinkled clothes he had worn the night before. The room was quiet. The men watched him dress.



"We don't like to have to do this to you," the other man said.



His wife Susan was downstairs with a third man in the kitchen. There was not a lot of chit-chat. Susan and Billy Walters were led across their fine, trimmed yard in handcuffs. The path to law and order wended past a copy of the daily newspaper, which lay on their driveway like an upturned headstone. As Billy Walters glanced down at the headline, he realized that he was the front-page news:


INDICTMENTS TARGET BETTING GROUP IN LAS VEGAS



As he tells it, what steams Billy Walters most of all was the sight later that day of his pretty wife in leg irons, chains scraping the floor as she staggered toward him. Afterward, when they had been released without bail, she revealed how the manacles had eaten through her stockings.



Seventeen days later Billy Walters and 16 associates held the first meeting of the legendary Computer Group. This was a celebrated occasion in gambling history, and long overdue. The men and women of the Computer Group had been pioneers in their field. All the Computer Group did, apparently, was wager money on college football and basketball games, but for five hysterical years they did it better than anyone else ever had. It was almost as if they had invented junk bonds. Every season the cash arrived by the millions, all because their computer told them which teams should be favored to win everything from the mammoth Ohio State-Michigan football game to the basket-ball game pitting Monmouth against Fairleigh Dickinson. The Computer Group did not fix games. It simply understood them.



The group began to assert its mastery of sports betting in 1980, when the computer as an everyday machine had no firm place in sports. Most of the big Las Vegas players of 1980 were still relying on their own good sense and whatever trends they could pick up. A computer seemed to them a gimmick from the future, a big blinking queen-bee serviced by men in white coats. There were relatively few of these "personal computers" that are everywhere today. As a matter of fact, the Computer Group didn't even own its own computer. Until 1983. the group settled for renting time on a computer 2,400 miles away in Rockville, Md. As for the group's invaluable program, it was maintained on thousands of clumsy old "batch" cards, kept in shoeboxes, then fed to the computer like hay into a thrasher.



Although dozens of workers served the Computer Group, only one man communicated with the machine itself. He was Michael Kent, a 34-year-old mathematician who had spent II years helping to develop nuclear submarines for Westinghouse. He found such work boring. In 1979 he quit his job and moved to Las Vegas, to bet on football games. In 1980 he became partners with a man he hardly knew, an orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who Kent says agreed to place bets for them on a 50-50 basis, in accordance with his computerized forecasts. In the 1980 season the computer wizard and the doctor shared winnings of $100,000 playing college football. By 1983 they were winning almost $1 million in one week of college football - or, at least, that's what Michael Kent was told. He never bothered to check the books.



By then Dr. Mindlin had built their little corner business into something resembling a national conglomerate, which had opened betting offices staffed by a dozen employees in New York and Las Vegas. The Computer Group had burgeoned into the first truly national network of sports bettors, able to buy up the best point spreads from coast to coast. At the height of its powers, the Computer Group of 1983-85 wielded more influence over the millions of Americans who bet on sports than any superstar athlete or Super Bowl franchise. Yes, it was even more important than the split-fingered fastball. In its sleekest moments, the Computer Group had as grand an effect upon its constituency in the 1980s as OPEC had upon American consumers in the 70s.



As its influence grew, the Computer Group became something of an underground social club, extending an unofficial membership to at least one smalltime hoodlum, as well as sharing information with the likes of lrwin Molasky, the powerful real estate developer and Las Vegas civic leader.



Profits were staggering. The group never had a losing season betting on college football or college basketball. According to figures compiled recently by Michael Kent, the Computer Group in 1983-84 earned almost $5 million from wagers on college and, occasionally, NFL games. Yet Michael Kent suspects that his records are incomplete. They do not account for personal bets made by Dr. Mindlin, or Billy Walters, or by the dozens of other associates who had access to the Computer Group's information. By the time everyone had exhausted Kent's forecasts in the 1983-84 sports year, they might easily have earned 110 million, perhaps $15 million. Perhaps more.



"When you worked it down all the way to the bottom," says Billy Walters, "it might have been 1,000 people using our information."



Finally, in 1987, success got the best of them. They had to break up, just like the Beatles. Despite all the time they had spent working together, the members of the Computer Group had never really known one another. In most cases they had spoken only by phone, in staccato conversation, using code names. Faces rarely had been attached to voices. And so, as their legend had grown in recent years, it was only proper that these reclusive celebrities be united last Jan. 22 in Las Vegas, to shake hands and wonder where all the time had gone, as 17 of them assembled in Courtroom No. 4 of the Foley Federal Building, awaiting their arraignment on 120 counts of conspiracy, gambling, and racketeering charges.



Among these Garbos there were two their partners most wanted to see: Billy Walters, gambler of gamblers, who had come to Las Vegas in debt and was now a millionaire; and the treacherous doctor, Ivan Mindlin, whose cunning had built the group up-and then led to its demise.



On the day they were arrested, just two weeks before the five-year statute of limitations on their case would have run out, Billy Walters sat in a holding cell with Dr. Mindlin and a third member of the group, Billy Nelson. Dr. Mindlin wore his hair longer than Walters remembered - combed back, until it splashed against his shoulders. The three of them were discussing their contempt for the FBI, and, in particular, the ambitious special agent Thomas B. Noble, whose investigation of six years had uncovered so very little. Walters and Nelson went back and forth in their denigration of Noble, using many unpleasant terms, until finally the doctor spoke up. Walters recalls Mindlin saying: "Yeah, and can you believe that S.O.B. told two people that, if they'd tell him how I killed my wife, he'd go easier on them?"



Now, in the courtroom 17 days later, his former colleagues whispered about Dr. Mindlin. He was the most intriguing presence among them. Yet he sat alone in a corner, as if he were the least popular boy in school.



In groups of four they were called to the bench of U.S. Magistrate Robert Johnston. Dr. Mindlin's was the first name called. Each man and woman was asked about his or her education, and it turned out that all had attended college, with the exception of Billy Walters. Then the magistrate wanted to know how they intended to plead.



"Not guilty," each of them said.



"Not guilty," the magistrate repealed each time, a little sarcastically. He then proceeded to set all the gamblers free, on their own recognizance, and several of them hurried back to their homes, for there were games that night, and wagers to be made.




The Operation



In a room alone, just he and his computer, Michael Kent was simply another technology dweeb. But plug him into a network of bettors, and now, with the flick of a switch, Kent was utterly brilliant, a mastermind. These dozens of betting agents, or beards, as they are called, were as essential to Michael Kent as the electrical juice that drove his computer. He could not begin to succeed without them. And so, each day, without equivocation, he turned over his forecasts of the upcoming games to Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who then passed them on to his New York partners, Stanley Tomchin and Jimmy Evart, who, until 1984, were responsible for placing the majority of wagers for the Computer Group.



Dr. Mindlin had been making personal bets through Tomchin and Evart long before the Computer Group was formed. According to a partner in the group, Mindlin had built up a debt of some $100,000 to Tomchin and Evart when Michael Kent came along in 1980. By offering Kent's computer information to them, Mindlin was able to work off his debt quickly.



Tomchin and Evart were so impressed with the accuracy of Dr. Mindlin's information that they agreed to move money for him on a regular basis. Their colleagues describe Tomchin and Evart as a pair of Ivy Leaguers, more erudite than the normal gamblers. Tomchin, a Cornell alumnus, was a world-class backgammon and poker player; his friend Jimmy (Sneakers) Evart was said to have attended Harvard. Tomchin and Evart were well known in New York gambling circles as the "Computer Kids."



In 1983, when Billy Walters began making bets for the Computer Group, he often received his orders from Tomchin and Evart. The Group's main betting pool was wagering $40 million per year, but all the action in the world could not sustain Evart's interest. His newlywed wife insisted that he stop gambling, and so, in 1984, he walked away from the money and moved to Spain. According to a former partner, Tomchin moved to San Francisco and eventually left the group . His former partners say he is now an options trader in Santa Barbara. Tomchin declined to answer questions in connection with this story.



The Computer Group foundered in Evart's absence until October 1984, when Dr. Mindlin offered Billy Walters a percentage of the group's winnings and placed him in charge of moving the weekly millions. At that time Walters worked out of a lovely three-bedroom home overlooking the eighth fairway at the Las Vegas Country Club, Indeed, Billy Walters wore clothes suggesting that he had been called in from the golf course. His gray speckled hair was styled straight back. away from his thin face. its expression creased by the transitions of gambling, from sadness to happiness and then back again. His face was older than his body. He was always thinking about work. He had been assigned (he enormous responsibility of exploiting the weakest betting lines, and it did not matter where they were. Billy Walters was supposed to find them. and where they failed to exist, he was expected to create them.



He was a powerful broker in an unregulated industry. Walters blanketed the country with bets, taking action wherever it was available, which was at times in as many as 45 states. In 44 of them he dealt exclusively with illegal bookmakers. To help bear that burden he hired six people to work for him in Las Vegas, at a salary of no more than $700 per week, plus the occasional bonus. His wife served as an accountant, but he depended most upon his young assistant, Glen Walker, who had quit his job in the publicity department at NBC Sports in New York and relocated to Las Vegas, so enthralled was he by a 1980 story in Sports Illustrated about Las Vegas gambler Gary Austin. "That copy of Sports Illustrated changed my life," Walker says today.



Billy Walters maintained a low profile in Las Vegas. If he appeared at a sports book it was usually around midnight. when he might come to open a betting account with $100,000 or more in cash - however much he could fit in a Famous Amos Cookies bag. As for more public matters, he preferred that business be conducted by Glen Walker. So Walker would visit the Las Vegas sports books each day, to settle up or place bets, and fend off the legions of bettors who wanted to know which games the computer liked that week. He worked with three other group employees at the "C&B Collection Agency," which was a front for their betting operation. His colleagues would meet there, at an office park on Spring Mountain Road., when they weren't moving money out of Billy Walters' house.



Perhaps Walters' favorite employee was gentle Arnie Haaheim, a big bright laughing man who was unable to mask his tremendous emotions. He liked women - liked to talk about them, actually, until he was all talked out. Then, says Walker, Arnie would stare off, leaning on his elbow, as passive as a solar cell at dusk. All around him phones were ringing and money was being wagered in thick sexy wads, but Arena would just sit there, his jaw hanging open while Billy Walters shouted orders.



By and large, though, there was little humor in their work. On a Saturday of college basketball they might bet 60 games, which required that they be aware of every injury, casualty and rumor surrounding all 120 teams. They had to chart the movement of the point spreads in various sports books for each game. They had to find the weakest lines, and they had to make and keep track of their wagers by the hundreds. They worked almost every day from September through March. Some days they would start at 6 a.m. and finish at midnight. Always Walters felt obliged to protect the Computer's information from the public, because these numbers were as valuable to him personally as they were to the group. His employees never even heard mention of the name Ivan Mindlin. The voice delivering the daily betting orders was known only as "Doc" or "Cowboy," and Billy Walters would say nothing more to identify him.



Occasionally, however, it paid to be careless. On a Wednesday afternoon, ever so casually, Billy Walters might tell Glen Walker to make a call over to the old Gary Austin Sports Book on the strip. "We want to lay $30,000 on Wisconsin giving 3 to Purdue," Billy Walters would tell him.



Walters knew that several wise guys would be passing time near the counter at Gary Austin's. And they would notice that the line favoring Wisconsin over Purdue would rise to 3 1/2 points. And they would ask who was responsible for moving the line, and they would be told the truth: That $30,000 had just been laid by the computer. And then..



The wise guys would bet on Wisconsin themselves. These wise guys would whisper to other wise guys. Tout services would hear that the computer liked Wisconsin. A run would begin on Wisconsin. News of Wisconsin would spread nationally. By the time word reached the man in Louisiana or the woman in Illinois, there would be no mention of the Computer Group. They would simply be told that they had better get something down on Wisconsin. You can see now that the betting market in Las Vegas is no different than Wall Street. Fed by rumor, speculation and greed, a stock like Wisconsin can grow hot for no substantial reason.



By Thursday or Friday, Wisconsin might be inflated to a 5-point favorite, 5 1/2 in some markets. At this point Billy Walters believed the price could rise no higher, and so he would marshal his forces: "Open order on Purdue taking 5!" In moments, they would be on their speed-dial phones, reaching every available source nationwide, betting as much as they could wherever Purdue was a 5-point underdog. They were a frantic yet focused group inside the "C&B Collection Agency," attempting to flood all the markets simultaneously, before the point spread could drop. Into one phone they would shout a few words and then hang up while dialing another number on another phone, back and forth, until they were frazzled. In two minutes Walters alone could place bets through a dozen beards or bookies.



So: On Wednesday they'd bet against Purdue. to lower its value in the market. Now on Friday they were buying as much Purdue as they could, a grand total of $1 million or more. And wouldn't you know it: Sometimes Wisconsin would beat Purdue by 4 and the Computer Group would win the "middle" - bets on both teams paying off in the same game.



Now and then, Billy Walters fooled his own employees. Glen Walker recalls more than one occasion when Arena Haaheim laid his own money on the first team (in this case Wisconsin) only to find out later in the week that the Computer had preferred the opponent (Purdue) all along. On Saturday they would sit in Billy Walters home and watch the game on television. "Arena, what's the matter?" Walters would say. "I don't see you cheering over there."



No betting operation bad ever controlled the market on such a synchronized and national level, but Billy Walters admits, he didn't always have his way so easily. "There were other times I bet $130,000 or $140,000 just to move the line," he says in his low Kentucky drawl. "One thing about the public, they'll follow anybody as long as you're picking winners,"



Because they pay a 10% service fee to the house on all losing bets, professional gamblers have to win 52.38% of their games just to break even. Records of the 1983 college football season seized from Dr. Mindlin show that the Computer Group won an incredible 60.3% of its games against the spread. The Computer Group's main betting pool began that season in September with a $1.1 million line of credit, and concluded Jan. 2 with $5 million cash.



Of course, in those days the official point spread was softer than mayonnaise. The mathematical wizard Michael Kent admits that the Computer Group might never have risen to prominence if not for the removal of Bob Martin, who since 1967 had been making the official line for Las Vegas. However, in 1980, Martin was sentenced to 13 months for the crime of transmitting wagering information across state lines by telephone. If the federal government had not gotten rid of Bob Martin, then the FBI might never have felt compelled to spend six long years investigating the Computer Group.



More often than not, Michael Kent's line was more accurate than the official line in Las Vegas. Line-makers will argue that the only purpose of their official line is to entice betting action on both sides, that they are not responsible for outsmarting experts like Michael Kent. Nonetheless, the people who were making that line in the early 1980s were a particularly feeble lot.



Other gamblers noticed the same weaknesses, but they couldn't take advantage to the same extent as the Computer Group. "They had some amateurs setting the line at that time, and the line was very weak," says Lem Banker, whose nationally syndicated newspaper column made him perhaps the most famous gambler in Las Vegas. "It was a good opportunity to win, and a lot of people did."



Greater than any individual, the mysterious Computer Group emerged as the prominent voice in Las Vegas, much like a Wizard in Oz. "When a handicapper gets going good, a 'following' phenomena goes into effect," says Michael (Roxy) Roxborough, now the top Las Vegas linemaker, whose services are purchased by 35 sports books. "A game might open at 3 [points], and the followers raise it up to a 6. With these computer guys, every time a game moved, they were the ones credited with moving it, whether they did it or not. Their legend may be larger than they actually were."



The top gambling rings today use the Computer Group as their model. In Las Vegas, a classroom genius like Michael Kent has to depend entirely upon someone like Billy Walters, who was educated in alleys. "There is no gambler's college," Walters says. "Everything I know, I learned the hard way. Now, how do I know when the spread has risen as high as it's going to get? I have to depend upon my years of experience. I use my feel and the information I get from my contacts around the country to decide when I should bet and when to back off."



Sitting at his desk each day, Billy Walters based his decisions upon numbers he wrote on two pieces of paper. On one page was a list of point spreads compiled by Michael Kent's computer. In the case of Wisconsin at Purdue, Kent might have decided: Purdue -I over Wisconsin. On the second page Billy Walters was keeping track of the official lines at various sports books in Las Vegas. Wherever he could find a difference of I '/2 points between the Computer Group's line and the official Las Vegas line, he would bet on that game. If the official line decided: Wisconsin -5 over Purdue, then what Billy Walters had here was a massive 6-point difference of opinion. In such a case he might bet $1 million on that game. The greater the difference, the more he would bet (see box, p.40).



So confident was the Computer Group that its weekly wagers often exceeded the ceiling of its betting pool. According to ledgers seized by the FBI, Michael Kent's group in one week wagered $4,571,050 on college basketball games alone - more than twice as much as its reservoir in the pool at that time. Including the college bowl games and the NFL play-offs. the group bet more than $5.5 million that week, turning a profit of almost $700,000.



And that represented the work of Michael Kent's tiny group. Dozens of other bettors had access to his information. Who knows how much additional revenue they earned?



Billy Walters claims that he gambled more than $500,000 of his own money each week with the help of computer information. He is just one of many big winners whose profits do not appear on the group's ledgers.



Even though he tried to gamble like the button-down brokers on Wall Street, Walters admits that he too fell victim to the occasional betting frenzy. During the Christmas holidays six years ago, Walters found he was betting hand over fist on Michigan in the Sugar Bowl against Auburn. It was one of those rare times when the tout services were opposing the computer on a major game. No matter how much Billy Walters bet on Michigan for the Computer Group and for himself, the line remained the same. The public kept laying money on Auburn, giving 41/2 points.



"I kept betting on the game, and the line kept coming back, so I just kept betting," Walters says. "I guess I got a little carried away. I had more than $1 million on that game. I literally bet my entire net worth on that game, and probably some additional."



Trailing 7-6 in the fourth quarter, Auburn took possession at its 39 with 7:44 left. If Auburn scored a touch-down to cover, Billy Walters would lose $1 million. But Auburn kicked a 19-yard field goal to win, 9-7, and Billy Walters is today a rich genius.








The Computer Wizard



One day Michael Kent, who was the centerfielder, got to wondering about his company softball team. How good were he and his teammates, really? When they destroyed a poor opponent by 15-4, was that as impressive as beating a good team by 6-5? His team had won a couple of league championships, but what had they really accomplished? All his life he had found answers to such questions in numbers, statistics. He simply had to find out what those numbers meant. What was the numerical definition of a good softball team?



His thoughts drifted naturally in this direction. Kent was a 27-year-old math-' mathematician at Westinghouse in suburban Pittsburgh. Every day he worked with computers. to help design a better nuclear sub. At night, he says. he began to formulate a computer program that rated the strength of his softball team. Each week he would update the statistics, then feed the information into the high-speed Control Data computer at Westinghouse. His teammates were interested in this output of statistics - it was flattering to them - but Michael Kent ultimately was disappointed by the results. When (he work was done he had a printout listing his team's strengths and weaknesses. So what? He had given order to these numbers, but there was no application, no further use for them.



He says he began work on a more complex program. The game was college football. This time he could foresee a dollar sign in front of the numbers. The year was 1972. He recorded information from old NCAA football guides, which list the scores and statistics from the previous season. Then he visited the library, the old newspapers in particular, in order to see which teams had been favored each week, and by how many points. He examined the spreads and the slats. attempting to find a correlation. Which statistics, he wanted to know. were important in assigning a point spread?



He knew of only one way to find out. He began to write a program. The computer would ask hundreds of questions in algorithmic. pinpointing strengths and weaknesses for each team. As his wealth of information grew, Kent learned that some strengths were more important than others. There was a value to first downs and there was another value to yards gained. Home-field advantage had a value. So did strength of schedule. So did success against common opponents. The list of questions went on and on, some so picayune that the average football fan might have laughed in the face of this stocky, bespectacled mathematician. Billy Walters believes that the program even accounted for the distance of the visiting team's road trip.



The hobby soon became his vocation. He began to test his model by placing bets with local bookies. He says he worked an average of two hours per night over the course of seven years, fine-tuning his football program and developing a similar program for college basketball, until one morning he walked into the plant and quit his job. He was very quiet about it. Only his closest friends were informed of his plans. He moved to Las Vegas in lime for the 1979 college football season. For the last seven years he had been saving his money, to wager on football and basketball games. Still, when he looked in the mirror, it was a hard thing to believe, that the person staring back at him was a professional gambler.



When Michael Kent arrived in Las Vegas, he clearly was on his own. No gambler of note was depending solely upon a computer to analyze bets. Allow yourself to go broke because of a machine? That was crazy thinking. But Michael Kent didn't know anything about Las Vegas common sense. He was from Pennsylvania. He wanted to know where he should do his laundry. On a daily basis he wanted to bet as many games as he could, whenever he perceived the slightest 1 1/2 point advantage, and this was more crazy thinking. Common sense in Las Vegas said that you couldn't win big by betting a lot of games. You should concentrate on just a few games. That's what common sense said. Michael Kent didn't know about that, either. Most of what he knew about this business was contained in a book called Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, by Richard A. Epstein.  Chapter 2 told him the percentage of his money he should bet, depending upon how much he liked the game. The book was written in the language of numbers.  Michael Kent wanted to meet this man Epstein.



The job of betting sports fulltime was a little harder than he had imagined. Kent would wake up early, update his information from the morning newspapers. tap into the Control Data computer on which he was renting time, and establish a belting line for each game. Then he and a friend would spend the rest of the day and night visiting sports books and private bookmakers, seeking out the most favorable point spreads. He was not instantly successful.



"That first football season was curious," Kent recalls, speaking by phone from Las Vegas, under the supervision of his attorney, Steven Brooks of Boston. "l started real well. Then in midseason, there were five big games, and I lost all five by a point, by a half-point. by a missed field goal. All crazy things. It put me down. and for the rest of the year I'd lose every week."



According to his records, he lost $40.000 that football season. His bad luck continued two months into the basketball season.



"I was getting killed," he says. "I was at the point where I was debating what my future was going to be. Then, I remember, there were 17 games I was betting one night, and I won 16 of the 17. That was a definite high. to get me back on the plus-side."



He found that betting the games was an awesome responsibility. It was not an easy thing to settle up with a bookmaker after each round of bets, carrying huge bundles of cash in and out of public places. Whenever he had a lot of money on him, he feared he was being followed. If he happened to notice two men walking behind him on the sidewalk, he would run as fast as he could into the nearest casino, and stand near a security guard for a while. Of course, this only drew more attention to himself. He asked security guards to escort him to his car whenever feasible. He also depended heavily upon valet parking. He didn't like the idea of carrying 150.000 into a dark garage. Valet parking was much safer. He didn't know how to just be cool about it. He couldn't chill out. He was working 80 hours a week in the strangest city in America and he was always worrying. He won $150.000 betting college basketball in 1979-80, but it was a terrible way to live.



He gave betting one last try for a football month in the fall of 1980. Exhausted, with no alternative but to go home, he says he placed a call to Dr. Ivan Mindlin. He had met the doctor once before. In 1979, while playing tennis with fellow gambler Billy Nelson, Michael Kent had mentioned his use of a computer in betting. Nelson had said that Kent should meet this Dr. Mindlin. "I thought they could help each other," Nelson said in a deposition year.



They seemed to understand each other. When Kent arrived at Mindlin's house on Ottawa Drive, the doctor explained that. quite ironically, he had been attempting to forecast major league baseball games by use of a computer program. When Michael Kent heard this. in 1979, he felt almost as if Dr. Mindlin was a brother. In 1980. when they began to work as a team. he came to think of Dr. Mindlin )as a father. Later Dr. Mindlin would place his arm around Michael Kent and say that they were, as gamblers, married to each other.



Years later, Kent's attorney marvels at the hypnotic grip Dr. Mindlin maintained over his brilliant yet woefully naive client. Says Steven Brooks, "I would sit down with Michael for hours, discussing different parts of his arrangement with Dr. Mindlin. and I would say: 'Why did you do this?' And he would say, 1 don't know.' It was incredible. He didn't know why they were doing anything. He just trusted Ivan completely."



In 1982 Michael invited his older brother John Kent to mow-to Las Vegas. Michael taught John how to feed data to the computer, training John to work for the Computer Group. Later, Michael would invite another brother, and even his mother, into the betting pool. Michael's success provided wonderful experiences for all of the Kents. Michael was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars each season. and he wasn't even paying taxes on it. He was depositing his winnings with banks in the Bahamas and Switzerland, the same banks that Dr. Mindlin was using, according to Kent.



Only in the last few years did Michael Kent begin to understand the full extent of his creation. As far as he knew, the Computer Group consisted of himself, members of his family. Dr. Mindlin and a few others who helped them make bets. From 1980 through January 1985, he figured that his group had wagered close to $140 million and turned a profit $14 million. The idea that his information was earning two or three times that much without him getting his fair share ... well. he never really came to grips with the possibility that anything unethical could come of his work.



While other regular players in Las Vegas schemed and flattered Dr. Mindlin in their vain attempts to gain access to the Computer Group's information, Michael Kent walked freely through town, blissfully anonymous, unaffected and ingenuous, the neon reflecting from his glasses.


The Doctor



His enemies, who are many, exult in spreading rumors that portray Ivan Mindlin as a doctor ruined by his gambling. They say that he would listen to baseball games while performing surgery to the detriment of his patients, and that he would leave the operating room to gather up the scores. In reality, Dr. Mindlin enjoys an excellent reputation as an orthopedic surgeon, according to three respected Las Vegas attorneys who specialize in medical cases - all of whom approved Mindlin to give objective medical examinations for use in court cases. "A doctor would have to be highly thought of to be approved by both sides in a case," says attorney Bruce Alverson, who lauds Dr. Mindlin. Attorney Neil Galatz expresses sadness over Mindlin's recent legal troubles with the Computer Group. "It's a shame," he says, "because he was a fine doctor."



Lem Banker, the famous sports bettor, says he has been a friend of Dr. Mindlin's for 30 years, since he served as house physician for hotels on the Las Vegas strip. "He was my doctor," says Banker. "I actually showed him some of the finer points of handicapping. Sometimes we'd stop into the hotels and go partners, shooting craps. I had a lot of respect for his mind."



Though the doctor reportedly had a good run playing the horses, one of his partners says that Mindlin was a loser betting on ballgames - that by1980, the doctor had run up a $100,000 debt to a pair of New York bettors, Stanley Tomchin and Jimmy Evart. Dr. Mindlin was able to work off that debt in October 1980, when Michael Kent dropped by (like manna from heaven) to discuss his computer program for handicapping football and basketball games.



As he spoke, Michael Kent could not have been very impressive to a man like Ivan Mindlin. Kent was something of a Lt. Colombo in that regard. He did not speak elegantly. He wore drab clothes. He said he had grown up in Chicago as a Cubs fan. And he looked like a Chicago Cubs fan, just in from the bleachers. To Dr. Mindlin he must have looked like a pigeon, with a beard and glasses.



Kent said he had grown weary of betting the games himself. What really tired him, he said with all sincerity, was having to deal with such large amounts of money. The chores of betting were wearing him out. He says he and Dr. Mindlin agreed: Kent forecasts the games, Mindlin makes the bets, and they split the winnings 50-50.



With their handshake, the Computer Group was formed. And from that day forward, Dr. Mindlin took it upon himself to insulate Michael Kent from the outside world, just as Kent had wished. Kent was left alone to work with the numbers, while Mindlin took care of the streets. Mindlin apparently loved the streets, where he was deemed something of a Renaissance man, a street-smart manager who knew how to move truckloads of money and an intellectual genius as well. As time went on and the group's profits soared, he began to take more and more credit, until it was common knowledge throughout Las Vegas that he - Dr. Ivan Mindlin - was the inventor of the Computer Group's invaluable program.



In March 1986. Sports Illustrated became the first national publication to report the story of the Computer Group. Dr. Ivan Mindlin explained to the magazine that he had taught himself computer programming while serving on the faculty at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, N.J., the first hospital in the country to have an IBM computerized record-keeping system. Mindlin told an intricate tale, of how he'd run 25,000 past college basketball games through computer services from coast to coast so see how accurate the pregame spreads were against the final score. The magazine reported that Mindlin "devised his own programs to make a number' on each game, and that he serves as the alleged mathematical mastermind behind the mysterious Computer Group, which just might be the biggest known sports betting ring ever established anywhere."



The name of Michael Kent was mentioned nowhere in the story.



Though many members of the Computer Group might have thought that Dr. Mindlin was the grand inventor, there is very little to support that view. Those partners of Dr. Mindlin's who agreed to give interviews all maintained that Michael Kent invented the group's program for handicapping football and basketball games. The only program Dr. Mindlin produced was for betting on major league baseball, and they say it was a failure.



Dr. Mindlin has declined to comment on this and all other matters. His attorney, Morris Goldings, is evasive when asked who invented the group's programs. "We're not getting into the vanity of it," he said recently from his car phone. Last February, however, Goldings said bluntly: "What does Kent say? That he was the brains and Mindlin was the beard? That's our position too."



Each day Kent and his brother John collected the statistical data for every team, fed it into the computer, updated their program. fine-tuned all of the forecasts and then dumped them into a computer file to which Mindlin had access. From that point on. Kent -who was either too busy or too gullible to notice the fence that Mindlin was constructing around him - abdicated all responsibility to the doctor.



Dr. Mindlin's responsibility was so relay the information to Stanley Tomchin and a few other beards (or betting agents), who would survey the market and make the bets. Those phone calls and his accounting duties for the group were the extent of Mindlin's workload, but other matters kept him busy.



To the doctor's credit, the Computer Group grew very quickly under his direction. As they were beginning to earn millions each season, Dr. Mindlin was injured in a 1981 car accident in Florida, which left him unable to perform surgery. He applied for disability insurance, and his practice was limited to giving expert testimony in medical cases.



As his reputation as a gambler grew, he was able to strike up an acquaintance with Irwin Molaksy,  mighty Las Vegas developer with whom Mindlin reportedly shared "his" computerized information in exchange for Molasky's friendship and all the avenues it might open up to him.



Now street-famous for his work with the Computer Group, Dr. Mindlin entered into the commodities business. Once more he turned to Michael Kent and Kent's friend, Mark Ricci who began work on a program for predicting the price of commodities futures. Based on their efforts, Dr. Mindlin farmed a private commodities firm he called Commend, which may have served him in several ways. For one, he allegedly was able to launder money through Commend. Michael Kent's brother, John, in a sworn deposition last year. testified that he received $112,695 from Commend for his work on the Computer Group's sports data base. John Kent testified that he never did any work for Commend.



Dr. Mindlin also found that commodities could serve as another point of contact with Irwin Molasky, who invested with him through Commend, according to Molasky's attorney Stanley Hunterton.



Mindlin also established a relationship with Dominic Spinale, who reportedly was a smalltime hoodlum with ties to Chicago mobster Tony Spilotro. Spinale happened to be under investigation by the FBI at the time his name was being used by Mindlin to open a betting account at the Stardust Hotel. If Mindlin could change one thing, he would probably never have become friendly with Spinale, which might have averted all of the troubles that engulf him today.



The Feds



Special Agent Thomas B. Noble has developed quite a reputation in the FBI for his six-year investigation of the Computer Group. Quite sad, really. "He got himself in a jam," says a fellow special agent. "He was a rookie when this thing started. Everybody was saying, Forget about it, you haven't got anything.' But, somehow, he convinced one of his superiors that it was bookmaking, and got him to go along with it. He (Noble] is always saying how every case he's working on is the greatest thing. In the end, it never works out."



Thomas Noble says that joining the FBI was "just something I had always wanted to do." He was made a special agent in 1982 and was assigned to Las Vegas a year later. He had not been there long when a gambling investigation of Dominic Spinale led him to Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who had opened a betting account at the Stardust Hotel in Spinale's name. A muted alarm began to ring between the ears of Thomas Noble. This had the look of a betting operation run by La Cosa Nostra. The Mafia. Organized crime.



Soon after he had been questioned by the FBI about Spinale, Dr. Mindlin began to spend more time at his house in Vail, Colo. A second alarm went off.



The subject seemed to be distancing himself from Spinale, his LCN (La Cosa Nostra) contact. Noble traced a check endorsed by Spinale to an account maintained by Michael Kent Kent referred the FBI's inquiries to his attorney. Another alarm. Michael Kent had the same attorney as Ivan Mindlin



Spinale was next observed by FBI operatives associating with a young blonde subject named Glen Walker, who walked with a pronounced limp (the result of a high school football injury). Walker was trailed to an establishment called "C&B Collection Agency." Further investigation indicated that the "C&B Collection Agency" was not actually a collection agency but was in fact the front for a gambling operation. Informants led special agent Noble to believe that Walker represented the Computer Group, the most successful gambling ring in the city, the gambling ring in which Dr. Mindlin was an admitted member. The alarm in Noble's head was now whistling like a steaming tea kettle.



Noble respectfully informed his superiors that he believed he had discovered one of the largest illegal bookmaking operations in the nation.



The distinction between bookmakers and mere bettors is an important one. Though federal prosecution of illegal bookmakers declined in the 1980s. the government still enjoys good legal footing in such cases, because it can easily be proved that bookmakers are in the business of illegal gambling. It is much more difficult to prosecute the mere bettor, because the laws weren't clearly written to apprehend him. In a 1981 case in Rhode lsland (U.S. v. Robert Barborian and Anthony Lauro), the U.S. District Court ruled that the use of telephones or other wire communication for interstate gambling "does not cover an individual bettor, even if the bettor wagered substantial sums and displayed sophistication of an expert in his knowledge of odds making."



But special agent Noble was certain that he was chasing bookmakers. More agents were assigned to aid Thomas Noble. Surveillance was increased. Wire taps were approved in December 1964. Every day was a new adventure. Two years with the bureau and he was about to crumble the LCN's finest bookmaking ring with one squeeze of his fist. Had it all started so quickly for J. Edgar Hoover?



"Through legally intercepted conversations," wrote Noble, forcing himself to sit at his desk long enough to compose this sworn affidavit in January 1985 while bookmakers were making book outside, "this investigation has determined that Ivan Mindlin directs William Thurman Walters on the placing of what are believed to be layoff' bets for the Computer' group. Walters operates a large bookmaking operation which be uses to place bets on desired games..."



This allegation was the keystone of special agent Noble's investigation. Layoff bets, by definition, are made exclusively by bookmakers wishing to protect themselves against large losses by making bets with other bookmakers.



"Besides this operation," Noble continued, "Walters controls a bookmaking operation under the guise of C&B Collection Agency. This second bookmaking operation is run by Glen Andrews Walker who uses the premises and facilities of C&B Collection Agency as a bookmaker's wire room...



The big day was January 19, 1985, the eve of Super Bowl XIX, in which San Francisco would crush Miami, 38-16. The weekend would prove to be even more momentous for special agent Thomas Noble. He had requested 43 separate raids to take place in 23 cities in 16 states - perhaps the largest series of coordinated gambling raids in history. "Historically," wrote Noble in requesting the raids, "(during) the weekend wherein the National Football League holds its Super Bowl' championship, the betting volume for bookmakers is very high."



He was right on. The members of the Computer Group were caught redhanded. Betting ledgers and hundreds of thousands of incriminating dollars were seized. All that remained before Thomas B. Noble could ascend toward the top of the FBI like a rocket toward the stars was this matter of legal paperwork. He simply had to prove that the Computer Group was an illegal bookmaking operation, that it was in fact a strong arm of the LCN.



"He said that to me once," recalls Billy Walters. "Noble said to me 'We're closing in on your friends in La Cosa Nostra.' I'm telling you, the guy's read too many comic books.'"

the first part is above..........




The Raids



Michael Kent and his brother, Bill, had been invited to spend the Super Bowl weekend at the home of Dr. Mindlin in Vail. Colorado. Before he left Las Vegas, Michael Kent was asked to run a couple of errands for Mindlin. First, he received cash and checks from Billy Nelson, the gambler who had originally brought Kent and Mindlin together and who now served as an aide to Billy Walters in the Computer Group. Next Kent visited the cashier's cage at the Horseshoe Casino, where he showed the cashier a dollar bill scrawled with a series of handwritten numbers, a password of sorts. The cashier handed Kent cash from the account of Billy Walters. That week Michael Kent carried some $500,000 in cashier's checks and perhaps $100.000 cash to Vail, for delivery to Dr. Mindlin.



Kent says his brother Bill happened to be sitting on the doorstep of Mindlin's home in Vail on Saturday, Jan. 19. when he was approached by three men identifying themselves as FBI agents. "One guy tried to kick the door in," Michael Kent says. "Bill said. What did you do that for?' The door was unlocked. Bill reached over and opened it."



The FBI took down the names and addresses of the Kent brothers, and then Michael Kent sat and watched television while the FBI rummaged through the house, confiscating money, records and gambling paraphernalia. An FBI agent was careful not so obstruct Kent's view while he was watching television. "I thought that was rather polite," Kent says. "They let us come and go as we pleased. I remember we went out for lunch - Ivan too. Ivan seemed to be taking it very well. He didn't seem to be too overly concerned." Indeed, the doctor simply turned around and began his own investigation of the FBI. Sources say that Mindlin, in his uniquely audacious manner, hired a private investigator to follow special agent Noble.



But Michael Kent wasn't taking it very well at all. He had been detained by police only once before, he says. for driving with a loud muffler. "It's a bad crime in Goldsberg, Pennsylvania," he explained in a deposition. The night of



the Vail raid he would return to Las Vegas so find she FBI raiding his condominium as well as the homes of his partners. Vacationing in Florida, Billy Walters and Billy Nelson were also raided that day. Clearly they were all in some sort of trouble. He says it struck him then how very little he knew about the group he had created.



One year earlier, special agent Thomas Noble had contacted Michael Kent about the check that had been endorsed by Dominic Spinale. At that time Kent had listened to Dr. Mindlin, who advised him not so worry. But, this matter of FBI raids was much more serious. At the advice of special agent Noble, Kent says he hired his own lawyer, separate from Mindlin. Kent was referred to attorney Steven Brooks in Boston. As Brooks learned more about she gambling operation, he urged Kent to take precautions that would protect him from Mindlin. "I would tell Ivan that I wanted to do things differently on the advice of my lawyer," Kent says. "Ivan would say, Oh, don't listen to him. What does he know? He's a schmuck.'"



Kent says he finally came so understand Mindlin's priorities. But Kent's attorney believes his client might still be loyal to Dr. Mindlin to this day, if not for the FBI's frightening raids five years ago. "Remember, Michael thought everything was fine back then." Brooks says. "He had no idea that he should suspect Mindlin of anything."






The Beard



Dale Conway says he was sitting as his desk, placing a bet over the phone from his Salt Lake home, when he stood to answer a knock at the door. In his driveway he could see a postal service truck. Conway opened the door to receive his mail and a man shouted, "FBI!" Suddenly, he claims, several G-Men came surging into his living room.



"They ran upstairs so where my boy David was playing in his room, Conway remembers. "He was just 12 years old. He's sitting on the floor playing. They knocked on the door and I guess he didn't answer quick enough, because they just busted the door down. The door's still all busted. I just left it like it was."



FBI records show that Dale Conway's telephones had been wiretapped prior to the Jan. 19, 1985 raid of his home. He says he had been making bets of $1,000 and less for Billy Walters, whom he met at a poker tournament in Las Vegas. "I don't see what's the big deal about betting on a ballgame," says Conway, 61, who has since been indicted for his part in the Computer Group.



The government seemed to believe that Dale Conway was much more than a simple gambler. In fact, Las Vegas Strike Force attorney Eric Johnson - who was acting as lead prosecutor in the case - flew to Salt Lake in May 1985 to plead that the government be allowed to retain as evidence $75,179 in cash seized in the January raid of Dale Conway. Johnson noted that Conway's money had been hidden in coat pockets and inside a box tied so a rope behind the furnace wall. "I don't think this is normal operating procedure for individuals who are trying to use their money in a legal manner," Johnson told the judge.



Johnson also said, "This is not your typical bookmaking operation, your Honor." And he said: "You're talking about over a thousand hours of tapes that have to be listened too. You're talking 216,000 pages of computer printouts that have to be reviewed." And he said: "We believe that bookmakers from coast to coast in a number of states have been involved in this. It's set up like a corporation. If your Honor would like, I can even show a chart demonstrating the vast complexity of this case."



The judge declined to view the chart. Is was obvious that the strength of Eric Johnson's argument that day - and the strength of the case itself - was that the government was going to expose and arrest a national network of illegal bookmakers. Too many times to count, Eric Johnson referred to Dale Conway as a bookmaker. He said Conway was just one of the many bookmakers involved in this investigation. He made it sound as though, once the government had learned so make sense of all she information is had seized, it would become easier to apprehend and bring to justice all future bookmakers.



"This case is complex and mammoth in proportions," Johnson told U.S. District Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in Salt Lake that day.



The judge asked many questions, and listened to Eric Johnson's answers, and then he ordered that the $75,179 be returned, along with stock certificates and other seized monies. Five years later, Dale Conway wonders when the rest of his "bookmaking evidence" will be restored so him. "They even took my 12-year-old's Dungeons & Dragons game," says Conway, "I guess because there's dice in that game, they called its gambling device.'"



When this matter is settled, he'd appreciate it if someone from the FBI would come by to fix the door.






Project Layoff



Some new bookies were in town, and they wanted to meet Billy Walters. So he came to the Desert Inn for lunch. The year was 1984. Waiting for him at the Desert Inn were Walters' top associate, Glen Walker, and a common gambler known in town as Matius (Fat Matt) Marcus. There were also two other men whom Walters had never seen before. They introduced themselves as Danny Donnigan and John Cleary, though Glen Walker still wonders if those were real names. "I remember Danny Donnigan sitting there in his Brooks Brothers sweater," Walker says. "It didn't seem right.   These guys just didn't fit in."



The two men turned their attentions to the kingpin Billy Walters, asking him many questions as they buttered their bread. Which is the most efficient method so establish a betting line? How does a fellow handle layoff bets? Basically they wanted Billy Walters to tell them how to become bookmaker.



Walters says he began by saying:



"I'm not a bookmaker, but..." He gave them advice and drew them into further conversation, which is how he generally handles his suspicions. Later he asked to speak with Walker privately. Says Billy Walters: "I told Walker, I said. These guys aren't bookmakers. They don't know what they're talking about.' I told Walker I would have nothing so do with it."



In the parking lot Billy Walters says he found a Lincoln Mark IV with Louisiana plates. The two men had mentioned that they'd recently moved from Louisiana. Walters wrote down the license number and passed it onto a private detective. "Of course he couldn't trace it anywhere," Walters says. "So that was it for me. I had no association wish them whatsoever."



But Glen Walker could only envision pigeons and soft point spreads, easy money. He bet with the new bookmakers, and he was not the only one. Fat Mat and his preppy bookies were quickly able to establish business all over town. For all of their dumb innocence, they were very sure of themselves. Fat Matt could be found hanging out (literally) at Gary Austin's sports book on the strip, passing out business cards. He was so brazen that, had the thought had occurred to him, he might have placed an ad in the newspaper: "Fall Malt's Illegal Bookmakers! We Take Bets From Anyone!" Indeed, he and his partners showed no fear of the law whatsoever.



It is amusing now to imagine the strategy sessions held at FBI headquarters in Las Vegas in January 1985, after 11 phone conversations between Glen Walker and the Marcus Sports Service had been intercepted. Special agent Thomas Noble sprang into action! He assigned other agents to investigate the illegal bookmaking operation; intelligence filtered in. The Marcus' group had swelled into one of the largest illegal bookmaking operations in the country, grossing as much as $2 million a week in bets. Their clients included associates of New York Mafia boss "Fat Tony" Salerno, and Chicago racketeer Tony Spilotro, who was betting them for upwards of $50,000 per week. But Noble's chief interest in Matt Marcus was his association with the Computer Group.



"Intercepted conversations indicate that the Waiters-Walker bookmaking ring operation uses this [Marcus] bookmaking operation on a regular basis to place what are believed to be layoff bets in violation of Title 18. United States Code. Sections 1955, 162(c) and 1952(d)," wrote Noble in the FBI affidavit, before his men went after Matt Marcus and tried to shut him down.



And so, on Jan. 19, 1985, on the eve of the Super Bowl, several FBI rents raided the Marcus Sports service. Perhaps they even broke down some doors. Certainly their firearms were loaded and ready. They raided the illegal bookmakers like they had never been raided before. Meanwhile, the men who worked with Matt Marcus sat in chairs and crossed their legs, perhaps smirking to each other from time to time.



Undaunted by the FBI, the Marcus Spans Service continued to accept bets for several months more. Then one day a pair of angry bettors marched into the office and demanded money they thought they had coming. They might as well have tried to get a refund from, say. the Internal Revenue Service. In other words. they did not come away with their money. Nonetheless, they had guns. Real guns, loaded with real bullets. The men behind the Marcus Sports Service were scared almost to death. They closed down their office shortly thereafter and went back to the Foley Federal Building at 300 Las Vegas Blvd., where they resumed their normal duties as agents for, yes, the Internal Revenue Service. The Brooks Brothers colleagues of Fat Matt Marcus had been nothing more than governmental meter maids. The Marcus Sports Service was their brilliant "sting" operation, with which the IRS had hoped to catch Billy Walters and other gamblers.



It seems now that the IRS probably should have shared its plans with the FBI. Perhaps then this peculiar business of the FBI raiding the IRS could have been avoided. "We knew upfront about that," special agent Noble says today. "We knew what it was. If you look carefully at the warrants, you'll see that we knew. We don't operate in a vacuum."



The FBI now says that it went forward with the raid in order to give the IRS bookmaking operation more credibility in the streets. In layman's terms, one government agency raided another government agency in order to convince the criminals that the other government agency was not in fact a government agency, but was rather an illegal operation that happened to be run like a government agency.



When the Las Vegas Sun broke news of the IRS scheme, more than four years after its demise, Nevada's U.S. Senators, Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, asked to see the records and reports of the undercover bookmakers, to learn what good had come from the sting. In his reply. IRS Commissioner Frederick Goldberg informed the senators that the records of Project Layoff, as it was named, were no longer available. They had been "disposed of." Destroyed would have been a stronger term, and just as accurate. Goldberg was able to inform the senators that the project had operated at a loss of $577,770, which in 1985 amounted to the federal income taxes paid by 350 average Americans.



Among the losses were $75,000 in uncollected gambling debts. The rumor in Las Vegas is that these were accrued by the notorious Tony Spilotro who - as it turned out was simply continuing his career of stiffing the IRS. A few months later, Spilotro was found buried in an Indiana cornfield, although no one believes the IRS would have anything to do with that - at least not as long as Tony was in red to the government for $75,000



The IRS is facing two Congressional investigations, and its Nevada office has been shaken up severely. But it's not as if the 1R5 is going to have to go through a terrible punishment, like, say, an audit. "The IRS owed me something like $10,000 when I was done betting them," Glen Walker says sadly. "I asked if I could get it written off of my taxes."





The Gambler



Billy Walters moved to Las Vegas eight years ago with his family and his immense ego and very little else.  He was worth more dead than alive, as they say.  For too many years he had been operating a used-car dealership in his home state of Kentucky, and then gambling away the profits.  In 1982 he plea-bargained to a misdemeanor bookmaking charge - possession of gambling records, it was called - and was sentenced to six month probation and a $1,000 fine.  He was in debt to several bookmakers, and he could not command credit.  At 35, into his third marriage, with an ill son who was supposed to have died years before, Billy Walters believed he had no alternative but move to Las Vegas, to be a full-time professional gambler, to lay all that he had on this one final hand.

            Walters can pinpoint his problems from those days, now that he is worth millions of dollars.  As recently as 1982, when he was preparing to leave Kentucky, he had lacked focus.  He was a gambler, that was definite, but he had no idea how to gamble professionally.  He wanted to win every single day.  When he lost at the race track or when he lost betting games or when he lost playing poker or when he lost playing golf, he always felt compelled to get down another bet, to retrieve what he had lost that very day.  He recalls an evening in Kentucky when he was pitching nickels with a friend.  The wagers grew until Billy Walters had lost his house - his house, from pitching nickels.

            Then he had to come home and tell his wife.  "I'm not one to beat around the bush," he says.  Standing now in his kitchen, head down, hands in pockets, he seems to be recreating the scene.  "I just came home and said to her, Look, honey, I was pitching nickels with a guy today, and I lost the house.  And we might have to move.'"  They didn't have to move but it took Billy Walters a year and a half to pay off the mortgage incurred by the revolution of the five-cent coin.  He kept the house, but he lost his wife.  She left him.  That was his second wife.  "She couldn't take it.  Fifteen times I've come home where I've lost every single penny we've got," he says, as if revealing a scar.

            His father died when William Thurman Walters was not yet 2 years old, and his mother ran off, and his grandmother, who was a maid in Mufferville, Ky., left him under the supervision of his uncle each day.  His uncle ran a pool hall.  Billy Walters estimates that his first bet was made at the age of 5, when his uncle would assemble islands of Coke cases around a pool table so that the boy could reach the felt.  As soon as he began to work, his grandmother charged him rent.  He hustled pool, betting his rent money.  He was not yet a teenager.

            At 13 he moved back in with his mother, in Louisville.  At 16 he had fathered a child and married the mother.  Some morning he worked 4:30 till 7:30 at a bakery, some nights it was 3 to 11 at a gas station.  Most days he went to school.  Sometimes he ran a poker game - he was still just a teenager - in a house adjacent to Billy's Lounge.  That marriage lasted one year.  It's been much longer than a decade since he's seen his daughter.

            His occupations have included newspaper boy, farmhand, shoe-shiner, baker, tobacco worker, foundry worker, painter, car dealer, realtor.  To him, these were mere side jobs.  In his mind he was a professional player - of pool, gin rummy, poker, blackjack, roulette, golf, the horses, whatever.  He remarried and with his second wife had two sons, which has since led Billy Walters to decide that his own childhood was not so desperate.  His oldest son, Scott, should have been dead at the age of 5.

            "They said he had 30 days to live," Billy Walters says.  "He had the tumor back behind the left eye, where they couldn't operate.  After radiation they told us every day he was going to die.  I stayed drunk the whole time.  I was 26 at the time.  It was the only thing in my life I wasn't able to handle.  I neglected my business and my family and stayed drunk.  After nine months I went back to running the business."

            The business, he says, was a wholesale auto dealership in Louisville.  "I earned $400,000 or $500,000 a year," says Walters, "but I never accumulated one dollar."  Three years after his son had been diagnosed, Billy Walters was wed to his current wife, Susan, and she has been a wonderful partner.  They will celebrate their 14th anniversary in September.  She moved with him to Las Vegas in 1982 and served as his accountant when he began to move money for the Computer Group.  She was indicted with him in January 1990 and expected to go to trial with him in November 1990, if the case got that far.

            Walters says he went to work for Dr. Ivan Mindlin in 1983, making bets in Las Vegas and a few other territories.  By then the Computer Group was four years old and churning out millions in profits each season.  In return for his work, Walters received free use of the group's betting information.  Because he didn't have to share his profits with others, he might have been earning more from the Computer Group than Michael Kent, the computer wizard who so naively trusted Dr. Mindlin.

            For the first time in his life, Billy Walters was winning consistently and holding onto the money.  He invested in real estate, fast food franchises and other ventures.  His confidence was such that he could play golf matched for thousands of dollars.  He even captured the 1986 Super Bowl of Poker in Lake Tahoe.  There has been recent talk that he won more than $3 million in one day of roulette in Atlantic City.  Apparently, Walters hired agents to take notes at the roulette tables, in attempt to locate "biases," or patterns, in the wheels.  Sources at Caesars Palace say that after Walters beat them for more than $1 million in one sitting, the wheel was sent to NASA for an examination and dissection that revealed specific biases - but no for the numbers Walters had been playing.  Nobody knows his secret, and he isn't saying, though he admits he has been barred from playing roulette in the major casinos.

            Late in 1984, Walters' reputation had risen so high that he was invited to join the Computer Group on a percentage basis.  In other words, he would share in profits with Michael Kent, Dr. Mindlin and other core members of the group.  Walters continued to place additional bets for himself until January 1985, when the FBI raided the group of its records and cash, shutting down Walters for the remainder of the college basketball season.  He complains about harassment by the FBI, saying it confiscated funds and refused to transfer them to the IRS to pay his taxes.  He claims he is persecuted in part because the government loathes his attorney, Oscar Goodman, a colorful Las Vegas lawyer who has represented many mob figures.

            "You've got to understand my position," he says.  "After the government went through all the evidence, they decided not to prosecute us.  For three years they tell us the case is dead.  Then all of a sudden, two weeks before the statute of limitations is going to run out, they come back with these indictments.  The day before we were indicted, my attorney (Goodman) tried to contact the Strike Force to say we would be willing to turn ourselves in.  The Strike Force wouldn't return his calls.  The next day they come barging into my house, drag me out of bed, put my wife in leg irons.  I'm telling you, you don't believe it until you've gone through something like this, what the government can do to you."

            Walters says he agreed to give this, his first interview, out of a feeling of desperation.  He perceives himself to be a rare gambling success story - a man who was in debt before he came to Las Vegas.  At 43, he wonders why he isn't put forth as a role model.  "People look at us gamblers and say, You don't have a job like we do, you don't work 9 to 5, you have to be doing something wrong," he says.  "I came to Las Vegas because it's the Wall Street of gambling.  If you can get arrested for betting games here...well, let me just say I never would have dreamed that the things that have happened to me, with the FBI and the rest of it, could happen here."

            Then he admits that his life could be much worse.  Inviting a reporter upstairs, he visits with his son, Scott, 22, is no bigger than a 14-year-old, and outside the house he wears a cap or wig to cover the hair loss caused by his cancer treatments.  He recently got his first job, as a busboy at the Horseshoe casino downtown.  His father says he could be no prouder of his son.  In this relationship the gambler is called "sir."

            "Let's see those autographed baseballs of yours," Billy Walters says, and the two of them sit on the bed, reading the signatures of Scott's heroes.



The Mogul



At one time Irwin Molasky was vice president of Lorimar-Telepictures, which produced television shows ranging from "Dallas" to "The Waltons."  Today, surrounded by his vast real estate holdings, he settles for being one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas.  There he lives atop the Regency Towers, which stands like a castle overlooking Irwin Molasky's kingdom.  At one time the Regency Towers was known as a high palace for the mob.  Irwin Molasky would surely argue that this no longer is the case.  Indeed, he commenced another debate over a piece of real estate in 1975, when the subject was his California resort Rancho La Costa.  At that time, Penthouse magazine reported the La Costa was controlled by "mobsters," that it served as their "power center," and that it used "illegal profits" from "the mob's worldwide operations."

            Molasky and his co-owner at La Costa, Merv Adelson, who at one time was chairman and chief executive at Lorimar, did not appreciate such unsavory allegations.  So, they filed a $490 million libel suit against the magazine.  The legal proceedings were drawn out over 10 years at a cost of $25 million, until Molasky and Aelson finally settle for an apology.  A major booster of UNLV basketball, Molasky at 62 is highly image-conscious.  It is important that he be recognized as a sober and legitimate businessman.  And in fact, Molasky has never bee charged with a crime.

            Molasky's attorney, Stanley Hunterton, readily admits that his client enjoys betting on ballgames, as do thousands of his fellow residents Las Vegas, where is can be a legal and rather social activity.  However, Dr. Ivan Mindlin was not interested in currying favor with thousands of legal bettors.  He was interested mainly in Irwin Molasky.

            For years, Dr. Mindlin had been pretending to be the brains behind the Computer Group, claiming to be the inventor of its unbeatable program for forecasting ballgames.  It appears that Dr. Mindlin was never much more than an intermediary for the group, as his own attorney admits today.  But Mindlin surely knew how to maximize his position.  By sharing the group's betting information with Irwin Molasky, and making a winner out of Irwin Molasky, he became a friend of Irwin Molasky.  When Dr. Mindlin needed help in the commodities business, who did he look to?  Irwin Molasky, with whom he became partners in the purchase and sale of commodities, according to attorney Stan Hunterton.

            Michael Kent, the mathematician who established the Computer Group's forecasts, recalls hearing Dr. Mindlin speak of Molasky in 1983-84.  "From what I remember," says Kent, "let's say it was a situation where we had taken a team with 4 points.  Well, for some reason that day, the team we took had jumped up to 5 points - which almost never happened.  Usually when we took a team, the points went in our direction."

            "I remember saying, Shoot, it's too bad we didn't wait and get that team at 5.' And Mindlin said to me, Don't worry - I'll go ahead and give the 4 to Molasky, and we'll go up and take the 5.'"

            That day they sold their bets on the underdog at 4 points to Molasky.  "It was a good deal for us," says Kent.  "Molasky didn't know any better, so he wouldn't mind taking the 4 .  And we were able to use the money to bet on the 5, which was a better bet."

            As the Computer Group investigation lay dormant from 1986-88, Molasky and everyone else using the group's information appeared safe from prosecution.  Then, in 1988, the government began to resurrect its case.  Molasky hired Hunterton, who says he had served as a special attorney within the Organized Crime Strike Forces for 10 years, until 1984.  Hunterton acknowledges that he was involved in the early stages of the government's case against the Computer Group, approving requests made by FBI special agent Thomas Noble.  But Hunterton denies the assertion, made by others in the group, that representing Molasky was a conflict of interest.

            Using his contacts - which the attorney admits were the reason Molasky hired him - Hunterton reportedly was able to win immunity for Molasky, in return for his testimony before the grand jury.  However, Molasky's testimony seems to have been a mere formality.  "I've seen the (Computer Group) indictment," said Molaksy's longtime attorney Sam Lionel, who worked with Hunterton on this case, "and it doesn't appear that anything he testified to had anything to do with what is contained in the indictment."  Whatever the substance of his testimony might have been, his appearance before the grand jury ensured that he would be excluded from any indictment the panel might hand down.

            Irwin Molasky's record as a law-abiding citizen was thus preserved, and his good name has been spared.  However, some of the indicted members of the Computer Group think he may not be entirely finished with this business - not yet, anyway.  If their case goes to trial in November, as scheduled, they plan to subpoena Molasky and question him vigorously, not only about his betting with Ivan Mindlin, but also regarding his attorney, Stanley Hunterton, who played both sides as effectively as anyone in the Computer Group ever had.



The Fall



After he had been raided by the FBI in January 1985, Michael Kent began to ask the kinds of questions he should have been raising long ago.  So began the end of the Computer Group.  He wanted to know how the group was run, and what became of his information after he gave it to Dr. Mindlin, and how much money his program actually was generating.  His partners in the computer group informed Kent that his precious information was being shared with the outside world in ways that could only profit Mindlin.  Here was Michael Kent, the mastermind, still living in his humdrum condo in Las Vegas, while Mindlin had homes in Vegas, Colorado and California.

            Dr. Mindlin even seemed to profit from the FBI's raids.  Kent alleges that when the raids shut down the group's activities six weeks into the 1984-85 college basketball season, Mindlin claimed the group had simply broken even on its bets to that point.  Therefore, no profits would be paid to any members of the group.  But when the FBI allowed Kent and others to review the seized records, Kent says he discovered that his group had earned a total of $1.6 million in those six weeks of basketball.

            By 1986 Kent had hired a lawyer of his own, Steven Brooks of Boston, who advised him that many of his current practices with Dr. Mindlin were either illegal (such as Kent's failure to pay taxes) or inexplicable (his failure to oversee Mindlin's handling of the money).  Kent says he tried to change the way he conducted business with Mindlin, but had little success.

            Wary that he could not account for the actions of his partner, Michael Kent nonetheless kept trying to deal with Mindlin.  He says he offered Mindlin exclusive rights to the computer forecasts for the 1987 college football season at a fee of $700,000.  In return, Kent would tell Mindlin which teams to play and how much to bet, and Mindlin could keep all profits.  However, Kent says, the forecasts lost money for Mindlin in the first week, at which point he canceled their agreement.  Kent says he never received payment for his one week of service, which he valued at $35,650.

            At this point Michael Kent was at the end of his rope.  He had placed all of his trust in Dr. Mindlin.  In return Mindlin had seemed to treat him like a son.  The truth of their relationship, Kent now believed, was that he had been playing the fool to Mindlin for all these years.

            In 1988 Michael and his brother John Kent filed a joint suit against Ivan Mindlin, demanding $589,719 in Computer Group profits and payment for services.  They suspect that he owes them more, but in all likelihood they will never be able to prove it.  At the same time, Michael Kent went tot he FBI, admittedly to punish Mindlin.  Kent agreed to explain what he knew about the Computer Group and turn over evidence.  In exchange, he was granted immunity from prosecution.

            Dr. Mindlin's attorney, Morris Goldings, was also representing Michael Kent when the FBI began its investigation in 1984.  Today he accuses Kent of extortion.  "Kent has admitted under oath that he told Dr. Mindlin, If you don't pay me the money you owe me, then I'm going to the feds with you.' That's the kind of guy Michael Kent is."

            Indeed, Kent's lawsuit revived the government's interest in its dormant case against the Computer Group.  "I don't blame Mike Kent at all for turning over to the government," Billy Walters says.  "This was the only way he knew of to get even...Kent is a bright guy in mathematics.  He knows numbers like nobody else.  But he's absolutely dumb from a common-sense standpoint.  Mindlin would tell Kent that he was betting, say, $5,000 when he was really betting $20,000.  And Kent had no idea."

            Yet Billy Walters admits that he too was fooled by Mindlin.  Walters says he quit the group in the spring of 1986 when Mindlin refused to honor a $110,000 debt.  "I knew from day one who I was dealing with, but never for a moment did I think the guy could steal money from me," Walters says.  "I thought I was too important to the operation.  I was the guy who moved the money."

            By 1987, the Computer Group was dead, victim of a human virus.  Vanity and greed had infected its affairs.  The computer wizard, Michael Kent, was refusing to supply his information, and the gambler, Billy Walters, was refusing to move the money.  Yet Dr. Mindlin was still in business.  He hired Kent's friend, Mark Ricci, of all people, who in the 1970's had worked with Kent at Westinghouse.  Mindlin's new group had its run of modest success, but it could not begin to compare with the impact he had made with the Computer Group.  Indeed, the doctor was something of a tragic figure, broken by his own greed, devastated personally as well as professionally.  While trying to recoup his relationship with Michael Kent, the doctor had engaged in a worldwide, yearlong search to find a cure for his only son, Gary Mindlin.  In the end, he succumbed to a cancerous brain tumor, the same type from his Billy Walters's son had been so miraculously spared.  The another tragedy struck the Mindlin household.  In 1988, the doctor's wife, Georgia Mindlin, died from respiratory failure consistent with an allergic reaction.  The coroner found that she was probably allergic to penicillin - penicillin that she apparently received from her husband, the doctor.

            The autopsy report indicated that Georgia Mindlin, 56, was suffering from a sore throat on March 19, 1988.  Dr. Mindlin admitted to giving her 500 to 1000 milligrams of penicillin, which she took orally, after her evening meal.

            Some 25 minutes later she told her husband that she wasn't feeling well.  She got out of bed and collapsed, falling into cardiorespiratory arrest.  The doctor called for an ambulance.  The police arrived at 11:52 p.m. to find an emergency crew trying to save Georgia Mindlin.  Police say that Dr. Mindlin attempted to revive his wife with a shot of adrenaline after her airway had closed off in reaction to the penicillin.  "It's easily reversible with things like adrenaline if it happens before the airway closes," says Eagle County coroner Donna Meineke, who requested the autopsy of Georgia Mindlin.  "But it (the injection) has to happen in minutes.  Once the airway closes off, oxygen can't get to the brain."

            Vail police lieutenant Corey Schmidt says he conducted his investigation of Georgia Mindlin's death without interviewing her husband.  "I think he left town," says Schmidt, who declines to make his report public.  "I didn't have a lot to go on, other than friends' and relatives' hunches that it (her death) was purposeful, but we couldn't nail it down."

            Special agent Thomas Noble says that the FBI is looking into the death of Georgia Mindlin.  "Once you read the coroner's report, it will be clear why we have an interest," he says.  When Michael Kent was deposed last year for his lawsuit against Mindlin, the doctor's attorney questioned him repeatedly about the death of Georgia Mindlin.  Kent admitted that the FBI had indeed asked him about it, but said he'd known little of her death - as little as he had known about Dr. Mindlin's betting activities with the Computer Group.

            Lt. Schmidt is surprised to hear of the FBI's interest in Georgia Mindlin, considering that the Bureau never asked him for his report.  "If they're doing something, why wouldn't they have contacted me?" he wonders.

            As for his own probe, Schmidt says he found nothing more than the hunches of relatives to make him suspect foul play.  He declares the investigation inactive.  "We haven't had one since 1979," he says, referring to murder in Vail.  "Not that we've been able to prove, anyway."

           

The End



His former colleagues say that Ivan Mindlin still has not given up.  They say he works with a beard in Miami, using the same program Michael Kent developed 10 years ago.

            Kent himself would be the first to warn his successors that the business is no longer so easy.  Kent has formed a legal sports betting corporation with two partners - his brother John Kent and their friend, Mark Ricci, who stopped working for Mindlin in 1988.  Their attorney, Steven Brooks, boasts that all profits of MJM Inc. (it stands for Michael, John, Mark) are reported to the IRS and that all bets are placed in full harmony with the law.  In a recent deposition, Ricci estimated that their three-man betting group won $800,000 last year, which would have represented two good weeks for the Computer Group.

            When Michael Kent was a mere centerfielder, trying to decipher the strengths and weaknesses of his softball team at Westinghouse 18 years ago, there was no real computer science in sport.  Kent was at the leading edge of all that.  Today every statistic is calibrated, measured.  Every human decision can be backed by numbers.  Michael Kent was among the first to find reason within the numbers.

            In November, if all goes as planned - and there is nothing in the history of this case to suggest that it will - his partners will be reunited in the courtroom once more (Kent himself was granted immunity.)  Though Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Johnson was the lead prosecutor in the government's investigation of the Computer Group five years ago, and though his name is listed atop the Jan. 4 indictment, he will not be in charge of the case when it comes to trial.  At that critical point, the six-year case will be handled by Jane Hawkins, even though she has been an Assistant U.S. Attorney for less than two years.  As a matter of fact, when Eric Johnson was leading the Computer Group investigation in 1985, Jane Hawkins was a humble clerk for Judge Lloyd D. George, before whom - and a fine coincidence this is - she will be trying the case.

            "That may have been the smartest thing Eric has ever done, getting himself away from this thing," admits FBI special agent Thomas Noble.

            Abandoned now by all the others who have worked on this case, Noble seems to be hanging out to dry.  He works for the FBI out of Chicago these days, his reputation stained.  For six quixotic years he led the chase after the Computer Group in the belief that it was the largest bookmaking operation in the country.  Following Noble's lead, the FBI obtained wiretaps on the group's telephones for five months, until there existed more than 1,500 hours of taped conversation, which then had to be laboriously reviewed and transcribed.  He requested and was granted the aid of special agents to follow the group's actions all over the nation.  He provided information that resulted in raids of 45 homes or offices in 16 states.  He requested a raid of the Internal Revenue Service.  (But he knew what he was doing!)  He oversaw the seizure of evidence by the truckload:  bank checks, the origins of which had to be traced, hundreds of thousands of dollars with serial numbers that demanded verification, gambling ledgers that had to be interpreted, not to mention 216,000 pages of computer printouts, incomprehensible to all but Michael Kent.  There were 89 boxes of evidence in government storage, much of it still there today.  Then there was the matter of dealing with this vast array of people.  Every man and woman raided had a lawyer demanding appeasement.  The government sent Eric Johnson and other attorneys to various sites, defending the FBI's right to retain evidence, including large amounts of cash.  It is no easy thing to capture a group of criminals these days.

            Thomas Noble still maintains his firm belief that the Computer Group was a criminal enterprise worthy of prosecution.  But at what cost?  If a bill could be brought before the taxpayers, the price of this investigation might total $1 million, which does not include the $577,770 lost by the IRS in its parallel attempt to capture the group.

            Then, in January, after six years of investigation and review, after the case had been opened and shut and opened again, the indictments at long last came down in Las Vegas.  Nineteen men and women were placed under arrest.  Each was charged with up to 120 counts of conspiracy, gambling and racketeering, related to their obvious use of the telephone to place bets and exchange betting information across state lines.

            There was no charge of bookmaking.

            No bookmaking.

            So the government admits, at last, that the Computer Group simply was betting on games.  If not for Ivan Mindlin's careless association with a petty hoodlum, there might never have been a FBI inquiry.  But the inquiry began, and it was extended into the next decade by innuendo and intrigue, and by Thomas Noble's desire to understand how these people were earning so much money.

            Six years with Big Brother has not cured the Computer Group of its addiction to gambling.  Of the 19 who were indicted in January, most are still gamblers.  Like deposed heads of state, they await trial while the system grinds on without them.  In Las Vegas, all the top betting operations now have access to their own Michael Kents.  They hire their Billy Walters to move the money on a national level.  Aided by their Glen Walkers and Dale Conways and Arnie Haaheims, they flood the market and try to manipulate the line.  In all of the Vegas sports books there are agents for the betting combines, soldiers armed with cellular phones and beepers, waiting for instructions.  For all their vast organization, these modern brokers of sports bets will never match the sensation created by their forefathers, who, not 10 years ago, were sophisticated enough to beat the linemakers at their own game.

            Their legacy was to ruin the game for all who might try to duplicate their success, including themselves.

            "Next year," says Michael Roxborough, an official linemaker in Las Vegas, "we've got a new computer program that's going to help us make a better line."













The following information was drawn from two sources:



(1)   the betting ledgers of Dr. Ivan Mindlin, seized by the FBI on January 18, 1985;

and

(2)    a chart compiled by Michael Kent, using the seized ledgers and other records of his own. Both sources hove been identified as exhibits in Kent's civil suit against Mindlin. It should be pointed out that these figures account for the activity of the main Computer Group, and thus represent only a fraction of the total profits earned by Michael Kent's computer forecasts.



Year    Credit   Line       Amount        Bet Profits Betting/Profit ROI

'80-'81        $370,000   $5,280,000        $700,000 $7.54 13.3%

'81-'82        $920,000 $20,900,000     $3,400,000 $6.15 16.3%

'82-'83     $1.790.000  $29,640,000    $3.721.000 $7.97 12.6%

'83-'84     $2,230,000  $141,830,000  $4,810,000 $8.70 11.5%

'84-'85     $3,590.000  $37,410,000    $1,298,000 $28.82 3.5%

TOTAL:  $8,900,000 $135,060,600   $13,929,000 $9.70 10.3%





*Betting/Profit = the amount wagered in order to profit $1


The Best of Times, The Worse of Times



The Computer Group reached the height of its powers in 1983-85. The national betting network was operating at its peck of efficiency, which freed Michael Kent to further fine-tune his computer program. The 1983 seasons represented the lost windfall year for the Computer Group, which had enjoyed a great run of three years against betting lines created by the inexperienced linesmakers in Los Vegas. By 1984-'85, the linesmakers were beginning to improve appreciably, as were other bettors competing in the market against the Computer Group.




THEIR BEST WEEK



The 1983 college football campaign was the best season the Computer Group ever had. Though the group began the season with a relatively low credit line of $1.1 million, it placed $23,440,000 in bets and won $3,850.000. It was only fitting that the group capped its best season with its best week ever, the last week of the 1983 season, which included the New Year's Day bowl games. It tamed out that Michael Kents's computer program was at its best in the post season. While other handicappers had trouble rating the rare match-ups found in bowl games, the computer was as efficient as ever.



Amount bet     Wins            Losses       Ties        Net Profit    % of Games Won

$2,907,300     $1,977,000  $912,000    $18,100   $974,000    68.4%





In order to earn $1 that week, they bet (2.99. The return on their investment that week was 33.5%








THEIR WORST WEEK



The following football season was the worst in the group's five years of betting on college sports. Laying $21,240,000 in bets, the group finished the season with heavy losses in 7 of its lost 9 weeks, including Week No. 7 below, which happened to be its worst week on record. Facing a deficit o1 $545,000 in the final week, the Computer Group won 85% of its wagers on bowl games, netting $628,900 and rescuing its members from red ink. The group finished with a small profit of $83,670, but a profit nonetheless.



Amount bet   Wins         Losses      Ties          Net Profit    % of Games Won

$2,184,700   $655,800 $1,133,400 $395,500 $(590,940)  36.7%

lol you can tell there isnt many 0-0's to trade 

Bob Voulgaris had become one of the most successful sports gamblers in the world when, in 2004, he started to lose. It wasn’t just a streak of bad luck, a series of randomly unfavorable outcomes that could last only so long. His edge, he realized, was gone.

He had begun betting on sports in the late 1990s, and within five years, before he had reached his 30th birthday, Voulgaris had accumulated a fortune. He says he routinely wagered a million dollars in a single day of NBA games. He considered his mean to be an unholy winning percentage that approached 70 percent. A man of no fixed address, he dated models and traveled the world. He was also an accomplished poker player, buying his way into high-stakes games from Las Vegas to Macau. He was essentially leading the fantasy life of your basic under-35 North American male.

A specialist in the NBA, his sports gambling success was almost completely the result of a kind of studied perspicacity, born of a talent for pattern recognition and the stamina to watch uncountable hours of televised basketball. In betting parlance, the man could suss out an edge -- and in 2002, he discovered one that would line his pockets for years. It all had to do with how most bookmakers set their halftime totals, the predicted number of points scored in each half of the game. Each half, of course, is its own discrete period of play, and the fourth quarters of close games can end in elongated foul-clogged stretches of free throws, timeouts, fast play and, hence, a burst of scoring. But incredibly, bookmakers at the time didn’t account for this fact; they simply arrived at a total for the full game and cut that figure roughly down the middle, assigning some 50 percent of the points to the first half and 50 percent to the second.

Terms to know for this story

BLACK BOX: Any secret and proprietary computer model used by a gambler to make smarter decisions.

EWING THEORY: Phenomenon, first described by Bill Simmons, in which a team gets better when its overrated superstar leaves. Named after Patrick Ewing.

QUANT: An expert in using data and analytics to make decisions.

SUBJECTIVE BETTOR: Any gambler who does not use rigorous quantitative analysis to find an edge.

TILT: To act or bet irrationally out of frustration over a loss.

DEFENSE-ADJUSTED VALUE OVER AVERAGE (DVOA): Measure of a QB's efficiency compared to a league average QB, adjusted for situation and opponent.

EXPECTED POINTS ADDED: Measure of how many "expected points" -- points a team can expect to score on average, given the down and distance -- that a QB has added through his play, adjusted for clutch situations.

FIRST-DOWN RATE: Percentage of plays in which a QB gained a first down on running plays, not counting kneel-downs.

For years, Voulgaris exploited this edge, playing both sides of it repeatedly. It is possible to say that it alone made him millions, combined with some keen observations regarding the game-management tendencies of three head coaches: Eddie Jordan, Jerry Sloan and Byron Scott. “Those were three coaches I had nailed perfectly,” Voulgaris, now 37, says. “I knew exactly what they were going to do. I mean, it was a joke, it was so easy.”

In retrospect, he regrets only not having bet more aggressively during this halcyon period. “I thought it would last forever,” he tells me
when I visit him at the house he was then renting in the Hollywood Hills for $12,500 a month. “But it didn’t.” Eventually, the bookmakers did finally catch on. Responding specifically to the money they saw Voulgaris minting -- though, for the most part, they didn’t yet know the identity of the gambler winning with such consistency -- they forever altered the method by which they set their NBA halftime totals.

And that’s when Voulgaris started to lose. And lose big. He lost a third of his bankroll in the final month of the 2003-04 season alone. Exasperated, his patience gone, he started to “tilt,” boosting the volume of his wagers in an effort to win back what he’d already lost. He won’t quantify exactly how much he gave back to the bookmakers all told except to describe it as a catastrophic time. He took the second part of the 2004-05 NBA season off. Mulling things over, he realized he needed a new approach. In essence, he decided he could no longer rely on his ability to suss out edges by his wits alone. He needed the help of a new machine.





Like baseball after sabermetrics, like Wall Street in the 1970s, sports gambling over the past decade has undergone a quantitative revolution. Nearly every successful sports bettor in the world now uses some form of computer model to assist in the handicapping of sporting events. Like their brethren inside hedge funds, these gamblers are known as quants. Like the advanced trading systems operating on Wall Street, the models used by this technologically adroit breed of sports bettor are sometimes called black boxes. Their models (and their identities) are shrouded in secrecy. Their algorithms are proprietary. And with each passing year, their sophistication mounts. One veteran Las Vegas handicapper, who goes by the pseudonym Steve Fezzik, laments, “They’ve left me, and others like me, in the dark ages.” Bayesian methods, Monte Carlo methods, Markov chains, k-nearest neighbor algorithms, Chapman-Kolmogorov equations -- the key advances in statistical analysis, probability theory and predictive modeling have been marshaled toward the object of beating the bookies out of a dime. Their goal is nothing less than a sustainable edge.

It is a paradoxical quest. The history of sports betting is littered with the corpses of gamblers who have enjoyed spectacular runs only to flame out just as quickly when their edges die. When they see a gambler winning big, bookmakers correct their mistakes. Rival gamblers spot the same edges -- or copy them -- and bet the line back to plumb.

Indeed, while the wide availability of information in the Internet age and exponential increase in computer processing power have given rise to the sports gambling quant, those very same factors have made the pursuit of a sustainable edge that much more quixotic. The marketplace evolves. The betting public, square though it may be, is better informed than ever before: Reams of team and player statistics reside in the cloud, awaiting download. The bookmakers, meanwhile, have joined the quantitative battle. Some who formulate the opening lines (only a few still do so; all the others simply copycat) have engineered their own sophisticated models. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street trading firm, started a division called Cantor Gaming in 2008 to operate a sportsbook business in Las Vegas, then acquired the consulting firm that had been the oddsmaker of record for the gambling world. Cantor’s computer model is named Midas. Andrew Garrood, a former high-finance quant whose previous experience included developing pricing models for interest rate derivatives at a London bank, designed it. “It’s hubristic to believe that the edge you have today will be yours forever,” he says. “The marketplace will always catch up.”

None of this, of course, has stopped the world’s sharpest quant bettors from trying.





A slim six-footer with dark hair and dark eyes, Voulgaris talks fast. His eyes flit. He has the canny, quick-minded air of a merchant in a bazaar in the Eastern Mediterranean. Since birth, he seems never to have lacked for self-confidence. He likes to say that he had no mentors when it comes to his gambling career, but in reality, he did.

When Voulgaris was 18, he took a gap year between high school and college. First he traveled to Greece, visiting the hardscrabble villages -- Argos, Tripoli -- where his parents were born and raised before they immigrated, in their 20s, to Canada. (Voulgaris’ legal first name is Haralabos.) Then he and his father made a trip to Las Vegas, where they lived for most of the next two months at Caesars Palace. The elder Voulgaris had risen from poverty to become a successful Winnipeg entrepreneur. He developed commercial real estate; he owned and operated a Greek restaurant called Hermes -- the patron god of (among other things) games, sports and sudden enrichment. His net worth grew into the millions; he also happened to be an avid gambler. Voulgaris’ father bet on horses, sports of all kinds, card games, dice games, penny stocks. He was also, his son now suggests, the consummate square. “He would just hold up a newspaper and get a feel for what he wanted to bet. There was no rhyme or reason to it. He was very, very superstitious. He would have dreams, with, like, numbers and colors in them, and that would influence him.” Voulgaris says his father went broke twice, both times sending the family into near destitution. “Don’t write ‘degenerate,’ ” Voulgaris tells me. “He was an ‘unsuccessful’ gambler.”

Nevertheless, Voulgaris remembers those Vegas days fondly. He couldn’t join his father on the casino floor for his blackjack sessions; he was 18 and underage. So he spent most of his time in the Caesars sportsbook. Because it was basketball season, he watched a lot of NBA, but with a purpose. He paid attention to adjustments, the ebb and flow of the pace of play. He took notes on what he saw. He eavesdropped on his fellow gamblers. Even then, as a pup bettor, he had a dim view of this group: “Most people who are in a sportsbook in Las Vegas spouting their opinions are morons.” His father would join him at night. At times they wagered together. The younger Voulgaris recalls that his biggest bet the whole trip came on an Atlanta-Golden State game, $100 on the spread, “which I lost.” These were formative times. His two months in Vegas -- and, really, the whole of his childhood -- were an education by counterexample. But while many people, if faced with Voulgaris’ early experiences, might have renounced the gambling life with the fervor of a prohibitionist, Voulgaris seems to have gleaned a kind of edge from it. “I learned at a young age that it’s tough to beat the house,” he says. “Unless you know what you’re doing.” By the time the younger Voulgaris was enrolled at the University of Manitoba, working as a skycap at the airport and betting small amounts on the NBA and CFL, he and his brother -- two of four siblings in all -- were paying their parents’ rent.





The first computer model put into the service of sports gambling dates to the late 1970s, when Michael Kent, a former nuclear submarine engineer for a Pentagon contractor, wrote a program that predicted NFL, college football and college basketball scores. Kent fed his algorithms, inscribed on punch cards, into a rented mainframe that had less processing speed than today’s high-end laptops. At the time, though, he was going up against green-eyeshade bookmakers armed with nothing more than adding machines and intuition. It was hardly a fair fight. Kent eventually moved to Las Vegas, where a betting syndicate -- the legendary Computer Group -- formed around his work, winning untold millions for its members well into the 1990s. Kent continued to develop models and bet on sports up until seven years ago. He is now retired, according to his lawyer, his whereabouts closely guarded. “He’s very reclusive,” the lawyer, Steven Brooks, says.

Billy Walters, a core member of the Computer Group, has, however, stayed in the game; he now has a staff of consulting mathematicians who have built advanced predictive models to project scores. Walters, Kent and their syndicates stood basically alone until the late 1990s, when PCs became powerful enough to do the computation work required by predictive models, and more data became available to feed them.

Voulgaris was well aware of these predecessors. Analytics and predictive modeling had “always fascinated me,” he says. “I’d always wanted to have a model of sorts.” Throughout his career, Voulgaris had been what is known as a subjective bettor, albeit one so astute that he became a whale. Two huge bets -- both for the Lakers to win the title in 1999 and 2000 -- had turned about $80,000 in savings into more than $1 million, his first fat bankroll. As a purely subjective bettor, Voulgaris had been placing perhaps 350 individual wagers each season. But after the disastrous end to the 2004 season, with his edge gone, he decided that he should increase his betting frequency by an order of magnitude but decrease the sums he was putting at risk on each wager. It only made probabilistic sense. If his return on investment (ROI) fell from 20 percent to, say, 5 percent, that was okay. Five percent of $50 million is better than 20 percent of $5 million (all figures are hypothetical; Voulgaris is as cagey as any gambler about the true size of his bankroll). This new approach would require an enormous amount of research and analysis. It would require projecting a score for each and every game in an NBA regular season -- all 1,230. A single human mind would be overwhelmed by the workload; only a computer program could handle it.

“If you think about it,” he says, “you’d be a slave to the game of basketball otherwise.”





Voulgaris chose the right moment to start building a predictive model for NBA games. Four years earlier, in the 2002-03 season, the league had for the first time made play-by-play information available to the public, whereas before only box scores were published. This trove of fresh information had no immediate practical value, except perhaps to assuage fan curiosity. But by 2006, a large enough sample of data had accumulated to employ it with scientific rigor.

To help him build his model, Voulgaris required a specialist in the field, a mind trained in the codes of statistics, mathematics and computer science. He started the search in 2005. It took him two years and six individual tryouts -- most of those interviewees were found online, Voulgaris says, and two of them landed in NBA front offices -- to find the right person. The right person was a literal math prodigy. As a preteen, he had won national math contests; he had been the subject of awestruck articles in major newspapers. He had scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT when he was in seventh grade. At the time of his interview with Voulgaris, he had just quit a high-paying job designing algorithms for an East Coast hedge fund with a roster of Nobel-grade quant talent. Voulgaris does not wish to have the name of this math whiz appear in print, presumably out of fear that some rival will attempt to find the whiz -- let’s call him the Whiz -- and poach him. When I visit Voulgaris at his rental in the Hollywood Hills, he tells me that he’s recently made the Whiz his partner. “50-50?” I ask.

“No.”





The relationship got off to a rocky start. In 2007 the Whiz basically spun his wheels striving to build a model on his own during his first offseason in Voulgaris’ employ. “He was optimistic that he’d be able to come up with something by the time basketball season started,” Voulgaris says, “and he just flailed away.” Voulgaris decided to shorten the leash, and together the two determined that what they needed was a program that could simulate a game of basketball between any two teams at any point in a season and spit out a projected score. To do so, they would have to break the game down into its basic unit, the possession. Each simulation would therefore be a series of mini-simulations. First, the program would have to predict the number of possessions each matchup would likely produce. Then it would need to judge the likeliest outcome of each possession: Score or no score; one point, two points or three; micro-forecasts ascertained from historical performance data. It would also have to take into account a vast number of potential occurrences, each missed shot or successful rebound creating the possibility of still other occurrences -- a garden of explosively forking paths, as if in parallel universes. The program would run tens of thousands of simulations for each matchup, discarding the most outlandish or improbable results. It would be a black box -- prophecy as output.

Between the statistical analysis, the algorithms and the programming, it took two years to create their first model, version 1.0. Voulgaris continued to bet subjectively, marking time until the model was ready. When they finished, they called it Ewing. (It wasn’t named after Patrick, per se, but after the “Ewing Theory,” a purported phenomenon famously described by Bill Simmons under which a team improves whenever its overrated superstar leaves the franchise.) At some point in the process of breaking the game down into its component parts, they realized that Ewing would also require a kind of feeder model, one that could forecast the lineups a team would most likely use each game and the minutes each player was likely to see on the court. They called that model Van Gundy. Van Gundy, in turn, required its own feeder tool, one that would track the overall roster patterns for each team, the trades, the draft picks, the midseason player-acquisition tendencies. That database, less intricate than the other two, they at times jokingly referred to as Morey, as in Daryl Morey, the quant-minded GM of the Rockets. Ewing, Van Gundy, Morey. Player, coach, GM. The names of each corresponding, of course, to the job of each tool.

In the summer of 2007, Voulgaris and the Whiz took Ewing on a dry run, testing the simulator against games from the previous season to see how accurately it could retroactively “predict.” But something funky was happening. Every score the model spit out was higher than the average lines produced by the bookmakers -- the standard by which they would be judging themselves. The model, in other words, was recommending that Voulgaris bet the over in every single game. After weeks spent poring through code, Voulgaris finally caught the flaw. When assigning variables in the model, the Whiz had somehow assumed that the league-average free throw percentage was 88 percent, when in fact it’s around 75 percent -- an absurd mistake on the part of the Whiz, whose basketball knowledge at the time was practically nil. In more advanced versions of Ewing, they would jettison this primitive free throw method. Now, says Voulgaris, they’ve adjusted Ewing so that it predicts the player most likely to be fouled on any given individual possession, then uses that player’s specific free throw percentage to run its simulation.

If Ewing has a secret sauce, it’s just this sort of thing: Finding scraps of information, sliced and diced ever more finely, that reveal something about how a system -- in this case, a game of pro basketball -- will operate in the future. The key is to find those scraps that are more predictive than others. Case in point: One of Ewing’s most important functions is to assign values to players. Each player has two values -- on offense and as a defender -- and those values are constantly changing. Ewing will also automatically adjust the value depending on who’s guarding whom. Oklahoma City’s Kendrick Perkins “is more valuable guarding Dwight Howard than he is guarding Shane Battier,” Voulgaris says. Why? “Because Howard is a unique player, and you need a big to defend him.” Likewise, according to Voulgaris, Celtics seven-footer Jason Collins is “useless every game, except when he’s guarding Howard, which he does really, really well.” Player values also change across a season and a career. So Voulgaris and the Whiz created, for Ewing, an aging component. Further number-crunching revealed that different types of players, based on position and size, will reach their zeniths at different ages and on trajectories that are possible to predict. Ewing now grasps the curve of the lifespan of the point guard, the shooting guard, the forwards, the center -- and predicts the downslope and expiration date of every NBA career.

When Ewing went live with actual betting for the first time toward the end of the 2008 season, Voulgaris was not yet sold on its powers. For one thing, his subjective-gambler side wasn’t ready to surrender control to a machine. For another, the model was performing unremarkably with their money on the line -- right above the break-even line. But Voulgaris had something in mind, “a long project, like a six-month-long project, to model a certain part of the game of basketball.” He and the Whiz spent the offseason pursuing this mysterious project, the precise nature of which Voulgaris will not discuss. “I don’t even want to allude to what it might be,” he says when I press him, “because I don’t think anyone else is doing anything like it.”

By 2009, once they’d added this mysterious additional model to Ewing’s inner workings -- version 2.0 -- they started making bets based on the scores it produced after the All-Star break. “We just, like, crushed the second half of the season,” Voulgaris says. Since then, as each subsequent season has passed, Voulgaris’ confidence in Ewing has increased. So too has the frequency of his wagering. In a season, he now regularly puts down well over 1,000 individual bets. “I mean, I don’t want to sit here and brag,” he says. “But this is literally, like, the greatest thing ever when it comes to sports betting.”





Despite believing himself to be in possession of the world’s most lethal gambling device, Voulgaris, in the middle of Ewing’s second season on the job, nearly walked away from it all. It might come as little surprise to learn that Voulgaris has intermittently dreamed of becoming the general manager of an NBA franchise. “This is going to sound really arrogant,” he says. “But the whole process” -- of studying the game of basketball with the end of beating the books -- “has led me to believe that I’d be able to put together a better team than almost any general manager in the league. If not maybe all.”

In pursuit of this, in 2010 Voulgaris broke one of the cardinal rules of the sharp sports bettor: He sought publicity, conducting interviews with gambling and NBA-centric blogs. As with everything Voulgaris does, it was a calculated move. He wanted to burnish his bona fides as a quantitative basketball expert. And it worked. Despite the fact that he was giving up a yearly income that he says would dwarf all but the highest-paid executive in the NBA -- who is Jerry West of Golden State, Voulgaris is quick to point out -- he stopped gambling and signed a contract during the 2009-10 season with one of the co-owners of an NBA franchise to consult on matters of player acquisition and roster assembly. The owner, according to Voulgaris, made certain alluring pledges. “He was like, ‘You could be my GM someday; we can do this together.’ It was this whole spiel.”

Voulgaris won’t name names, nor will he say how he first met this particular owner. He has had contact with other NBA executives; he has met, for example, Daryl Morey. (Voulgaris has assured me that it wasn’t the Rockets he consulted for.) As his move to the NBA suggests, there is today much common currency between the analytical work of the sports gambler and that of an increasing number of professional teams’ front offices; one of the chief goals of both, after all, is to value players. The quant revolution in sports at large has brought these two worlds closer together than ever before, at least intellectually. Every winter at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, members of the gambling community openly intermingle with GMs and their staffs of wonkish analysts.

“If I were the general manager of a team,” says Voulgaris, who will be attending the Sloan conference for the second time, in early March, “and I had someone building models and doing quantitative work -- if that person could not beat the Las Vegas line, his model wouldn’t be worth anything to me.” The reason? The way he sees it, the best and perhaps the only way to test one’s theories about player value is to take those theories to market. And the only market that’s liquid with money flows in the billions is the betting line, where opinions have a daily price. “Over thousands of samples of games, our model is constantly being tested on whether it’s right or wrong,” Voulgaris says. “If we’re wrong, we lose money. If we’re right, we make money.”

Voulgaris spent five months working for the NBA franchise. He says he advised his co-owner client on several trades. But he also felt excluded, held at arm’s length. “It was like if someone put a puzzle in front of you and said, ‘Solve this.’ But then, in order to solve it, you needed this special key that they weren’t going to give you.” He feels now that for all the momentum of the quant revolution in the NBA, there may be a glass ceiling for its true practitioners. “There’s a real disconnect between the basketball people, the business people and the -- for lack of a better word -- stats nerds. The stats nerds have no chance of ever becoming general managers. They’re just being used as a resource to mine.” At the end of the contract’s term, in the summer of 2010, Voulgaris decided to end his NBA flirtation and go back to being a gambler.





In truth, though, what Voulgaris says he missed most during his five-month hiatus from gambling was the gamble itself: “I was bored out of my tree.” Little wonder, given the frisson of his betting sessions. During the NBA regular season, which he splits between any number of North American and international ports of call, he watches as many games as he can, clocking more than 80 hours a week. No matter where he is -- LA or, say, Monaco, where he rents a flat -- his normal position during his game-day gambling shifts is supine on a couch, feet up on an ottoman, body nearly horizontal, a MacBook Pro resting between his lap and his knees, Ewing’s interface on the laptop’s screen, his dog (a Jack Russell named Coltrane) lying under his feet. He typically faces a wall against which rises a rack of Samsung flat-screens: a 65-inch central TV flanked on both sides by vertical ranks of three 40-inch screens, each showing a game. From here, he orchestrates his wagering: Ewing spits out a projected score and a number representing its level of confidence for each potential wager. Any projection above a certain threshold on that confidence scale Voulgaris will bet, though he sometimes overrides Ewing’s recommendations. He shows no emotion while watching the games on which he’s laid tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands, though he does very much sweat it on the inside, he says. In his words, “You’d have no chance of telling whether I was winning or losing.” During the season, he will bet, watch games, eat and sleep -- in that order of importance -- and do little else. To stay in shape, he doesn’t consume food after nightfall. This is a lifestyle not exactly conducive to relationships: He partly attributes his recent breakup with a girlfriend of five years to his odd hours during the season.

Despite it all, Voulgaris faces the same issue that all sharps face: the sustainability of his edge, no matter how sophisticated the model that produces it. When he returned to gambling for the 2010-11 season, Voulgaris says Ewing clocked an ROI of more than 6 percent. By 2011-12, it had fallen to 5.14 percent. Of course, the lockout-shortened season made for a bizarre outlier year, and Voulgaris and the Whiz had to adjust. Basically they subtracted a varying amount from the scores Ewing gave them, trying to account for the rust that kept scoring low at the start of the season, and the compressed number of games that later fatigued players -- and also kept scoring low -- toward the end of the season. But the limits of Ewing were apparent to Voulgaris. Already he sensed the inevitable. “We’re probably already at the point where my capability to make money is decreasing every year,” he says. “Every time you make a bet, you’re educating the people taking the bets. They’re learning the right way to make a line. They figure s -- out based on what you’ve already figured out.”

If, year after year, his margins are deteriorating, Voulgaris must increase the number of bets he makes in order to account for that slippage, just as he did when he moved from a subjective to a quant approach. He and the Whiz tweak Ewing in a ceaseless effort to incrementally improve its ability to spit out projections that carry high-enough confidence readings. “You’re not even improving it so much as trying to stop it from getting worse.” Like a fund manager, he must cope with the fine line between ROI, the number of bets he makes and the natural volatility caused by the random. The more he wagers, the more he courts ruin. In one unguarded moment, he tells me, “You can’t do this forever.”

When I visit him in LA over the summer, he and the Whiz are working to finish several potential alterations to Ewing, incorporating offseason player movements and adjusting the model to account for the weird data produced by the 2011-12 campaign. The predictive tool will end up responding in a very predictable way: Its margins will continue to narrow. By the middle of the 2012-13 season, Voulgaris will only say, “This has been one of the more difficult years.”

Voulgaris has only a blurry eye on his own future; Ewing’s simulations can’t help with that sort of prediction. Maybe, he muses at one point, it will be that sports gambling is someday legalized throughout the U.S., which will unleash a thundering flood of square money from casual bettors, exponentially increasing the liquidity in the market. The limits that bookmakers place on bets would increase and so would Ewing’s edge. The prospect makes Voulgaris as giddy as it’s possible for him to be. “That would literally be, like, the best thing ever,” he says. He wonders whether he could become a gambler akin to the Brit Tony Bloom, whose predictive soccer model won him enough quid to acquire the recently promoted Brighton FC. “It’s good to have goals in life, no matter how unrealistic,” Voulgaris says with a wry grin. And with enough gambling winnings, he says he would have only one goal.

“I would buy a basketball team.”

I'll leave it at that there's enough 'light' reading there for anyone and in amongst it there's some very good 'tips' for anyone starting out. Good luck to all.

good reading buzzer

I don't suppose anyone's looking in but Howzat-Kerry Packers War is on BBC4 now

going to read this entire thread one night...cheers buzzer sterling work

..and adjusting the model to account for the weird data produced by the 2011-12 campaign

Holy cow.  These guy sounds nothing more than a chancer.  So many inconsistencies in that story it's untrue.

I agree (with Mr Angry)

Excellent thread Buzzer....maybe there is life in the old dog of a forum yet !!!

I would be amazed if any more than half a dozen
forumites read the main post, but nodded approval.

Re Billy Walters. Just finished reading The Smart Money by Michael Konik and although he has changed some names, the main character is supposedly Billy Walters. Easily one of the best gambling books I've read, Konik starts to worksfor him putting on and ends up having to punt hundreds of thousands every weekend and the trouble with not getting froze out or rumbled by the bookies.

Read every word and glad I took the time...thanks to all posters :-)

outstanding thread..a refreshing change

Somewhere in the forum was a thread called ( I think ) - Betting Shop Charecters. Anyone know where that is? That was a great read!!

I've bumped it for you jt, it's on chit chat

Cheers Buzzer

No betting operation bad ever controlled the market on such a synchronized and national level, but Billy Walters admits, he didn't always have his way so easily. "There were other times I bet $130,000 or $140,000 just to move the line," he says in his low Kentucky drawl."One thing about the public, they'll follow anybody as long as you're picking winners,"


The last sentence of the quote above, probably gives the most insight into the mind of your average punter .

If any of you lads are interested I've coped and pasted a link to a You Tube clip featuring Billy Walters


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHVvfRaIqOg





StevieB

* copied even

good link that Stevie.......and in fact it led me to look at the one below.....it got very interesting at around the 30 minute mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLH8yCY7Ais

Good call Joshua Tree.I'm not really into American Sports but the psychology is the same the world over and some of the insights Dr Bob gave  in particular were fascinating.

Go on then I'll put him in, though not strictly a gambler with his use of rebates he's obviously beaten the odds in style one way or another although it's been to the detriment of other casual punters.


Zeljko Ranogajec: While the winnings of wagering on racing have traditionally not been regarded as taxable, there comes a point where even the tax man feels compelled to seek his cut of the proceeds.

And it appears that Zeljko Ranogajec has surpassed that point to a degree that the authorities are seeking to make the distinction between gambling as a hobby and gambling as a business.

The Taxation Office has investigated Zeljko several times over the past 25 years, each time ruling that his activities did not fall into the category of being a business. Zeljko Ranogajec Professional Gambler

The Australian Taxation Office recently conducted another audit of Zeljko Ranogajec.

The outcome, announced in October of this year, 2012, seems to contradict years of legal precedent that gambling winnings are not assessable as taxable income.

The ATO seems to have taken the approach that since Ranogajec heads a syndicate of gamblers that he is indeed carrying on a business.

The end result, one that is likely to hold the interests of solicitors and courts for years to come, is that Zeljko Ranogajec, perhaps in the interest of putting the matter behind him, has agreed to surrender an amount reported to be nearly $700 million over the course of 12 months.

That works out to just under $60 million per month, a figure that would stagger just about any business in the country, but in Ranogajec's case appears to be an instance of cutting one's losses short.

It would seem the Zeljko Ranogajec was ultimately the victim of the worldwide economic crisis that has compelled revenue starved governments to actively disregard historical precedent and tax racing winnings retrospectively. Some commentators have compared the incident to the witch hunt conducted against software giant Microsoft, whose main crime seems to have been the failure to make appropriate campaign contributions. Nothing breeds envy like success.

In fairness to the tax man, it would certainly appear to the moderately objective person that Zeljko Ranogajec and his cohorts did everything in their power to disguise a truly well and highly organized endeavour to make it appear completely casual. The syndicate headed by Zeljko Ranogajec uses sophisticated gambling software to seek maximum profit. It also employs hundreds of people in three different companies based on advice it received that personally operating the gambling software in question would lead taxation authorities to conclude that there was no question that a business venture was involved.

A safe conclusion to be reached here would be that as times change and technology evolves, so must the interpretation of what is a business and what is a hobby.

While alarmists may raise the cry that the taxation office settlement, reached via court-ordered arbitration, raises the specter of retroactive taxation on anyone who has ever had a winning punt, the reality would seem that the ATO is only interested in the extremely large players, those who it seems have turned the wagering game into a science-for-profit endeavour.

Zeljko Ranogajec himself is a quite interesting character. Born in Tasmania of Croatian immigrant parents, Zeljko is reclusive in the extreme. He is never seen at tracks or in casinos. He defies the image created by flamboyant predecessors that carried colorful nick names such as Prince of Punters, Filipino Fireball, The Fireman, Fast Eddie or Hollywood. Instead, he has earned the nick name Lock Ness Monster because no one is certain that he has ever been seen. He has never been interviewed and goes to great lengths to zealously guard his privacy and that of his family and associates.

This has worked to his advantage in that where racing is concerned there can be no accusations of any sort of tampering whatsoever. This would also seem to be true of his betting interests in sports, lotteries and the stock market. It would seem a wise policy with which to adhere given the enormity of his involvement. Various estimates place his total annual participation at anywhere from $1-3 billion.

It is said that Zeljko Ranogajec bets on every thoroughbred race in Australia.

It seems that his preferred tactic emulates that of another low-key punter of an earlier era, Fred Angles.

Instead of relying on a bank of phones in his home to line up wagers in the last five minutes before a race, however, Ranogajec uses modern computer technology to queue up hundreds of bets in the TAB system, placing those bets in the final seconds before a race.

The end result is identical: opportunistic bettors cannot ride his coat tails and bookies seldom have the opportunity to take advantage of the tumbling odds that Zeljko Ranogajec's huge wagers engender. He combines relatively safe win and place bets earning small payoffs with big winnings for picking trifectas and other exotics.

Zeljko Ranogajec wagers alone are purported to account for over 30 percent of Betfair's southern hemisphere operations.

Also like Fred Angles, he approaches betting with the same attention to detail, even those that seem insignificant. It is said that the paper file of his activities for just one Melbourne Cup was over an inch thick. Perhaps so, but this fanatical attention to detail availed him not when he decided to lay Makybe Diva in the 2005 Cup.

His exhaustive preparations did not account for the VRC watering the track in order to placate trainer Lee Freedman, who had threatened to scratch Diva if the track was not softened. This just proves Ranogajec is human.

Zeljko Ranogajec has taken the art form of gambling and raised it to a higher level. His annual outlay surpasses the GDP of some third-world countries.

His approach of maintaining a low profile in order to keep the odds where he needs them to be in order to produce profits, combined with a willingness to wager on any event, even those on remote country tracks, has supplied him with a winning formula that amassed a fortune for him, a fortune that it seems, however, to have unfortunately attracted the attention of the ATO. It seems like only a question of time before other tax authorities join the queue to get their share of the pie.

As ZR etc was getting "rebates" from TOTE operations, then this would clearly lay him/others open to being deemed more of a "business2 than a punter!

Check this out....

The gambler
PUBLISHED: 11 Feb 2012 00:04:00 | UPDATED: 13 Feb 2012 10:28:17
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Angus Grigg and Hannah Low

Illustration Karl Hilzinger

A rare photo of Zeljko Ranogajec, published in The Australian.

David Walsh Photo Louise Kennerley

It was hardly a difficult question, nor one that invited clarification.

But when one of Australia’s most secretive men was asked to state his name at the Federal Magistrates Court in Sydney there was a moment of confusion.

    IN DEPTH
    The Financial Review’s ‘Gambler’ series: The inside story on the secretive Australian gambling syndicate that turned over billions
    Part 5: Money magic makes billions disappear
    Part 4:How ex-wives’ club nailed David Walsh
    Part 3: No humbling a great gambler
    Part 2: The gambler
    Part 1: How Alan Woods beat the odds

“My name is John Wilson … and I am an investor,” he told the court.

That was not, as it emerged, the only name he answers to.

After prompting from counsel, the witness confirmed he was also known as Zeljko Ranogajec.

It’s a name few would recognise, even though Ranogajec would count as one of the world’s biggest gamblers. His vast wealth and incredible power has been achieved in an arena beloved by Australians – horse racing – but he has never given an interview, has rarely been photographed and many of his long-time employees have not even met him.

To racing insiders, however, the man known simply as “Z” is an almost mythical figure – loathed and admired in equal parts.

Born in Hobart, this 50-year-old son of Croatian immigrants controls an empire that wagers an astonishing $1 billion on racing each year. Yet the closest thing to a public profile for Ranogajec comes via his old friend and fellow gambler, Tasmanian art collector David Walsh, who built the ambitious Museum of Old and New Art outside Hobart.

The pair have prospered since their university days, but recently Ranogajec’s gambling empire has come under threat.

The Australian Taxation Office is known to be once again looking into Ranogajec’s affairs and he told associates last year that it is demanding about $900 million for 10 years of back taxes, penalties and interest.

Ranogajec, who is thought to have relocated to London, is not available for comment.

And just as the ATO is giving him a good looking over, so too are everyday punters and racing professionals, who are beginning to grasp the sheer scale of the incentives given to his betting syndicate by TABs across Australia.

These incentives, not available to ordinary punters, almost brought down Tote Tasmania last year and threaten to undermine how the racing industry is funded.

The story of how Ranogajec built a system that has ended up in controversy and litigation starts in the United States, where his business became so large it attracted the attention of regulators and attorneys working for former New York governor Eliott Spitzer.

They had grave concerns about how syndicates such as his work.

Despite this industry-wide notoriety, up until now little has been known about how Ranogajec operates. But previously unseen court files, obtained by the Weekend Financial Review, provide a window into this normally opaque world and to what Walsh has described as a “money mine”.

Ironically, the assiduously private Ranogajec outed himself when he brought a commercial dispute to court in 2008.

His legal action, designed to claw back $2.5 million from his former bookmaker Karl O’Farrell, meant the court ended up hearing the gritty details of how his gambling operation worked. It offered a close-up of the deals that delivered his fortune. And it was all on the public record.

What could have possessed Ranogajec to expose himself will never be known but it is inexplicable given what he previously told O’Farrell.

“We like to keep our dealings secretive. Nothing in writing,” Ranogajec told O’Farrell, according to his written evidence filed in the Federal Magistrates Court in Sydney.

In the course of the case, which was not reported at the time, the court heard how Ranogajec had convinced totes around the world to provide him with giant rebates or subsidies in return for his betting dollar. These deals enabled Ranogajec to win even when he picked the wrong horse.

That was a revelation to federal magistrate Rolf Driver, who heard the case.

“Surprisingly, the syndicate apparently makes most of its money by placing losing bets,” he said.

Ranogajec expanded on this during his evidence to the court. He was talking about racing in the US but it’s a model he has used successfully the world over.

“You bet to lose, so that you actually turn over more money and the win comes from the rebates,” he told the court.

“So we may not necessarily have won. I don’t know off the top of my head whether we won [excluding rebates] or not.”

Whatever the outcome, it was certainly lucrative.

From an outlay of just $200,000, Ranogajec confirmed to the court that his syndicate had earned $44 million from betting on US races over a 3½-year period. In addition, he claimed to be owed a further $8.5 million in rebates from O’Farrell’s bookmaking company Capital Play, which was licensed to take bets on US races.

That would have taken the syndicate’s earnings to about $52 million over that period.

This is surely successful punting, yet in the US, Ranogajec’s system was based on rebates, not picking winners.

To understand rebates and how it’s possible to win from losing, the mechanics of pari-mutuel betting needs to be explained. It is standard practice for totes around the world to take out between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of all money wagered.

Due to this “take out” it is considered almost impossible for the average gambler to come out in front over any length of time.

But Ranogajec is not your average gambler.

Due to his sheer size he has persuaded the totes to pay him “rebates” or “loyalty payments”.

In the US, the syndicate received an average rebate of 13 per cent on all losing bets, according to court documents.

From there the maths is pretty simple, as Ranogajec told the court.

“If you bet $100 and lost $5, but you get a 10 per cent rebate, you still make 5 per cent,” he said.

That means the more money you can turn over, the more money that comes back to you in rebates. And so it becomes a matter of ensuring that any losses are less than the amount rebated.

The court documents show that just 15 per cent of what the syndicate earned from US racing over that 3½-year period was from selecting the right horses.

Their winnings on a correct punt were just $8 million – a figure dwarfed by the $44 million earned from losing bets with rebates attached.

It was a perfect system that only came unstuck when O’Farrell allegedly refused to pass on all the rebates the syndicate felt it was owed by Capital Play.

In response, Ranogajec called in a $2.5 million loan advanced to O’Farrell, who was eventually bankrupted by the court.

In his effort to get his money back from O’Farrell, it became clear that Ranogajec was very keen to impress on the court that his syndicate was “not a business”.

In his words, it was a “punters club” or just a “collection of individuals” who came together to bet.

This modest description does no justice to the scale of his enterprise. The syndicate employs about 300 people at its offices in Hobart and Sydney and it runs a global gambling operation that places bets on races in Japan, Hong Kong, England, Australia and the US.

The betting system relies on computer models driven by complex algorithms that place thousands of bets, worth millions of dollars, in the final minutes before the horses jump.

In Australia the syndicate is known to win in its own right, while in the US the operation relied on rebates.

But during his legal battle with O’Farrell, it became clear that the paying of rebates was something of a legal grey area in the US.

While not unlawful, they were prohibited by some state racing authorities.

Regulators had been concerned for some time about the probity of so-called rebate shops such as O’Farrell’s Capital Play and the type of clients they attracted.

In fact, Ranogajec and Capital Play were one and the same, as his syndicate was its only customer and financial backer.

“Rebate shops have for some time been associated with illegal activities such as race fixing, money laundering and tax evasion,” said a 2008 report commissioned on the industry by former New York governor Eliot Spitzer said.

The report mentioned Capital Play extensively but made no specific allegations against the company.

It also named Ranogajec and his wife, Shelley Wilson, as being associated with Capital Play and claimed regulators in the ACT, where Capital Play was based, paid the couple little attention.

“The screening of individual betters, in particular with respect to the nature of their businesses, backgrounds, and sources of funds, is limited,” the report said.

Eventually, the New York Racing Association cut off Capital Play’s access to betting pools at the Aqueduct, Belmont Park and Saratoga racetracks.

Keeneland Race Course in Kentucky soon took the same action. No specific reason was given but, despite persistent protests from Capital Play, its access was never restored.

O’Farrell said that the termination was “without merit” and was “driven by the New York Racing Association’s attempt to remediate its own serious integrity problems.”

That failed to sway the regulators and the report to Spitzer said there were “serious risks associated with rebate shops”.

“By betting consistently on races where the risk of loss is known to be relatively slight, money can easily be laundered,” the report said.

With no access to the major US racetracks, that was the end for Capital Play.

But just as regulators in the US were raising concerns about how the likes of Ranogajec operated, he was being welcomed warmly by TABs in Australia.

Ranogajec’s home state of Tasmania was the most aggressive enthusiast.

From 2007 onwards the government-owned TOTE Tasmania (TT) began reporting impressive growth in its wagering business.

Over the next four years its pari-mutuel turnover would nearly triple to an impressive $937 million in 2011.

But the spike in revenue turned out to be profitless growth.

Despite nearly $1 billion in turnover, TOTE Tasmania could manage just $1.5 million in profit last year.

This gap between turnover and profit was due to aggressive rebating to the likes of Ranogajec. His syndicate did not actually bankrupt TT, but it made it unprofitable.

That lack of profitability may have explained the sudden sale of TT in December for $103 million, despite public assurances from the Tasmanian government just three months earlier that it had no intention of selling the business.

Tatts Group, which operates the tote in Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory, was the buyer and its chief executive, Dick McIlwain, was scathing of TT’s strategy.

“They gave all the profits away,” he says.

“They [TT] rebated the backside out of the business until there was nothing left.”

A recent Macquarie Equities report estimated that TT was paying an average rebate of 10.5 per cent to punters such as Ranogajec.

That’s aggressive in the extreme, given TT takes out only 14.8 per cent from win and place bets and 20 per cent on so-called exotics such as trifectas.

But while TT was floundering, syndicates such as Ranogajec’s were doing very nicely. Calculations provided to the Weekend Financial Review by someone with intimate knowledge of the TT business estimated the tote paid out $45 million in rebates last financial year.

“Most of that would have been to Zeljko [Ranogajec],” said the source.

But his syndicate appears to have been living off more than rebates.

A line item in the latest TT annual report showed that Tasmanian punters, or perhaps one in particular, was highly successful.

TT reported that $69.1 million had been booked in “settlements from other TABs”. Once again, it’s thought Ranogajec’s syndicate would have reaped a good proportion of this.

“These guys made money consistently, they were not just living off the rebates,” says the source with knowledge of Ranogajec’s betting patterns.

Insiders say TT began by offering rebates of about 2.5 per cent in 2007, but the more money bet by the syndicates, the more they demanded in rebates.

“It became a race to the bottom,” according to McIlwain.

By June 30 last year it was clear that TT had all but destroyed its own business, by offering increasingly larger rebates to the likes of Ranogajec.

The nature of racing is also such that not everyone can win – it’s a zero sum gain.

In fact, the more Ranogajec won, the less was left for other punters.

This is McIlwain’s main gripe.

“They are giving money back in rebates to punters so they can screw over the betting pools,” he says.

“The ordinary punter is subsidising these guys.”

The result has been a devastating one for the weekend gambler.

The sheer weight of money from Ranogajec, facilitated by rebates, has flattened out the odds and means that any wins enjoyed by punters are far smaller than in years past.

It should be remembered that Ranogajec bets in all states, it’s just that TT was the biggest provider of rebates.

“The recreational gambler is losing their money faster,” McIlwain says.

“And if you take their money away from them too quickly, then they lose interest.”

Taken to its logical end, it could mean smaller betting pools and less money to fund the racing industry.

That is yet to happen and McIlwain is determined to end the massive rebates offered by TT when he takes control of the business in March.

But TT is not alone in providing the rebates.

“Tasmania started this odyssey and it has spread like a disease,” says McIlwain.

“Western Australia is now very heavily into it, although they would probably deny it.”

The Tabcorp-owned NSW and Victorian TABs also provide rebates, which are thought to be between 5 per cent and 6 per cent.

McIlwain says that “dimwit governments” have facilitated the “ripping off” of ordinary punters by passing legislation allowing the paying of rebates.

“Tasmania was OK until others started doing it [paying rebates] – then it became a fight to the bottom,” he says.

And the Tasmanian example shows that the only winners are the likes of Ranogajec and his syndicate.

It’s no wonder that David Walsh described the betting system as a money mine.

That appears no exaggeration, given that it funded Walsh’s $180 million Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) outside Hobart.

In the introduction to his book Monanisms, released when the gallery opened last January, Walsh gave a typically oblique description of his working life:

“I invent a gambling system. Make a money mine. Turns out it ain’t so great getting rich using someone else’s idea. Particularly before he had it. What to do? Better build a museum; make myself famous. That will get the chicks,” he wrote.

MONA has certainly made Walsh famous but it has also put the spotlight on Ranogajec, who would prefer to have no public profile at all.

That’s surely why he didn’t want to disclose his real name, even when asked in court.

The Australian Financial Review
Angus Grigg

Thanks for the tip on the book 'the smart money'

Reading it at the moment it's very good!

RACING had never seen anything like Terry Ramsden - his gambling really was the stuff of legend; in the end he became notorious.

For younger generations the name will hardly resonate; his comeback to the sport in the last decade flickered, rather than caught fire. A glance at some of the cuttings from around that time suggests something between a dreamer and a fruitcake. He certainly talked the talk, predicting Classic victories for promising two-year-old Jake The Snake and a Grand National for a horse called Royal Atalza.

But then you remember the red-hot city slicker who shot through racing's firmament in the mid-1980s.

Dealing was where it all started for Ramsden. The boy from Enfield, north London, who left school at 16 and joined a City stockbrokers as a clerk.

Enquiries about Ramsden often elicit answers such as "he's the cleverest man I have met". Even a Serious Fraud Office investigator would tell Ramsden that he had an "alpha intellect". Ramsden's brain quickly told him that clerking did not pay as much as he was making for his employers, so he took his first personal punt, buying Glen International in 1984 to trade in Japanese warranties in a rising market; the company had a turnover of pounds 3.5 billion at its height.

Japan was deemed too insular and unwelcoming by much of the City but Ramsden saw an opportunity to make money and, with his trademark brashness and self-belief, built a fortune reputed to be around pounds 150 million. He was listed at one stage as Britain's 57th richest individual.

Ramsden lived the high life of the archetypal Thatcherite entrepreneur, splashing the cash and buying Walsall Football Club. He announced himself to the racing world with a bang.

Days before the 1984 Irish 1,000 Guineas, Ramsden bought a filly called Katies. Her trainer, Mick Ryan, recalls: "He paid pounds 500,000 for her and had never seen the filly - he didn't know what colour she was!" The Midas touch held and Katies won back her price reputedly five times over with a 20-1 success at the Curragh. There followed a legendary three-day party at the then Newmarket Moat House, two without Ramsden, who called open house for all before returning in his helicopter for the official celebration party.

He reportedly turned down an offer of pounds 2m for Katies in the aftermath of the Irish Guineas and was rewarded with his first Royal Ascot success in the Coronation Stakes.

That was Ramsden in a nutshell. A diminutive 5ft 4in figure with trademark long hair, he had racing enthralled at his every move for five short seasons, buying, selling, sponsoring, giving to charity and betting big on his horses and those of his trainers. He was a betting shop punter writ large, placing four-figure yankees for fun beside the regular six-figure sums on his own horses.

There were no shrinking violets in his stable, as the likes of Ryan, Geoff Huffer, Rod Simpson, Alan Bailey and Jenny Pitman handled a team that numbered more than 70 at its zenith.

Ryan adds: "He was a bit lively! He was a flamboyant, ruthless gambler. He was one of those guys who wanted to be in the know.

"He always let the owners of the other horses have first dip, mind you, but he wanted to know all the winners. But he would make his own mind up and have silly bets as well."

Ramsden did not confine himself to the Flat. He added a Cheltenham Festival winner in the 1986 Coral Golden Hurdle final with Motivator. Had David Nicholson's festival jinx lasted a bit longer and Brunico caught Solar Cloud in the Triumph Hurdle the next day, Ramsden would have claimed one of the biggest paydays in racing - around pounds 6m, or a staggering pounds 15m in today's money.

As it was, Ryan remembers the mayhem after Motivator justified his trainer's confidence, which had been transmitted to Ramsden. "I told him to have a good bet because I fancied it and he said he'd already backed it to win half a million. I suggested he had a go for the other half.

"Some bookmakers couldn't pay him out. I remember his bodyguards carrying briefcases and stuffing all the money in."

IT WOULD have been trunks had Brunico prevailed. It's well worth a look at the race on YouTube - even Sir Peter O'Sullevan could not sight the flying grey going to the last.

The year 1986 was a good one for Ramsden's royal blue and white hooped colours - Jenny Pitman weighed in with a Welsh National winner in Stearsby and Ramsden bought the Grand National favourite Mr Snugfit two weeks before Aintree, ensuring he hogged the headlines in the build-up with his pounds 50,000 each-way at 8-1, which showed a small profit when the Mick Easterbytrained chaser finished fourth. Needless to say, the good times did not last. The Ramsden empire unravelled quickly. The Japanese market collapsed, and so did Glen International with debts of pounds 100m in 1987 (Ramsden would mutter darkly about the mat being pulled from under his Japanese operation with the withdrawal of a $1bn line of credit) while Ladbrokes, his deadly rival in the ring, took him to racing's Tattersalls Committee over pounds 2m of gambling debts.

There was time for Not So Silly to win the Ayr Gold Cup at 12-1 in 1987 and a pounds 1m (losing) bet on a horse called Below Zero, but when Ramsden failed to keep to the terms of settlement, Ladbrokes acted again and the Jockey Club warned him off in October 1988, bringing to an end his ownership, if not his punting.

Court papers later revealed Ramsden's gambling losses to have totalled a staggering pounds 58m in a three-year period; Ramsden denied the figures but would tell David Ashforth in 1999: "Even if it was pounds 30m over five or six years, so what? Those sums for a man of my capabilities are no big deal, are they?" Matters would only get worse. He fled to the US and found himself in Los Angeles prison as the Serious Fraud Office began extradition proceedings. Returning to Britain, he was declared bankrupt, with the Inland Revenue claiming pounds 21m, and in 1993 was given a two-year suspended sentence for fraud.

When he breached the terms of his insolvency, including concealing pounds 77,000 he won at York's May meeting in 1992, he ended up back in prison, serving ten months of a 21-month sentence.

The story might have ended there.

Ramsden had lost everything, including his marriage. But in the new millennium he resurfaced in the City, pardoned by racing, and with an ironic change of silks, mourning black but with a hooped-sleeve homage to his blue and white colours.

It didn't work out for Jake The Snake (a winner for new connections at the age of ten) or Royal Atalza, but Ramsden enjoyed success with hat-trick-scoring handicapper Banjo Patterson and had a largely unpublicised small share in Grey Swallow, the 2004 Irish Derby winner trained by Dermot Weld. But like a film sequel, the second show could not match the original.

Ramsden's affairs were in court again in 2008 when City stockbroking firm Hoodless Brennan obtained a High Court judgement against him; he was reported to owe the company more than pounds 1m.

Ramsden will be 62 next year; a third coming would appear unlikely.

I probably did Alan an injustice so I'll put in a larger article



Alan Woods, passed away on January 28th 2008 at the age of sixty-two. He was, without a doubt the world's most successful horse-race gambler. It was estimated that at the time of his death, he was worth over £320m ($670 million US). For twenty years, he was regarded as one of the worlds best gamblers (or punters) and was generally named as one of the three biggest bettors alive.     
We called him...Mister Huge.He did not see racing as a sport of horses and humans, he only saw it as a never ending string of statistics and numbers. He did not socialize with the upper crust of racing. In fact he couldn't even recognize common names of Jockeys, trainers, or important racing personalities.
He would brag that he had not been to a racetrack for over twenty-five years. He was the best of the game and had little interest in the beautiful animals that make up the sport. Alan was strictly a numbers guy.  Born in 1945 in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, Alan showed an early brilliance for mathematics. He was a losing punter at university and never developed gaming interest until later on.
He was a mathematician and worked as an actuary in the 1970s. His job was to figure out how long you would live if you smoked two packs a day and didn't exercise. The insurance companies would then sell you insurance based on his numbers.   
Worlds best Gambler was a card counter...
In the mid 70?s, he was intrigued by reading a copy of The Revere Point Count Strategy on blackjack card counting. This was his initiation as a serious gambler, long before he was known as the Worlds Best Gambler. For three years he undertook disguises to avoid identification as he traveled from Australia to Las Vegas, playing alone or with teams of blackjack pirates. In 1982 he was tired of the travel, fake identities, and dodging the casino bosses, the worlds best gambler headed for Hong Kong.
He was successful in the world of card counting, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to what was ahead in horse racing. After investigating what the Computer Group was doing with software in sports betting, his priorities changed. With a couple of programmers, he would establish a new purpose and change the sport forever.
Hong Kong is the perfect spot for professional gamblers. Racing is controlled by the not-for-profit Hong Kong Jockey Club, and is scrupulously honest. You don't want to be caught fixing races in China and have the authorities find out. Untrue results or race fixing hurts computer calculations. Hong Kong racing features huge betting pools with a limited number of horses and jockeys. He would build a database, his programmers would write a program and they would make history. Hong Kong racing is packed with multiple exotic wagering providing numerous financial opportunities for computer wizards.
For twenty years, Woods would rise to the zenith of this business and become one of the world's largest horse players. His teams of computer experts and money running agents made it all work. He directed his empire them from a luxury high-rise apartment in Manila. Over the journey he had his ups and downs but it's reported that during one race day in 1995, Woods made $8 million. It was estimated that in the 2006-07 season, Woods accounted for 2% of the $71.46 billion total Hong Kong Jockey Club betting turnover.

His downturn only came when he ventured outside of the Racing world. In the late 1990's, he took a $100-million stock-market hit when he attempted to short the NASDAQ index just weeks before the bubble actually burst. Had he waited sixty more days, he would have been a multi-billionaire. But it is showing how effective computers can be to the professional punters in succeeding at horse racing. Though Alan is gone, another cancer victim, his legacy will live on. We will miss you my friend, and always consider you the Worlds Best Gambler. 
 

The men and women who operated the numbers game were known as bankers.  The most successful bankers were known as Kings and Queens.  As early as May 1924, the New York Age estimated that there were at least 30 bankers in Harlem, many of them Cuban, and many employing between 12 and 20 collectors.  Huge sums could be made operating numbers, but a popular number hitting could also quickly wipe out a banker, although, notoriously, they often avoided that fate by simply refusing to pay out, or offering players reduced payouts.

The most successful bankers earned the label King or Queen.  The first banker to achieve enough success to be called a numbers king was a Cuban named Marcellino, who controlled much of the gambling by Spanish-speakers.  He displayed the ostentatious style that would become a hallmark of the kings and queens, driving up and down Lenox Avenue in a chauffeur-driven limousine, and living in a palace of an apartment, adorned with imported chandeliers and a baby grand piano.



The most successful numbers king was almost certainly the reputed inventor of the game, Casper Holstein, a native of the Virgin Islands.  He owned a fleet of cars, apartment buildings in Harlem and a home on Long Island, and acres of  land in the Virgin Islands.  However, unlike most kings, he did not live a flamboyant lifestyle.  He was a committed member of the Monarch Lodge of the Elks, even running unsuccessfully to be the fraternal order’s national leader.  He gave generously to support Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, and his native Virgin Islands.  Holstein was also a key supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, “a great help to poor poets,” as Langston Hughes put it.  He gave money to charities and loans to aspiring businessmen.



One of the few ways that Holstein did not spend his money was on sports, but other kings promoted boxers and, most notably, operated baseball teams.  A Cuban banker, Alex Pompez, played the most prominent role in baseball, owning a team called the New York Cubans and supporting the Negro National League, before becoming a scout for the Giants and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.



Stephanie St Clair was the leading, and perhaps only, numbers queen. A native of Martinique who spoke with a French accent, she lived in 409 Edgecombe Avenue, an address favored by civil rights luminaries and other members of Harlem society.  St Clair took the leading role in the fight against the takeover of numbers by white gangster Dutch Schultz, pushing her case in the black press as well as through violence.

From about 1905 to 1915, the Harlem policy racket was controlled by Peter Matthews. Matthews was convicted of illegal gambling in 1915 and died in 1916, while serving his time. This left about an eight year void, where there was no real clear cut leader to take over the now vacant position of Policy King in Harlem.

In 1923, Casper Holstein who was born in St. Croix, Danish West Indies (now the Virgin Islands) of mixed African and Danish blood, saw the opportunity to take over the policy racket in Harlem. At his peak, Casper was making $12,000 a day from this enterprise. Like many of the policy kings, he invested his money in legitimate businesses as well. He is reported to have been worth over 2 million dollars by the 1930's.

Casper Holstein was not alone in the Harlem policy racket. His biggest competitor was Stephanie St. Croix, a Black French woman said to have migrated from Marseilles, France. In 1912, she invested $10,000 of her own money in a numbers parlor. Within a year she had amassed over $500,000.

By this time the Mafia having taken notice, started to try to muscle in on Harlem's black policy makers. They beat, extorted from, kidnapped, and murdered some policy makers and their numbers runners. In 1928 Casper was kidnapped by five men thought to be working for Dutch Schultz. A $50,000 ransom was demanded and Casper Holstein was released after three days. Casper claimed that the ransom was never paid. Shortly thereafter, he was convicted of illegal gambling. After serving his sentence, he retired later dying in 1944.

After Holstein's retirement and death, Dutch Schultz still had Stephanie St. Croix to deal with. Although he eventually got his way, it required a bloody war that took over forty lives due to gang violence. Because she had named policemen and other officials that had been paid kick backs, she was under pressure from the law as well as Schultz. Schultz did take over the Harlem policy rackets for awhile, but in 1935 he was killed by order of Lucky Luciano. Madam St. Clair as she was most often called by Harlemites, sent a telegram to Schultz's bedside saying, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." At the time this telegram received widespread attention. Stephanie St. Clair died in 1969, just two years after New York began its state run lottery in 1967.
Ted Roe
Ted Roe

The Bronzeville Policy Racket

Bronzeville is a predominantly black area and is Chicago's south side of town. The dominant players here in the policy racket were the Jones brothers. The oldest being Ed followed by McKissak (Mack) and George. Ed owned a tailor shop and at some point decided to get into the policy racket. The Jones brothers like Casper Holstein and Stephanie St. Claire cornered the market for policy or numbers racket in Chicago. All were successful because they paid promptly and without hesitation, building a strong customer base. At their peak, the Jones brothers made between $10,000 and $15,000 a day. They funneled money into many legitimate enterprises. They had real estate holdings in Europe, Mexico, and the United States. They also had cash in twenty-five different banks and investments in some of this countries largest corporations. It is estimated that they were worth 14 million dollars.

Running the whole operation for the Jones brothers was Ted Roe. He was born in Louisiana of a black mother and Italian father. After being a bootlegger in Little Rock, Arkansas for a while, he made the move to Chicago, specifically Bronzeville.

The mob in Chicago just as Dutch Schultz did in Harlem, began to muscle in on the black policy makers. In fact, in 1946 they kidnapped Ed Jones and demanded $250,000 and the turning over to them of the policy making operation. Ted Roe did the negotiations on behalf of the Jones family. He paid the ransom but had no intention of handing over the policy racket.

After being held hostage for three weeks, Ed Jones was finally released. At this time he made the wise decision to retire and take all of his family to Mexico to live. Ted Roe saw this as an opportunity, he took over the policy racket resisting attempts of the mob taking over. For many years he resisted and battled attempts at kidnapping and murder instigated by the mob. Some time in 1952, Ted decided to travel around openly rather than under the protection of his many body guards. One night while getting into his car, he was ambushed by at least two men both using shotguns. Ted Roe had been diagnosed with cancer and doctors had given him only three months to live.

loved the stories great read

This is quite topical with Mark Read being in the news...........



BETTING on the Melbourne Cup, and we are talking about serious betting, has been part of Mark Read's genetic make-up since he was a Year 10 student at St Bede's College.

Back then Read was a teenager with a head for figures and a love of the punt, two passions that would meet in spectacular fashion a decade later.

That the punt would be one of his true loves was always going to be the case given his mother Mabel Read remains the biggest female punter this country has seen.



With flaming red hair and always dressed to the nines, Reed struck fear into bookmakers, betting in huge cash amounts because she never trusted herself with credit betting.

In 1966 Mabel's second husband, former jockey and highly respected trackman Lal Reed (they married after her first husband, bookmaker Jack Read, died) had fallen in love with a Bart Cummings-trained gelding named Galilee.

On his advice, Mabel Reed decided Galilee was the way to go for the Caulfield-Melbourne Cups double and backed him to win $200,000 with Albert Smith, or around the $6 million mark in today's world.

Mark Read, who became a well-known bookmaker, recalls the Galilee double with obvious glee.

"Lal Reed thought Galilee was the best stayer he'd seen and he knew what he was talking about. So Mum acted on his opinion and just kept backing the horse,'' said Read, who grew up in within sight of Flemington racecourse.

"When Galilee first came to Melbourne he raced in the Patrobas Welter at Caulfield. He has an unusual gait and the word went around he wasn't right so he eased considerably. Mum just kept backing him.

"He won easily then won the Toorak Handicap when she backed him again. But even after that she still got 14-1 in the Caulfield Cup because Tobin Bronze was odds-on. He won again.

"Most people would be satisfied with having the double going but Mum kept backing the horse. After the Caulfield Cup, Albert Smith rang, as is normally the case with bookies facing a big doubles payout, and asked did Mum want to lay some off. She laughed and said she wanted to back the horse more.''

On Mackinnon Stakes day - the story goes - the commission agent didn't get Mabel's money on, or maybe he knew the Alcimedes gelding's grand final wasn't that day.

Galilee, with jockey John Miller sitting quietly, ran a pleasing third to Tobin Bronze without ever looking fully extended. The stewards opened an inquiry but cleared Cummings and Miller before the Melbourne Cup three days later.

Starting an 11-2 favourite, Galilee bolted in the Cup and Mabel was counting her money.

Two years after her death in 1982, Mark Read did his best to make his mother proud on the Monday before the Cup.

Not long before the Cup of 1984, he had been impressed with the win of a five-year-old gelding named Black Knight in the modest Benalla Cup. Yep, a long way from the first Tuesday in November but Black Knight had some serious plusses.

"He was trained by George Hanlon - who to my mind was every bit as good at getting horses right for a Melbourne Cup as Bart Cummings,'' stated Read.

"George used to win the race with handicappers like Piping Lane and Arwon whereas Cummings had well-bred horses such as Light Fingers and Gallilee.

"I liked horses that would get the two miles and Black Knight was by Silver Knight who had won the Cup in 1971."

So Read planned to back the horse at the Call of the Card, held every Monday before the big race. In 1984, in the days before casinos and corporate boomakers, you could back a horse to win $1 million in the Melbourne Cup.

Read hit the Call of the Card when he made a "punter's book'' against bookmakers, outlaying almost $200,000 on seven horses with $80,000 of his money going on Black Knight at an average price of 12-1.

It was at a time when then Hanlon stable had some big punters closely associated with it, one such person being Sydney underworld figure George Freeman.

But the money being bet on Black Knight's was largely that of Read, as he was the find out straight after the race and again the next day.

When Peter Cook won the race on the five-year-old gelding, some rowdy scenes broke out in the mounting yard. Read still recalls the moment with distaste.

"I was accused of betting around the favourite, the Bart Cummings-trained Bounty Hawk who finished down the track,'' recalled Read, who cleared over half a million when Black Knight won.

"Somebody very well known and closely associated with the horse loudly said I had paid for it to be pulled up.

"You see after the Call of the Card there was a lot of publicity about me backing Black Knight for a stack but Bounty Hawk was one of the other horses I had backed.''

For the record Read had bets of $360,000 to $30,000, $220,000 to $20,000 and $100,000 to $9000 twice on Black Knight.

He also backed Foxseal (5th, 15-1) to win $300,000, Bounty Hawk ($230,000, 15th, 4-1) Mapperley Heights ($250,000, 3rd, 10-1) Secured Deposit ($132,000, 12th, 12-1) Lancelotto ($150,000, 8th, 33-1) and Affinity ($90,000, 6th, 4-1).

If the Bounty Hawk accusation left a sour taste in Read's mouth he managed to overcome it that night with a party where his mother's name was frequently mentioned. The next day it was business as usual, Read travelling to Kyneton for the races.

As he walked through the course he rang slap bang into Black Knight's trainer George Hanlon. Naturally Read was full of bonhomie towards Hanlon and quickly made his feelings obvious.

"I told him there was a table for 10 available at Gloria Staley's Lonsdale St restaurant Fanny's, which was about the best going around at the time,'' said Read.

"Well George just went right off, abusing me as loudly as he could. It was just this tirade of abuse with George yelling 'you've embarrassed me you bastard'.

"It seems he had told his punters Black Knight couldn't win. He never did take up the table at Fanny's but it was there for him until the restaurant closed in 1993."

Read will be back betting on this year's cup because it's part of who he is. Since Black Knight he has won some and lost some, Zipping in 2007 when it ran fourth to stablemate Efficient being one that got away.

Read backed Zipping, a $7.50 chance, to win just under $3 million and thought he was home 300m out but the horse just failed to stay.

As a bookmaker he has been on the other side of the fence when a punter named Kerry Packer wanted $1 million on Saintly who won easily and paid $6.80 on the Victorian tote.

Read took the bet because that's what good bookmakers do then re-invested it at the tote, plus backing the horse himself. It ended up on the NSW tote, who weren't that pleased with the result.

Hero or villain?

Love him or hate him, Barney Curley is box office.

No one can get the betting world talking as he can and that has been the case for many decades. Whilst the focus of much of the media was initially on Frankie Dettori’s return at Lingfield on Wednesday, that soon changed as speculation reached fever pitch that the seemingly retired Barney could well be instigating one of his infamous coups.

Four horses racing at three meetings in Britain, all of which had some connection to Curley, were heavily backed on Wednesday morning and reportedly linked together in combination bets.

Eye Of The Tiger, trained by Curley when last seen on the track 481 days ago and now trained by Des Donovan - Curley’s former assistant trainer and resident in Curley’s old yard - was backed from 10/1 to even money. The former Group 2 winner bolted up under Shane Kelly in a weak heat at Lingfield at 1.30pm.

Just 10 minutes later, Seven Summits, trained by Curley prior to joining trainer Sophie Leech last year and returning from 225 days off the track, was backed from 7/1 to 9/4 to win a modest handicap hurdle at Catterick. Paul Moloney’s mount travelled well throughout the race and was always holding his nearest rival.

Meanwhile, Des Donovan and Shane Kelly were heading from Lingfield to Kempton where he would saddle Indus Valley in a six-furlong handicap at 4.25pm. The seven-year-old was making his return from 700 days off the track, but was backed from 20/1 to 4/6. He scrapped home after looking an unlikely winner for much of the race. It should be noted that Shane Kelly and Paul Moloney were often utilised by Curley when he held a licence.

The final leg of the gamble was Low Key, formerly owned by Baron Georg Von Ullman, whose cast-offs have often been secured by Curley in the past. Low Key is now trained by John Butler, a former assistant trainer to and tenant of Curley’s, and was backed from 7/1 to 4/7 on his return from 350 days off the track. Despite having the eyes of the racing world on his shoulders, Liam Keniry kept his cool and delivered the seven-year-old to complete the scarcely believable four-timer with a degree of authority.

First and foremost and all betting coups aside, one must acknowledge just how incredible a feat of training and planning this was. Any one of those winners would have been described as an excellent training performance when evaluated individually given that they have all presumably had physical problems and had to defy long absences, but to get all four to peak on the same day and be placed in races that they could be confidently backed to win is a genuinely remarkable performance from all involved.

At the time of writing, it is pure speculation that Curley was involved at all, but not only do all four horses have links to Curley, the style of the gamble was very much that of the man in the trilby with the Fermanagh accent.

Curley came to international prominence for organising the infamous Yellow Sam coup at Bellewstown in 1975 which reportedly yielded €1.7m in today’s money. While that coup is sure to live on the longest due to the ingenuity and quality of the story attached to it, Curley reportedly won well more than double that amount in a more recent coup on May 10th 2010 which bore striking similarities to Wednesday’s coup.

The 2010 plot involved three horses trained by Curley, who had just 12 horses in his care at the time, and an ex-inmate of his who had been moved to trainer Chris Grant. The four horses were linked together in multiple bets and three of them won, reportedly netting Curley in the region of £4m, a large proportion of which was only paid out after a high-profile and prolonged dispute with Betfred. Had the fourth horse won that day, approximately £20m would have been paid out.

When one steps back and examines Wednesday’s coup, one wonders did Frankie Dettori even play a minor role in the incredible day. It is well known that Curley took Dettori under his wing as a young apprentice and the two remain very close. With Frankie’s long-awaited return from injury being sure to be the focus of media and public alike, was it a coincidence that Frankie choose to return on a quiet Wednesday that also saw his great friend attempt the biggest betting coup in years? Only the men involved will know for sure.

The handicapper’s role must also be discussed, as three of the four were dropped eye-catchingly large amounts in the official ratings in a short space of time. Eye Of The Tiger was dropped a remarkable 56 lb after just six runs for Curley, Indus Valley had been dropped 16 lb in four runs since joining Des Donovan and Low Key had been dropped 28 lb in just four runs since joining John Butler. Seven Summits had been treated similarly on the flat, being dropped 42 lb in six runs in Great Britain, but he landed his leg of the four timer over hurdles following four outings over obstacles. One can only imagine how long it would have taken for a horse to be dropped by the same amounts by our more cautious Irish handicappers!

The obvious question is this, are such coups good for racing, or do they make a mockery of the formbook and integrity of the sport?

My view is that, save for a couple of quibbles, Barney Curley exploits the handicapping system as it stands and does it more ruthlessly than anyone else is willing or able to. In terms of the coverage it generates being perceived by some as negative, I would suggest that anything that gets people buzzing about Mickey Mouse races on a Wednesday afternoon is great for racing. It is the characters and drama of racing that draw many people in and instances such as Wednesday’s drama will do more good than harm.

One suspects that almost every trainer, owner and punter, secretly or otherwise, would love to pull a stroke with just one horse in one race, but the reality is that the vast majority do not have the ability and/or patience to get a horse to the track to win when duly expected, never mind having the logistical skills and ability to keep the most precious of secrets under wraps to get adequate sums of money on without alarming the bookmakers. If it was that easy, it would be happening every day and that would be a serious problem.

However, there are very few people in British and Irish racing capable of pulling off such a coup such as Wednesday’s and thus they are a rarity. Curley aside, perhaps only Michael and Barney O’Hare and Patrick Veitch can claim to have successfully pulled off similar coups in recent years.

For all the rejoicing of seeing the bookmakers take a hiding from a brilliantly-executed coup, this case did highlight how our game is changing. A few months after his audacious coup in 2010, Curley told the Independent that: “Nobody will win as much on horse racing this century.” If the speculation connecting Curley with Wednesday’s coup is correct, that view didn’t stop Curley, who handed in his training license and declared himself retired just over a year, making a bold attempt to better it, but his words could well prove prophetic.

Unfortunately for Curley and those that like to see the bookmakers take an old-fashioned caning, his 2010 coup served notice to the bookmakers of the danger, albeit an unlikely one, of multiple horses being linked together by one puppet master. In these days of bean-counter bookmaking, every measure is taken to ensure that bookmakers are not exposed to excessive liabilities and one-off gambles such as this week’s one.

The systems put in place after his 2010 coup coupled with the increase in popularity of overnight betting markets and the ease with which punters can communicate with one another via Twitter meant that many people cottoned on to the gamble at an early stage. As a result, early reports from bookmakers suggest that those connected with the coup did not win as much as the £4m won by Curley in the 2010 gamble, but any coup that results in a seven-figure pay out in this day and age has to be considered a spectacular success.

The bookmakers will undoubtedly be relieved that the efficiency of their bean-counting systems coupled with their cautious approach to laying saved them from a proper caning by an ingenious coup, but as Curley put it himself in the aforementioned Independent article in 2010: “It's not for the money, it's for the buzz. Beat the system, you know, beat those bookmakers, those smart-arses. You go into a betting shop and see them robbing these poor fellows, with these gaming machines. They're as addictive as crack cocaine. You see them coming back to the counter with their credit cards, for another tenner. Of course the great thing about those machines is that number nine won't go to even money and win five lengths."

Barney Curley may be 74 years of age, but whether you love him or hate him, he is still the master the hitting the bookies where it hurts the most. Such is the changing nature of the sport and bookmakers, there is unlikely to be another Barney Curley. In an era where genuinely interesting characters are in very short supply, I for one will be very sad the day that the final shot is fired between Barney and the bookmakers. However, one suspects that it will be Barney rather than the bookmakers that chooses that day and there may well be another bullet left in the Curley gun yet.

A film well worth watching even more so because of the trials and tribulations of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The film opens with Mahowny in conversation with a psychiatrist in prison, stating that his ‘secret life’ is a lot less secret than anyone else’s at the moment. This sets the scene for the back story to be told and begins from the point that Mahowny, a successful banker, has just been promoted in the Canadian bank where he works. His girlfriend, played by Minnie Driver, also works as a clerk at the same bank and soon shows that she is frustrated by her shy, workaholic boyfriend, who never seems to have enough time for their relationship. The viewer’s opinion of Mahowny is immediately changed when two ‘bookies’ turn up at Mahowny’s office asking him to pay the money that he owes them or violence will ensue. As he doesn’t have the money himself, he realises that he can use some funds from a client account to pay these debts, initially planning to repay the unofficial loan. However, once he has successfully defrauded the bank and realises that he can get away with it easily, he becomes locked into a cycle of taking greater sums of money from the bank to place ever larger bets with his ‘bookies’. He also begins to travel regularly to a casino in Atlantic City to play the tables, lying to his long-suffering girlfriend in the process. She slowly comes to understand the nature of his problem. The unscrupulous casino boss in Atlantic City, played by John Hurt, becomes fascinated by the unglamorous Mahowny and soon realises that he can make a lot of money from him as Mahowny’s gambling problem becomes evident. It is in the scenes at the casino that the viewer shares Mahowny’s compulsion to place bets without regard to the consequences of losing huge sums of money. Any attempt by his girlfriend to make Mahowny acknowledge his problem is met with complete denial by him. Although she has no idea of the extent of his financial difficulties, she alone understands the gravity of his situation but decides to stick by him regardless of this. The final unravelling occurs as the police investigate the ‘bookies’, who have continued to place bets for Mahowny, finally leading them to Mahowny himself. The viewer is finally returned to the conversation between Mahowny and the psychiatrist in prison. Mahowny is asked to rate the thrill he got from gambling on a scale of one to a hundred. He answers with ‘a hundred’ and then says that the biggest thrill he has had outside of gambling would score twenty on that same scale. Mahowny goes on to acknowledge that he must now accept a maximum of twenty out of a hundred for excitement in his future life and ends by saying “twenty’s OK”.

It was November 22, 1998, when a Jew from New York turned up dead in a two bit Vegas motel usually used for quickie shtups by hookers and philanderers. Nobody knows what this guy used his room for, but plenty of guesses abound, and they run closer to illicit substances than illicit lust, though no drugs were found when the cops and coronor arrived. Whatever he was doing, he ended up face down on the slightly musty bed with $882 in his pockets.

Eight hundred eighty-two portraits of George Washington were all the 45-year-old Stu Ungar had in the world.

Just a few days earlier, Ungar had been fronted $10,000 in "walking around money." What he spent it on is uncertain, though pretty easy to hypothesize. It most certainly was not steak dinners. A diminutive figure at 5'5", Ungar had always looked about half his age — it's how he got his nickname, "The Kid" — and in the months leading up to his death he'd wasted away from his normally scrawny figure to a gaunt sub-one hundred pound weight.


Even more unbelievable, perhaps, was that Ungar had made millions on high-stakes poker and gin games, raking in one of the highest winning percentages in gambling history. Every penny of it was blown on drugs and the reckless gambling they led to.

Two days before he stopped breathing, he'd checked into the Oasis Motel paying cash for a one-night stay. He extended it an extra day with a hundred dollar bill slipped to the manager. This was after    an employee had found him similarly face down and convulsing the morning he should've been checking out. What might have prompted some to call for an ambulance or at least a cop car was overlooked. Ungar asked his hosts to shut the window on their way out.

"I'm cold," he said. The window, however, was already shut tight.

Those may not have been the last words of "Stuey the Kid," but they were probably the last ones he ever said to another human being. Sometime in the ensuing 24 hours, the boy king of high-stakes gambling climbed back onto the ratty mattress and died.

His heart, according to the official report, simply gave up its fight against a lifetime of cocaine, booze, and God knows what other garbage. His arteries had hardened and refused to let any more blood pump through him. Drugs were in his system — probably where he'd spent the rest of the ten grand — but the coroner concluded that Ungar's death was accidental, not the result of an overdose.

If one binge didn't kill him, then it could at least be argued that the man who looked like a boy and gambled like a giant certainly overdosed. It was just a longer trip, and it wasn't just drugs that did him in. The son of a bookie who owned a bar for patrons of ill repute, Stuey was born into the underworld. He went to the Catskills for the holidays, like other Jewish kids and their parents in the 1950s, but he picked up gin rummy and the thrill of the cards instead of Borscht Belt jokes. Back home on the Lower East Side, he helped his old man "figure out what the parlays paid at Belmont."

Blow and methadone weren't the only things in Ungar's system when he died. The ultimate vice ran through his veins, the unquenchable thirst for what poker pros call the rush — the exhilaration of winning, the thrill of a lucky run — and in all too brief an existence it did him in more brutally than any coke binge ever could.

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There was a time when the drive to win, the hyper-aggressive uber-talent that was Stu Ungar, looked like it would light the poker world for years to come. That such a supernova might burn out so quickly and so dramatically didn't occur to the onlookers at Benny Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas in the spring of 1980. The tenth installment of the World Series of Poker, what has become the signature event for professional card players, was winding down. Seventy-three entrants — along with their $10,000 buy-ins — had been whittled to just two.

Jay Heimowitz, a Jewish amateur who'd collected ten thousand greenbacks in his Army barrack poker games — all before his 21st birthday — and turned his winnings into a profitable beer distribution company, had been busted out in third place. All that remained was a heads-up showdown between Ungar, a then 26-year-old featherweight, and 46-year-old Doyle Brunson, otherwise known as Texas Dolly and a heavyweight by any measure of the term.

The juxtaposition of these two men had to seem a little bizarre, even in a world where oddities and personalities of a, how shall we say, colorful sort abound. Yet there they were, Stuey "The Kid" and Texas Dolly facing off for the biggest cut of a prize pool that neared three-quarters of a million dollars. Ungar was a bean pole and ghostly pale — he might've tipped the scales into the triple digits, but just barely — and even at 26 looked more like a high school freshman than a grown man. His arms didn't seem any thicker than the stacks of chips arrayed in front of him. Ungar had also never played a major poker tournament, instead cleaning up at his native game, gin rummy, and getting himself banned from every blackjack table in town due to his computer-like card counting abilities.

Texas Dolly, on the other hand, was a battle-hardened veteran of high-stakes poker. Having played the illegal cash game circuit in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana since the mid-1950s before settling in Vegas, Brunson had already won two World Series of Poker titles. He was also considerably older, not just in years, but also in appearance and demeanor.

Heavyset and balding, Brunson sometimes required a crutch due to an accident back in Texas that sent a load of sheetrock crashing into his leg, breaking it in two places. He was only in his mid-forties, but he could've passed for fifty, and as opposed to the less than loquacious Ungar, Brunson was educated and fairly articulate, having paid his way through graduate school with poker winnings.

In his lifetime, Texas Dolly had probably gambled as much as Ungar, but Ungar's lifetime was much shorter and he was far more reckless than the legendary Brunson. The two couldn't have been more different, and seeing them perched across the green felt, facing off for a $365,000 top prize could only be described as surreal.

Brunson had laid 100-to-1 odds against the upstart gin player. He had, after all, only gotten into the tournament because another poker pro and Benny Binion's son Jack had been willing to stake his buy-in, so the odds weren't entirely unjustified. For Ungar though, the long odds from the guy he was now facing provided just enough goading to his ego. Later on, Ungar claimed he could only play people if he could find something to hate about them, even if it's as trivial as their height. Brunson had given the kid just the reason he needed to wipe the felt with him.

Problem was, at a critical hand the neophyte New Yorker had a measly 5-4 of spades against Texas Dolly's two pair, aces and sevens. What happened next is what makes poker so thrilling, because Ungar was about to get lucky three times over.

First, Brunson made a too-small bet with his two pair, allowing Ungar to call with only one chance to win — he'd need a three to join the ace and a two already face-up on the table, giving him a five-high straight. Brunson's mistake was Ungar's lucky break number one, and number two came when the next community card was turned up, revealing a beautiful red three of hearts.

From a four-to-one underdog, Ungar had become a nine-to-one favorite. His final stroke of luck came when Brunson pushed all his chips into the pot against Ungar's nuts — poker slang for the best hand possible.

The kid who'd found cards in the Catskills quickly called the bet. When a harmless two came down on the river, Ungar had beaten poker royalty in the granddaddy of all poker games, becoming the youngest player — at the time — to do so.

As with all heads-up matches, the crowd of onlookers probably held their breath in collective silence as the cards were turned up and the winner was crowned. The stunning quality of Ungar's victory over the established champion probably caused them to hold their silence that much longer, but did any of them realize what they had just witnessed?

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The win in 1980 was both a long way and just around the corner from where Ungar started out. At age 13, when he probably looked about six or seven-years-old, Stu's father Isador had a heart attack and left his wife a widow and his son half-way to orphanhood. Isador did this while in the arms of his mistress, which must've been doubly insulting to Stu's mother, who one year later had a stroke that eventually landed her in a nursing home.

He'd skipped from sixth to eighth grade and was in tenth when his mother's brain blew a circuit, but at the ripe old age of 14, Stuey dropped out and became the breadwinner for his ill mother and older sister. They say a Jewish boy becomes a man when he becomes a bar mitzvah, but the fact that "The Kid" was technically already a man didn't provide much comfort.

"I was never a kid," Ungar said in an interview a few months before he checked into a motel to die. "I got a job dealing poker in a goulash joint on Ninth Street between Second and Third Avenues."

The pay could've been better, but Stu made his bank in other ways. Barely a teenager, he hustled like a seasoned shark. His best routine was standing on the edges of underground gin games, almost all of them high-stakes affairs. A partner at the table would eventually claim exhaustion and offer his "cousin" Stuey as a fill-in. Seeing a child, the other gamblers were more than welcome to oblige, to their eventual chagrin.

In this manner, Ungar cleaned up against guys politely referred to as "Leo the ****" or "Bronx Express." It was a game against "Yonkie," a.k.a. Harry Stein, that finally dried up Stu's gin competition. A Canadian import, he was called in expressly for the purpose of busting Ungar. Twenty-seven games of Hollywood (a variation of gin) later and the teenage hustler had relieved Yonkie of $10,000 and sent him back across the border.

"You have to understand that $10,000 was a lot of money back in the 60s," recalled Ungar years later about his winnings against the Canadian. He promptly blew them at the racetrack, which fit quite nicely with his M.O.

One Thanksgiving weekend, he had just wrapped up a two-week rush that had netted him a cool million in earnings. The card table had been good to him, but as fellow poker pro Walter "Puggy" Pearson once said about Stuey, "because he's so good at certain things, he thinks he should be good at everything." Since he was cleaning up at poker, why wouldn't he clean up betting on the weekend's gridiron match-ups?

"I was betting $100,000, $150,000 a game," Ungar said of the memorable betting binge during that interview shortly before his death. "That was nothing to me. I had no sense of the value of the money."

By the final seconds of Monday Night Football, the million in cash had become a debt of $800,000. One weekend and Ungar had racked up the kind of loss that would make any other man as dead as the presidents on the dollars he'd just blown. For Stuey, the money probably didn't matter as much as the fact that he'd lost.

Money was just the tool of his particular trade, and Ungar traded plenty. He was an atrocious golf player, so much so that he was often allowed to tee up every single shot, a huge advantage. Pearson swears he once saw Stu tee up the ball in a lake. He still lost, once to the tune of about eighty grand in a game against Jack "Treetop" Straus — another Jewish world champion who earned his nickname for his decidedly un-tribe-like 6'6" frame — and all this was before making it off the practice green.

The golf course wasn't the only black hole into which Ungar would toss his money. "I once played ping-pong for $50,000 against some Chinaman in Tahoe," he boasted. "I'm an action freak. I'd bet on a cockroach race."

When he wasn't gambling his money away, he was tossing it around on bar tabs and women. He managed to demolish five Jaguars and a Benz on the streets of Las Vegas too. Perhaps the best story comes by way of Mike Sexton, currently a commentator for the World Poker Tour and once a friend and bar buddy of Ungar.

As Sexton tells it, he and Ungar were in Palm Springs, California, for a golf outing with another couple friends. The four of them went to dinner at an upscale joint that was recommended to them, but upon arriving found the place packed like a sardine can. When the maitre d' asked for a reservation, the group of gamblers had to inform him they had none.

"I'm sorry, but I won't be able to seat you without a reservation," the well-dressed host informed the group.

As his three buddies turned towards the door, Stuey stepped around to the side of the maitre d' and pushed a single bill into the man's hand. "Ungar always let Benjamin Franklin make his reservations," Sexton has written.

"We'll be at the bar," said the kid who probably looked like he'd just picked up his driver's license.

If only the story ended there, it would serve as a fine example of Ungar's hubris and willingness to part with cash as easily as he could win it. But Ungar was more than a gambling addict; this was a man with a few thousand poker chips on his shoulder.

The foursome clawed their way through a pickpocket's paradise and finally made their way to the bar. Lining up to make their drink orders, it came down to Stu and a rum and Coke. The bartender, however, wanted proof that this pip squeak wasn't underage. "I.D. please," was his response.

"What are you talking about," the card player screamed loud enough for half the restaurant to hear. "I'm 35-years-old!"

Absent I.D., the bartender was not impressed so Ungar resorted to his universal standby — lots and lots of currency. His skeletal arms disappeared into his pants pockets, quickly to reappear with two neatly rolled stacks of $10,000 apiece. Slamming them, double-fisted, onto the worn wood of the bar, Stu presented them as all the I.D. he needed.

"Do you think any teenager would be carrying around that kind of money," he asked the bartender, who thought it over for a second before pouring him the drink without further protest. The child lookalike didn't have long to drink it, however, as the maitre d' showed up just a few seconds later with an open table.

Not exactly a Jewish mother's dream, but if Ungar could've simply held onto his winnings, he'd have been richer than any doctor or lawyer, if not as reputable.

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Though it's hard to imagine, there was another love in Stu's life — two of them, in fact. Back in New York, while he was still just a teenager and still pocketing gin players' cash in local dive bars, he met a blonde cocktail waitress named Madeline Wheeler. Sexy as they come, Madeline's come-hither qualities proved almost as alluring to the young hustler as the rush of gambling. It took Ungar a year to land his first date, which could be considered record time for a suitor who looked the part of a child in his dad's gaudy polyester. It was his charm that ultimately got Madeline to go out with him.

"I knew what I was getting into," she told the New York Times last year as the newspaper covered the 2005 World Series. "I knew it was always going to be the cards."

Indeed their relationship was a rocky one, but Ms. Wheeler followed Stu out to Vegas anyway, and a year after he won the world championship for a second time in 1981, she became Mrs. Ungar. Now a husband and step-father — Madeline had a son from a previous marriage when she was 18 — Ungar's lifestyle never quite adjusted. The relationship stayed rocky.

Disappearing for days at a time to burn cash, snort crack, and woo other women, Ungar couldn't bring himself to settle down. His day-to-day affairs would have seemed just the other side of peculiar to an average person. Grocery shopping took place at the 7-Eleven near the Tudor house he purchased with his poker winnings. Foregoing things like a mortgage and calculating interest rates, Stuey instead bought everything with cash.

"Basically, you needed to take care of him," Madeline said shortly after Ungar's untimely demise. "Everything about Stuey, with the exception of the tables, had to be looked after. You needed to take care of him from head to toe. It was like bringing up another child at times."

Bob Stupak, a casino owner and Ungar's friend — and last financier — once recounted a story about the poker pro's naiveté away from the casinos.

"In 1980, Stu got invited to Ireland to play in a poker tournament but did not have a passport," Stupak told the Las Vegas Sun. "He went to get one and was told it would take a while to process. Stu asked if there was a way to get it quicker, and the clerk said for 'a few extra dollars' it could be ready in a couple of days."

What Ungar didn't understand was that the clerk had referred to a processing fee, not a bribe. He quietly slipped three hundred-dollar bills to the clerk. "That's what Stu thought the guy meant by a few extra dollars," said Stupak.

Not long after their wedding, Stu became father to Stefanie when Madeline gave birth to their one and only child together. Fatherhood didn't mellow him; his antics eventually led to divorce and periods of estrangement from his daughter, who lived with her mother in Florida from 1989 until 1997. Nevertheless, many of his friends have said multiple times that if Ungar survived as long as he did, it was because of his love for Stefanie and his determination to see her grow up.

He wasn't entirely unsuccessful in connecting with his daughter.

"A lot of people knew my dad only as a great poker player. But he also was a generous man who did not have a mean bone in his body. He was funny and he was the gentlest man I knew," Stefanie said after his death, only a high school sophomore at the time.

She recalls that he would call her "20 times a day" to check up on her. "My dad would ask me things like are you eating? If I said no, he would say he was coming over to take me out to eat. If I needed something, he'd give me his last $200 without me knowing it was all he had. Then he would walk around broke for days."

Stefanie also faced Stu's innocent streak. On a visit to see her father in the early 90s, she discovered a letter he had received. It was an invitation from then-president George Bush to visit the White House. As one of the greatest poker champions of the day, even the leader of the free world was willing to take some time out for Stu. He purposefully ignored the invitation.

"I said, 'Dad, you know how rare it is to get an invitation to the White House?' He said: 'What am I going to talk to the president about? We have nothing in common.' Dad said he wouldn't even know which fork to use at dinner."

The love for a daughter and the love of a daughter, perhaps this is what kept Ungar going for all those years, but it couldn't save him. His family may have loved him enough to forgive his trespasses, but his home was the casinos and gambling halls of Vegas.

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An ex-wife and daughter weren't the only family Stuey had. The insider quality of the poker world makes for a kind of extended family, and by and large, that family takes care of its own. Nevertheless, Ungar's poker family weren't able to save him either, as he withered into a ghost in the Vegas card rooms. Occasionally showing up to play but usually losing and hitting up old friends for loans they knew he could never repay, he simply was too far gone.

This was the environment into which Ungar showed up to pester Billy Baxter, a fellow poker compatriot, in 1997. Looking for a friend to buy him into the World Series of Poker, Ungar's virtual pariah status made the job especially difficult. Baxter initially rebuffed the former champion. It had, after all, been a decade and a half since Ungar had won his back-to-back titles and almost a decade since he'd made any kind of serious run at the final table. That was a ninth-place finish in 1990 — a story in itself — when Ungar overdosed in the middle of the tournament. Unconscious in the hospital, his massive chip advantage allowed him to finish in the top ten as the dealer folded away his blinds every hand. Baxter had backed Stuey that year too and swore never to do it again.

"I was playing Lowball [a variant of poker] at the time," Baxter remembered it during an interview at the '98 series, recounting how Ungar refused to stop pestering him. "I must have been winning, because a day later I put up the entry fee."

Ungar did not look the part of a high-stakes poker champion, even less so than he had when he showed up in 1980 looking like a middle school reject. Two decades of cocaine up his nostrils had literally worn away his nasal membranes. His nose had recessed into a tiny pug, on which he now perched a pair of blue shades in a vain attempt to mask the damage. As opposed to looking half his age, the self-abuse made him look every bit the washed-up 40-something he was.

What had brought him from the lowest depths to that particular poker championship was a mixture of broken pride and police intervention. Having been busted twice, on one occasion for trespassing and again for possession of drug paraphernalia, he was required to remain clean or head for the lock-up. Seeing just clear enough to notice the whispers of how he was a washed-up castaway damaged his ego that much further, mainly because he knew they were mostly right.

"It got to me real bad," he said of the lead-up to his '97 appearance. "My pride was hurt."

So there he was sitting politely at the table when he and 311 other competitors heard the words, "Shuffle up and deal." It must've seemed a tragic farce, if not an entirely sickening display of desperation, or hubris, or both. By day two, however, Ungar was storming up the leader board, raking in the chips off amateurs and pros alike. The press dubbed him "The Comeback Kid," an extended version of his traditional moniker.

"If they wanted to do a clinic on no-limit Hold 'Em, they would have filmed me from day one to the final hand," beamed a restored Ungar after the tournament. "You can't play more perfect than I played. I was reborn."

Reborn, yes. Whether he played perfectly is debatable, but nobody can dispute that Ungar's aggressive brilliance was on display as if he'd never spent twenty years on the downslide. Sexton called it possibly the greatest performance ever in the event.

By the last day, Ungar out chipped his nearest opponent by more than $300,000. Throughout those four days, he kept his daughter's photo in his shirt pocket and would regularly phone her during breaks. "He would tell me there are only 18 players left, then six left and so on," Stefanie remembers. While he was at the table, he'd often slip out the photo and look at it during hands.

Eventually, all 310 players had surrendered their stacks, and it was just casino impresario John Strzemp against the two-time champion — who had amassed a four-to-one chip lead. Strzemp never had a prayer and, to his credit, he probably knew that. Faced with the best player in the world playing his best game ever, Strzemp was forced to rely on a strategy of all-in bets with hands others might have attempted to win through less risky moves.

If luck broke his way, the strategy would work. If it didn't, then at least Strzemp made his best play for victory. Needless to say, it didn't. It spectacularly didn't.

Ungar won the main event with an Ace-Four offsuit, which is to say he had an ace but that's about it. Strzemp had an ace as well, and he had a better kicker with an eight of clubs, so when Ungar pushed all in after an ace hit on the flop, Strzemp once again risked his tournament life with the top pair.

The Comeback Kid was a slight underdog, since he had a straight draw. If a two fell on the turn or river — fourth and fifth community cards respectively — the tournament would be over. A three, which helped neither player, hit on the turn. Then, in a suck out for the ages, Ungar spiked a two on the river and won the million dollar prize.

It was a bad beat for Strzemp, but nobody seemed to mind Ungar's ballsy move. They had their beloved superstar back, and he'd returned in history-making fashion. The kid from the Lower East Side was the only player to win three world titles. He posed for the photos, then he called his daughter.

[Editors note: Johnny Moss holds three World Series of Poker championships, but his first one — in the first year of the series — was by vote of his peers, not because he defeated all other players. For this reason, Ungar remains the only player to actually win three titles under the current format which has been employed in every year except that first one.]

It would only take Ungar a year to lose every penny he'd just won and then some, get rhinoplasty — which he then obliterated by snorting coke shortly after — and generally return to his less savory ways. By the time the '98 series rolled around, Ungar was in absolutely no condition to play. His right nostril had literally collapsed following the rhinoplasty debacle, his skin was a pallid grey, and he was dangerously underweight.

"I looked like I came from Auschwitz," was his self-description a few months later.

Despite the fact that Baxter had put up his buy-in once again, Ungar pulled out of the tournament at the last possible second, confirming for the poker world that his comeback was little more than a one shot deal.

Only a few months later, Ungar finally climbed into the coffin he'd been dancing around for so long. Stupak pooled donations from the players of Vegas' card rooms to cover funeral costs. A rabbi presided over the memorial for a man who had died, at least in spirit, well before his pulse went faint.

Then, with the boy king whose own demons destroyed what could've been a poker empire safely in the soil, they went back to their tables. They had, after all, lost Stuey long ago. This was Stu Ungar's end, as unglamorous as his beginnings and seedier still, and for those who knew him best, it wasn't the way he should be remembered.

The Ungar that should be remembered made history when he raised big stacks of cash over his head in 1997, grinning with his blue shades and showing the world why he'll never be forgotten. The boy who took down the legends, who paved the way for the East Coast poker brats who take down today's televised tournaments, lives on in the poker greatness that has never since been matched.

In his lifetime, he never entered more than thirty major tournaments. He won a third of them, picked up three world titles and made millions — though he mostly ended up making it for others.

Yes, Stu Ungar died alone in a low-rent motel in the Nevada desert, but his shadow still falls across every poker table in Vegas, at every home game across America. If he was willing to bet the house — and the city along with it — then he won his bet. The Kid ruled the felt.

It was just the demons that ruled him.

Still big on censorship i see!

A gambler who is suing Britain’s oldest casino for withholding his £7.8 million payout has admitted  he did win the cash by ‘reading’  the cards.

Phil Ivey, dubbed the Tiger Woods of poker, says he used a legitimate technique called ‘edge sorting’ to identify cards during a game of punto banco, a type of baccarat based purely on luck. But he vehemently denies cheating.

However, Mayfair club Crockfords believes he ‘operated a scam’ and claims he ‘acted to defeat the essential premise of the game’ – and is refusing to hand over his winnings.
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'The Tiger Woods of poker': Professional gambler Phil Ivey is suing Britain's oldest casino for withholding his £7.8million payout, despite admitting that he did win by 'reading' the cards using a controversial technique

'The Tiger Woods of poker': Professional gambler Phil Ivey is suing Britain's oldest casino for withholding his £7.8million payout, despite admitting that he did win by 'reading' the cards using a controversial technique

Mr Ivey – a professional American  poker player – is suing the casino in the High Court and the case, the biggest legal battle in casino history, is due to be heard later this year.

In May, The Mail on Sunday  reported details of Mr Ivey’s win – and revealed that the casino had not paid out because it believed he had been reading the cards.

In his court submission – seen by The Mail  on Sunday – multi-millionaire Mr Ivey, 37 admits to being an ‘advantage player’ – someone who uses legal ways to gain a mathematical advantage over the casino.

It was well known in the industry around this time, according to Mr Ivey’s claim, that players might be able to use imperfectly cut cards to their advantage.

Because of this, the claim adds, the casino should have thoroughly checked them before use.

On his visit to Crockfords, Mr Ivey was accompanied by a Chinese associate known as Kelly, who was adept at ‘identifying the design flaws’.

Mr Ivey’s claim says: ‘During the second session on August 20 [Mr Ivey] made various requests for decks of cards to be changed at the end of hands with which [Crockfords] chose to comply.

This continued until Kelly identified a deck or decks of cards where the pattern on the reverse side of the cards was asymmetrical (in that one “long’’ side was different from the opposite side).’

Outlining how the pair managed to ‘edge sort’ the deck, the claim says: ‘Kelly would ask the dealer to reveal each card in turn by lifting the edge furthest from the dealer so that Kelly could identify whether the card was a seven, eight, or nine – the key cards in punto banco.

The first time that Kelly identified a key card, she told the dealer that it was a 'good' card which she wanted the dealer to rotate in the opposite direction to all the other cards and the dealer complied with the request.

‘In this way, the long edges of the key card became distinguishable from those of the other cards.’

Over the course of time, ‘the cards in the deck were increasingly orientated so that “good” and “bad” cards faced in the opposite direction’.

This meant that Mr Ivey was later able to recognise the key cards and bet accordingly.

Initially, he was betting £50,000 a hand but, having edge sorted the cards, he asked the casino’s permission to raise the maximum stake to £150,000.

Mr Ivey maintains in his claim that Crockfords’ owners were well aware how edge sorting worked and only have themselves to blame.

He says that casinos frequently accede to advantage players’ special requests because they do not want to deter them from playing.

Crockfords, the oldest private gaming club in the world, initially agreed to transfer Mr Ivey’s winnings to his bank account, but has returned only his £1million stake.

The casino is owned by Genting, a Malaysian gaming corporation, which sent investigators to London to question employees and scrutinise hours of CCTV footage.

By almost any measure, Louis B. Colavecchio is a quintessential, unremarkable Rhode Islander.

In this state, novelty license plates are such a status symbol that people have bequeathed low-numbered tags in wills. Colavecchio drives a red Honda adorned with plates that sport his initials.

In this state, jewelry manufacturing and the tool-and-die business have had a significant shared history. Colavecchio's father was a tool maker, and Colavecchio used those skills in his jewelry business.

In this state, a daily commute of more than 15 minutes is pretty much unheard of. It is no surprise, then, that Colavecchio lives exactly two miles from his storefront jewelry business, Diamonds In Design.

People were surprised, however, when law enforcement officials in Atlantic City said they had found thousands of fake slot-machine tokens in Colavecchio's Honda. And in his North Providence jewelry store, the dies to make counterfeit tokens for nearly every major casino in the nation.

Law enforcement officials are calling the arrest of Colavecchio and his girlfriend, Donna Ulrich, on Dec. 28, among the largest gaming-related counterfeit busts in the nation's history. When state police searched Colavecchio's car in the parking garage at Caesars Atlantic City Casino Hotel, they found more than 6,000 fake slot tokens, ranging from $5 to $100 denominations. A probable-cause hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

State police estimated there were 750 pounds of tokens, made for at least nine of Atlantic City's 13 casinos - so many, that when police transferred them to an officer's car, the rear bumper nearly scraped the ground, according to court papers.

In Colavecchio's North Providence jewelry shop, federal and state law officers found a 3,800-pound safe containing 60 dies to make fake slot-machine tokens for most of the casinos in Atlantic City, Reno and Las Vegas, and for two casinos in Connecticut.

That such a huge scam could have been operating out of the tiny storefront along the town's main thoroughfare boggled residents and merchants.

``We used to hear a banging noise and wondered what it was,'' said an employee at Perfect Touch Beauty Boutique next door. ``We just thought it was them making jewelry.''

Neither Colavecchio nor Ulrich has a criminal record. And neither made waves, at least not among 13 neighbors on their cul de sac, who generally said they knew nothing about Colavecchio or Ulrich.

* Tool-and-die shops once filled the state, providing precision tools to another of the state's big industries - jewelry manufacturing.

Louis Colavecchio's father, Benedict, arrived in Providence in 1903 from Italy. Ben Colavecchio was a self-employed toolmaker, and owned two Providence tool companies.

Ben Colavecchio and his wife, Dora, had three children. The oldest was Ronald, a Jesuit in Brazil. Next came Angela, a suburban Providence housewife. The youngest was Louis, born in 1942. He followed in his father's footsteps.

After graduating in 1964 from Providence College, Louis Colavecchio ran the Trop Jewelry Co. in Providence. By 1987, success afforded a move to suburban North Providence, where Colavecchio bought a $130,000 condominium in a development called Louisquisset.

The decade-old development is a perfect place to be anonymous. A handsome stone guard house gives way to quiet streets with names that reflect the site's history as a country club. A nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, a small swimming pool and a pond dotted with Canada geese round out the amenities. Residents say they barely know their neighbors, who are mostly retirees or young professionals without children.

Colavecchio's gray, wood-sided condominium stood silent last week. An American flag fluttered from a pole attached to the garage and a green garden hose hung neatly from a metal frame on the wall.

* Donna Ulrich also was born into a blue-collar Rhode Island family. Her father, Wilfred Morin worked two jobs, and his wife worked as well. Wilfred Morin, a machinist for the U.S. Ring Company, instilled a strong work ethic in his children.

``We were always frugal with money,'' says one of Donna's brothers, Wilfred R. Morin of Middletown, R.I. ``The finer things in life were never something we aspired to. Things weren't easy.''

Donna worked for a time as a teller in the now-defunct Woonsocket Savings & Trust. ``She's a superb, wonderful person. She's always been as honest as the day is long,'' her brother says.

According to Morin, Donna Ulrich, twice divorced with no children, and Louis Colavecchio met at the complex where both lived. ``He was absolutely one of the nicest guys I've ever met,'' says Morin. Morin met Colavecchio several times during family get-togethers, where, he recalled, Colavecchio wore a beautiful gold interlocking bracelet that he designed and made himself.

* Louis Colavecchio's quiet middle-class life had been disrupted in 1990. When the Trop Jewelry was robbed. Colavecchio, rescued by his son, was found unconscious, bound and gagged, according to a police report. The following month, Trop Jewelry Co. filed for bankruptcy. Months later, Colavecchio filed for personal bankruptcy.

Between the two bankruptcies, in January 1991, Colavecchio started Diamonds in Design Ltd. The company always maintained an address on Mineral Spring Avenue, North Providence's main drag, which is overwhelmed with strip development.

The Colavecchio store consists of a narrow room with glass door and plate-glass window. Neighboring merchants said the store had glass display cases with gold chains and other jewelry until about a year ago. Colavecchio's state-issued precious metals license, which allows a company to purchase gold and silver from the public, expired in June of 1996.

Neighboring merchants say visitors were buzzed into the locked store, but added they saw few, if any, customers enter or leave. An employee at nearby Copy World remembered that Colavecchio on one occasion offhandedly said that he really didn't need his business - that he just ran the store to keep himself busy.

* Small black lettering on the door to the jewelry store never mentions Diamonds in Design Ltd., but reads, ``Precision Molds, Models and Dies. Prototype Custom Work. E.D.M. Electrodes. E.D.M. Machining. Appointment Only.''

Rhode Island's tool-and-die shops are a traditional industry. They make the tools that other companies need to construct their products, and go hand-in-hand with the state's jewelry manufacturing. Electric-discharge machining, or E.D.M., uses electricity to produce an image on the metal - an electronic form of carving or sculpture, according to Winston Knight, chairman of the manufacturing engineering department at the University of Rhode Island.

A die is the mold used in combination with a mechanical press to imprint softer metal into some desired shape. A slot-machine token could be produced by using electric-discharge machining to carve into the die those letters, numbers and insignias to be impressed onto the token's softer metal.

Sculpting the die, says Knight, is an art. Because slot machines are sensitive to the writing on a token, a forgery must be extremely precise. Casinos have their tokens stamped with their own insignias, so only those tokens can be used in their slot machines.

* In August 1996, Caesars' Casino in Atlantic City discovered in an inventory that it had too many $10 slot machine tokens circulating in its facility. An investigation by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement determined that the casino's inventory of tokens had been flooded with ``high-quality counterfeit slot tokens.''

The state notified other casinos, and soon Bally's Park Place and Showboat Casinos also found fake tokens. The state studied the tokens, and determined they were made with dies that had been created using an electric-discharge machine.

Casinos are routinely monitored with surveillance cameras, and two suspects came to light - Louis Colavecchio and Donna Ulrich. According to court papers, on Sept. 13, state police detectives saw Colavecchio and Ulrich at Caesars' playing $10 slot machines, then exchanging tokens for U.S. currency at the casino cage. After they left, officials shut down the machines and checked the tokens inside. They found fake tokens.

On Dec. 28, after continued observation, the two were arrested. In addition to the tokens in Colavecchio's car, police found $8,000, a gun and records of counterfeit tokens cashed at other casinos.

Both made bail and were released last week. Their lawyer, James E. O'Neil - Rhode Island's former attorney general - said he could not comment on the case.

The U.S. Secret Service and New Jersey state police, continuing their investigation, have said they want to determine whether Colavecchio and Ulrich were merely passing the tokens themselves, or whether they sold them to others. Officials said the investigation was focused on the two Rhode Islanders, but did not rule out the possibility of other arrests.

Last week, Secret Service agents and New Jersey state police drove up to the storefront on Mineral Spring Avenue in an unmarked white van to cart away more evidence.

After taking more photos, rifling through boxes and files, and ordering pizza from down the road, they finished their work. They took the evidence. And left the pizza box behind.

The FBI, Secret Service, three state police agencies and Providence police took inventory at Colavecchio's Providence operation. The government had to rent two storage facilities to store all the loot that was seized.

Everyone took their turn arresting Colavecchio. He hired a former Rhode Island attorney general as his lawyer.

Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun acknowledged finding a total of at least $50,000 in fake tokens. Investigators borrowed microscopes from local high schools to inspect mounds of tokens. It took them weeks just to determine that Colavecchio hit one Mohegan Sun jackpot for $2,000.

Colavecchio ended up in a conference room and getting VIP treatment at Mohegan Sun. His lawyer had worked out a deal. Colavecchio showed law enforcement how he did the job, and promised to help the casino tribes and the state ward off any future raids. They say he was a hero in Providence as well. Colavecchio served a short sentence and did not "rat out" any of his friends.

Fans of real-life gambling stories may be wondering exactly how professional poker player Phil Ivey and a sharp-eyed accomplice are alleged to taken advantage of subtle variations in the playing cards being used at New Jersey’s Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa.  The cards themselves, along with the card-identification technique called “edge sorting,” rest at the heart of a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the Borgata last week against Ivey and three other parties.

As we reported in our previous feature on the unfolding Borgata-v-Ivey case, Ivey played a variation of high-stakes baccarat at the Borgata on four different occasions betweem April and October of 2012, winning more than $9.6 million overall.  As that fourth and final session concluded, Ivey was publicly identified as being involved in a big-money dispute with another major casino, London’s Crockfords Casino, involving another form of baccarat and what later turned out to be very similar edge-sorting allegations.

While court documents in the British case filed by Ivey against Crockfords have never been made public, last week’s lawsuit by the Borgata against Ivey contains an exact image of the “full bleed” card design being used on the card decks at the Borgata’s high-stakes baccarat tables.  The cards were manufactured by a Missouri cardmaker, Gemaco, which is one of several major card manufacturers serving the gaming industry.

Gemaco and an unnamed “Jane Doe” employee of the company are also named in the Borgata lawsuit, as part of the inference made in the Borgata’s assertions that only because the cards were defective that Ivey and his companion, a sharp-eyed woman named Cheng Yin Sun (also named with Ivey in the Borgata suit), were able to identify them and cause them to be manipulated for identification purposes.

I'll put the link up, if anyone's interested, to see Iveys edge.

http://www.flushdraw.net/misc/borgata-v-phil-ivey-alleged-edge-sorting-explained/

Fred Smith, then an undergraduate at Yale University, wrote a paper for
an economics class that proposed overnight delivery service in which one
carrier is responsible for a piece of cargo from pick-up through delivery.
To accomplish that, the carrier needs to fly all of its own airplanes,
operate its own depots, posting stations, as well as delivery vans.

At the time, cargo shipment was handled by a chain of companies – the
journey of a box would include being picked up by a local agent, flown
by an airline’s cargo department then handed over to a local van company
for delivery so Smith’s idea was unorthodox, and he got a grade of "C"
for that paper. The professor wrote: "The concept is interesting
and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must
be feasible."


Despite his professor’s lack of encouragement, Smith held on to the idea and founded
Federal Express in the early 1970s. In 1973, the company carried its first
load of 186 packages … and immediately ran into financial troubles.
Beset by rapidly inflating fuel prices and other costs, FedEx was bleeding
money.




FedEx had only $5,000 in its checking account, and faced a $24,000 jet
fuel bill. After he was turned down for a loan by General Dynamics, Smith
took his last $5,000, flew to Las Vegas and played blackjack. He won $27,000
– enough to pay the fuel bill and operate for another week. Smith’s partner
Roger Frock recounted the experience:

    I said, "You mean you took our last $5,000– how could you do
    that?" He shrugged his shoulders and said, "What difference
    does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn’t
    have flown anyway." Fred’s luck held again. It was not much, but
    it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week."

Shortly afterwards, Smith was able to secure more loans and FedEx rode
out its bumpy early days. Today, FedEx carries up to 17 million packages
on its busiest day and is worth about $28 billion. Fred Smith himself
is worth about $2 billion.

Phil's not letting the 'edge sorting' cases hinder him.

Before the start of the World Series of Poker, Daniel Negreanu went on Twitter and offered an even-money bet that he or Phil Ivey would win a bracelet this summer.

Anyone who wagered against the duo lost late Friday.

“There’s gonna be a lot of broke people in the poker world,” fellow pro Mike Matusow declared.

Ivey won the $1,500 buy-in Eight-Game Mix event in front of a large crowd at the Rio Convention Center, besting 484 other players to earn his 10th WSOP gold bracelet and ensure he and his friend will collect on “The Bet.”

Ivey is now tied with Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan for second on the all-time bracelet winners’ list behind only Phil Hellmuth (13). Ivey was presented his bracelet by WSOP executive director Ty Stewart, who noted that Ivey’s 10th victory came during the WSOP’s 10th year at the Rio.

“Doyle is one of my poker idols,” Ivey said. ” When I first came to Vegas and started playing in the big games, him and Chip (Reese) were guys that I looked up to playing poker. Of course it’s meaningful tying him.”

The victory marked Ivey’s first bracelet in a WSOP event in Las Vegas since 2010. His most recent bracelet prior to Friday came in the $2,200 buy-in Mixed Event at the 2013 World Series of Poker Asia Pacific.

Ivey put up the majority of the money to cover Negreanu’s public wager, and he reportedly will earn at least $200,000 on the side bet in addition to the $167,332 first-place prize.

“It was really interesting because I wanted to win for Daniel,” Ivey said. “He doesn’t really step out there and make big bets too often, so I knew he was really rooting hard. It was a different kind of feeling. I really wanted to bear down and try to win for him.”

Bruce Yamron of Naples, Fla., finished in second place and collected $103,375. Yamron held a slight chip lead at the start of heads-up play, but it took Ivey only 20 minutes to steamroll his longtime acquaintance.

“We’ve been friends a long time. I started playing in Atlantic City with him 15 years ago,” Ivey said. “He’s just a great guy.”

Dan Heimiller of Las Vegas, who won the $1,000 buy-in Seniors No-Limit Hold’em Championship this month, was third. Negreanu, meanwhile, finished ninth as he made a run at winning the side bet on his own.

“(Negreanu) had a couple opportunities late. I had almost no opportunities,” said Ivey, who cashed for only the third time during this WSOP. “Me and him were down here pretty deep in this tournament. This was a very good opportunity.

“The tournaments are dying down and there’s not too many left, so I knew I had to get this one or else it’s going to be pretty tough from here.”

Superb thread gents, thanks

Jack Straus once said, "If they had wanted you to hold onto money they would have made it with handles on." That pretty much sums up Straus's attitude towards life in general; he was a gambler.
Nicknamed "Treetop" for his imposing 6'6" stature, he was born in Texas in 1930. As a young man, Jack played basketball while attending Texas A&M and eventually graduated with a degree in business administration. Straus began a career as a teacher but it wasn't long before gambling took center stage in his life.
Straus honed his chops on the road, like most card players in the days before legalized gambling and casinos. Over the years, Treetop played against some of the best poker players in the U.S. and earned the respect of many, including Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss and Amarillo Slim Preston.
Indeed, Straus had gamble in his blood. During his relatively short career he made a habit of wagering on anything and everything; he bet every penny he had on the 1970 Super Bowl and won.
After Las Vegas replaced the Texas/Oklahoma road game circuit as the best place for a professional poker player to earn a living, Straus made the move. Another transition he was forced to make at this time was from cash games to tournaments. Treetop, a fearless bluffer and ultra-aggressive player, had a tough time adjusting to the more conservative style of play needed to overcome the large tournament fields.
Despite winning his first WSOP bracelet in 1973, Straus knew his strategy was better tailored to short-handed cash games. Straus continued to play tournaments however and won the World Series Main Event in 1982. As if winning this prestigious event wasn't noteworthy enough, Straus did it in a way that gave birth to one of the most quintessential poker sayings of our time; "A chip and a chair."
Although there is some question as to the exact sequence of events that led to Jack being left with only one chip, it is generally accepted that some variation of the story is true. Being the aggressive player that Straus was he often found himself moving in on players at the slightest sign of weakness. Not surprisingly, this lead to Straus being busted out of tournaments on a regular basis.
During the 1982 Main Event, this was exactly what happened, except for one thing. As Jack got up to leave he noticed that there was one errant chip that had not made it into the middle with the rest of his stack. This is where there is some contention with the facts, since many believe it unlikely that Jack would be allowed to proceed. After all, he had been all-in on the previous hand and the chip, hidden or not, would rightfully belong to the winner of their all-in confrontation. Regardless, the tournament staff let him keep playing and, to the chagrin of the rest of the players in the event, he came back from that single chip and won the championship.
Although Treetop earned his place in the poker history books by becoming the 1982 WSOP Champion, there is another story for which he is equally well known. Considered by many to be the greatest bluff of all time, Straus is fondly remembered for the creativity and fearlessness he exhibited on this day.
Playing in a No-Limit Hold'em cash game, Straus was running good and decided to keep it going when he raised the pot pre-flop with a 7-2 off-suit. Called by one player and going into the flop heads-up, the board came 7-3-3. Catching a seven and not figuring his opponent for a deuce, Straus bet out.
Unfortunately, his opponent came over the top with a substantial raise. Knowing his opponent to be a tight player, Jack put him on an overpair and knew he was probably behind in the hand. However, considering the money he had already invested in the pot, Jack thought he may be able to represent a big hand like a set and push the other player out after the turn or the river, so he called.
The turn was a deuce, giving him two pair but not improving his hand if he was indeed up against an overpair. Displaying his signature aggression, Straus pushed in a big bet, hoping to take down the pot then and there. While the other player contemplated the situation, Jack was becoming increasingly uneasy that his opponent would make the call and have him dominated going to the river.
It's impossible to know what was going through Treetop's mind at that moment, but nonetheless he did something then that was both brilliant and almost completely unheard of: He offered to show one of his cards before the other player had made his decision.
Jack told him that for $25 he could pick one of his hole cards and he would turn it over. Incredulous, his opponent accepted the offer and after flipping him a $25 chip, pointed to the card he wished to see. Straus flipped over the two which caused the other player to go back in the tank again, trying to understand why Straus would do such a thing.
Eventually he came to the conclusion that the only way Jack would pull a stunt like this was if both his cards were in fact deuces, giving him a full house. By offering to show either of his cards he would have known his opponent would see a two and perhaps be lured into making the call. His opponent folded and Straus took down the monster pot.
It has been said that Straus took a risk by allowing his opponent to pick a card since there was a fifty-fifty chance he would have chosen the seven. In fact, the move would have worked precisely the same way if he had chosen the seven. Seeing the seven on the board would have put him to the same question; does Treetop have a wired pair which would make him a full house? Nevertheless, it took a unique mind to formulate such an outlandish ploy and an iron constitution to execute it.
Jack was a risk-taker and a thrill-seeker both on and off the felt. Having admired the work of Ernest Hemingway, he had a fondness for hunting and marksmanship. On one trip to Africa, Straus was successful in taking down a lion and took the animal's paw as a trophy. He had the souvenir inscribed with the motto, "Better a day as a lion than a hundred years as a lamb," and wore it on a chain around his neck.
Jack Straus suffered a heart attack in 1988 while doing what he loved most, playing poker. He was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame later that year and will always be remembered as one of the greats.

Harry Findlay begins to tell the story of Big Fella Thanks, which is the story of his sporting life.

It goes back to the National Coursing Championships at Clonmel in Co Tipperary 11 years ago. Findlay owned a brilliant bitch named after his daughter, Jade’s Dilemma. It was 7/1 on to win the Oaks final, they had booked a hotel for the celebration but Jade’s Dilemma got beaten in a desperately tight finish. Harry owned the dog in partnership with Michael “Curley” O’Driscoll from Co Cork, whose brother Denis trained the bitch. They called off the party, Curley was due to travel home with two Skibbereen friends, the former Cork football star Mick McCarthy and his best friend, Jack Pat Collins. But Curley decided he wanted a drink before travelling, his two mates wanted to eat. They dropped him at a pub, travelled on to the next roundabout, were involved in a crash and both were killed. Harry knew them well, understood how loved they were in Skibbereen and wondered if he could find a dog for Denis O’Driscoll to train, one that would win the National Coursing Derby. If he did, it would be a tribute to the memory of the two lads.

He heard of a great big white dog in the north and asked his Derry friend, Martin McDaid, to make inquiries. Anthony O’Connell, from Newry, owned the dog and wasn’t inclined to sell. McDaid told him the story of what happened in Clonmel.

What he said to McDaid was that if ever he did sell, Findlay would be given the chance to buy him. “I rung Anthony,” says Harry, “told him what had happened to Mick and Jack Pat travelling home from Clonmel and what it would mean to Skibbereen to have the Derby winner trained by Denis O’Driscoll.” Nineteen thousand was what O’Connell wanted for the greyhound. Harry had his chance. “I lived in Sheffield at the time, my bank was in Chester-field and I had flight booked to Australia that left in 36 hours. So off I went, got the money, got to Ireland, drove to Newry and bought Big Fella Thanks.”

He was 4-1 ante-post favourite for the Irish Coursing Derby four months away but by the day of the final, against just one other dog, you could still back him at 3-1. His opponent, Toy Razor, was 1-4 and considered unbeatable.

Harry Findlay never felt as he did that afternoon. “Before the semis, I just broke down. I went behind the stand, cried a little and then threw up. I don’t believe in God or religion but before the final, which I didn’t think Big Fella could win, I looked up at the clouds and thought, ‘If there’s anyone up there, if there is anything you can do to let Big Fella win, please, please do it’.”

It was the last coursing Derby of the 20th century and, as Harry Findlay tells it, the greatest race of the century. First Big Fella got his nose in front, then Toy Razor’s speed got him into the lead, Big Fella got back to him and stretched a half-length in front, Toy Razor responded and surged past his rival, a long neck in front. Then the most extraordinary thing happened, Big Fella Thanks found something more and accelerated again. It all happened in seconds. Seventeen thousand people watched, many had tears, and when Harry and his wife, Kay, drove into Skibbereen the next evening, bonfires blazed outside the town. Big Fella Thanks went on to win 31 consecutive races and when he retired, Harry brought the dog back to England and made a bed for him in his office.

He’s old now, Big Fella, he has cancerous tumors all over his body and when he got an awful virus six months ago, Harry was sure the dog was gone. On the night he expected him to go, Harry stayed with him. At 1am, Harry went to make a cup of tea. On his return, Big Fella wasn’t there. Harry woke Kay. They knew the dog had gone outside to find somewhere quiet to die. “We’ve got to find him,” Kay said. They woke Bradley and the three of them went into the pitch dark. Bradley found Big Fella in a little cave, behind bushes at the side of the house.

They dragged him out and lifted him onto an old mattress in the warm boot room. The next morning there was blood everywhere, the fever had raged through the night but, remarkably, the dog was still alive. He recovered and now he’s back in the office, listening to Harry forever telling him he’s a legend.

It is Thursday morning and like every other day, it begins with Harry taking Big Fella for his walk. Of course, it is more than that because this greyhound reminds Harry of what it is about life that he loves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR2NYR64P2M

A poker player was sentenced to two years in prison after using infra-red contact lenses and cards marked with invisible ink to win games.
The high-tech scam saw Stefano Ampollini, a 56-year-old Italian nicknamed ‘Parmesan’, rake in up to £60,000 pounds in one night at an upmarket casino in Cannes, on the French Riviera.
Describing himself as a ‘player and cheat with an international reputation’, Ampollini told a criminal court in nearby Grasse that he was proud of his ‘work’.
He used insiders at ‘Les Princes’ casino to mark cards with the invisible ink, and could then ‘read’ them using the contact lenses, which he bought in China for around £1,800.
Ampollini always sat opposite another accomplice, another Italian codenamed ‘The Israeli’, who sniffed or snorted to signal what cards Ampollini should choose.
The complicated scam enabled Ampollini to ‘control the game’ without being caught, he said.
Marc Concas, barrister for the owners of the casino, said: ‘Security found his behaviour rather strange as he won very easily and, above all, because he folded twice when he had an excellent hand, suggesting he knew the croupier’s cards.’
It was at this point that police were called, and detectives launched an immediate investigation along with casino staff.

I wonder how much Sun has actually won from 'edge sorting'

Cheng Yin Sun, who was accused of helping poker pro Phil Ivey “edge-sort” at Atlantic City’s Borgata casino in 2012, is now involved with another legal case, this time against Foxwoods Casino Resort in Connecticut.

Sun, along with two other gamblers, Long Mei Fan and Zong Yang Li, are suing Foxwoods for millions. They say that the casino owes them money that they won playing mini-baccarat.

The Day reported that Foxwoods has refused to pay because it believes the three cheated, according to the suit filed July 31 in U.S. District Court in New Haven.

They say they are owed more than $3 million, which includes their $1.1 million in winnings, along with $1.6 million in gambling front money and other damages.

The three gamblers admitted to edge-sorting, which is a technique that will give gamblers roughly a 6.765-percent edge over the house in mini-baccarat. It’s a complicated technique that involves trying to spot asymmetries in the ill-manufactured cards.

Basically, the gamblers argue that it isn’t cheating and they are owed the money.

“Edge-sorting is possible because some brands of playing cards are not cut symmetrically across their backs and some players are gifted with eyesight keen enough to tell the difference,” the multi-million dollar suit against Foxwoods claimed.

It’s the same technique that Ivey and Ms. Sun once used at the Borgata to take that joint for $9.6 million. Unlike Sun’s lawsuit against Foxwoods, Borgata is seeking to recover the millions it paid out to Ivey and Sun. Last month, Ivey’s legal team said that “each and every penny of [Ivey’s] winnings was the result of sheer skill.”

Edge-sorting doesn’t involve the gamblers touching the cards in any way, but the lawsuits hinge on figuring out how casino laws and regulations apply to the technique.

According to a court document in the Borgata case, Sun is a professional gambler who has been banned from several casinos around the world. She resides in Las Vegas.

Sun was also accused of assisting Ivey in an edge-sorting scandal at Crockfords casino in London in or around August 2012. That incident resulted in the casino refusing to pay Ivey and Sun $12.1 million in ill-gotten winnings. Ivey admitted to edge-sorting and has sued the casino for the money.

In the Foxwoods case’s court documents, Ms. Sun’s name was spelled “Cheung Yin Sun,” as opposed to “Cheng Yin Sun” in the Borgata case’s court documents. Card Player was told by an attorney for the Borgata that this is indeed the same person.

AMID the mundane spreadsheet of dollars, dates and unassuming names, there lies a stark tale of woe.

It's the National Australia Bank account statement linked to maligned racing identity Bill Vlahos; the chief architect of a secretive punters' club dubbed The Edge whose vast fortunes have supposedly vanished into thin air, leaving punters at least $200 million out of pocket.

Money goes in. Money goes out. Amounts of cash that would make any bank manager nervous. And all at regular intervals.

What is clear is where the deposits emanate from - real estate agents, dentists, business owners, Melbourne identities, ordinary suburban couples - those with a thirst for a bet who were unable to resist the temptation of a punting club reportedly seeing 80 per cent annual returns.

Such punters have potentially lost millions. Some recklessly sank their life savings into the club. Others re-mortgaged their homes to chip in some cash.

What is not clear, and is the subject of NSW Supreme Court action, is where the copious amounts of withdrawals went. Hundreds of millions of dollars vanished in a plethora of internet transfers that don't stipulate a destination.


Mr Vlahos, a psychologist by trade who emerged in recent years as serious buyer of yearlings with his BC3 Thoroughbreds, had maintained the withdrawals were being funnelled into a Westpac account which he shared with mysterious Dubai-based acquaintance Daniel Maxwell. He even emailed screen shots of the account to anxious punters proving there was, at times, in excess of $170 million tucked away. But that account, as Mr Vlahos admitted in court last week, does not exist.
He says he doesn't know why; giving the semblance that he too has been duped. But sources have confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that those screen shots of the Westpac account are fake.

An entry at the top of page nine of the NAB bank statement will no doubt be the key in the NSW Supreme Court battle between Mr Vlahos and a group of US investors collectively known as Aloga.

Aloga's investors stand to lose $26 million in the collapse of The Edge punters' club and are taking up the fight on behalf of hundreds of equally aggrieved punters.

On January 23 this year, a deposit of $112 million was made into the NAB account linked to Mr Vlahos from Daniel Maxwell. On the very same day, the $112 million was transferred internally to an unnamed account.

It is a fact that should bring some cheer to punters and investors who are substantially out of pocket. The money, at least $112 million, has not been squandered, or evaporated in a Ponzi scheme. It's out there, somewhere; it's real; and it is now the focus for forensic accountants.

What they don't have at their disposal is Mr Vlahos' laptop and dongle, which he used to access his accounts. Those items were burnt to a crisp in the alleged firebombing of his car last Sunday night, just two days before he was to have surrendered them to court.


Acting for Aloga, Robert Dick SC told the NSW Supreme Court his simple theory on Thursday.
"Analogies of homework could be used sir,'' he said.

Those who are out of pocket to Mr Vlahos' empty promises are many and varied.

Former Melbourne Football Club President Don McLardy made two known deposits into the NAB bank account on behalf of a syndicate of friends, the biggest being $118,486.

That was dwarfed by the $500,000 that Anthony Podesta, the founder of car-leasing company McMillan Shakespeare and 2012 Australian Entrepreneur of the Year, chipped into the club in April.

It's been a pretty lean year for the businessman, with his 9.7 per cent stake in McMillan Shakespeare plummeting by $50 million, courtesy of the previous Labor government's proposed upheaval to fringe benefits tax on leased and company cars.

Still, $500,000 is small change for Podesta. It is not, however, small change for the army of real estate agents and golfing buddies who loaded up and took the biggest gamble of their lives.

One is Buxton Mentone director Wesley Belt, who told the Daily Telegraph he is missing more than $300,000.

He has around 50 mates, acquaintances and associates who were investing in The Edge. Collectively, his Melbourne gang is down several tens of millions. He is livid, and his "mate'' Bill isn't returning his calls.

"They are all my mates, most of them interested in the horses. We all go to the races together. Together we've lost millions. Some have got one, one and a half, I even know of one guy that has three million in,'' he said. "I pulled out of it for about two years, then stupidly went back in three times.

"The first year the dividend was 110 per cent and every year it's been around 80 per cent. Every year except this year when, for the first quarter ever, they had a loss, but this year still would have done 25 per cent.''

Mr Belt's suspicions arose when the terms of withdrawals suddenly changed. Instead of a three-month lockout of funds, punters were told in June they could only withdraw winnings and dividends every six months. Then it changed to 12 months.

"As soon as they said that I thought, 'What's going on here?' Vlahos kept saying a major investor had pulled money out and he was below his threshold with the bookmaker, which never made sense to me because the bookmaker had $200 million to punt with. Why?"

That major investor was Aloga, which spent the best part of a year trying to withdraw the $26 million the club owed its investors. It first asked for its money at the end of 2012. Three weeks later came the $112 million transfer.

It came in, it went out, and Aloga and a myriad of spurned Melbourne investors never saw a cent.

In 2005 Bill Vlahos was just another wise guy punter who thought he could beat the system. He couldn’t. He passed himself off as some sort of mathematical guru. He wasn’t.

Vlahos blew his own money and a lot of other people’s before he realised he was getting nowhere. He was good at persuading other people to “invest” in his punting club but he wasn’t good at beating the odds makers.

One corporate bookie reckons Vlahos lost about $4 million with his outfit — and big figures with other bookies, too — before the penny dropped.

“He was a gold brick,” laments the bookie about the free-spending punter who came out of nowhere.

Eventually, Vlahos came up with a lame story that he was going to bet “offshore” because he would get better odds that way.

The bookies knew it was nonsense because no one (apart from Australian betting firms set up in Vanuatu) bet week in, week out, on Australian racing.

But the “mugs” throwing money at their new best friend Bill didn’t know that. They believed him. After all, he seemed such a nice guy — which, of course, all con men do. Otherwise they couldn’t be con men.

It’s hard to know exactly when Vlahos switched to “robbing Peter to pay Paul” — creating a classic Ponzi scheme (named after one set up by Charles Ponzi in the United States in 1920, but in fact old even then. Charles Dickens wrote about such rackets in the previous century).

Although Vlahos fancied himself as a mathematician it was his knowledge of human nature that kept money coming his way for almost eight years. He knew enough about psychology to persuade people to let greed overrule caution.

The first public glimpse of Vlahos was in 2007, when he played a cameo part in a syndicate that bought the promising colt Pillar of Hercules at a one-horse auction. Racing authorities had forced the sale because it was embarrassingly clear that members of the drug-dealing Mokbel family controlled the horse.

Most interest was in the colt, its high-profile trainer Peter Moody and the Mokbel connection, not in the new owners. This was unfortunate, because it turns out that one of them was a convicted criminal who would stay close to Vlahos until he realised “Dollar Bill” had stung him, too.

His name is Joe Zaiter and he reckons he sold his house in Sydney and “invested” $100,000 with his “mate”. But Zaiter admits that while he was in jail Vlahos put $50,000 in his wife’s account. Vlahos might have had his reasons to be so generous — he put Zaiter’s name on the ownership papers for a one tenth share of Pillar of Hercules, which sold for $1.8 million at the auction. By chance, or not, Zaiter’s name was slightly misspelt in subsequent reports.

There is no proof Zaiter was another “patsy” for the Mokbel brothers, still cashed up in 2007 despite the fact “Fat Tony” was on remand after being arrested in Greece on huge drug charges. But some people have their suspicions, mainly because Zaiter was in jail at the time — and because he didn’t actually pay the $200,000 for his supposed share.

The way Zaiter tells it, he was one of “a lot of people” Vlahos knew in Sydney.

“I was his mate in terms of entertaining all the people,” he told the Herald Sun. “When Bill comes from Melbourne with some people I would introduce them to some girls, take them to the strip joints … I wanted to show him a good time.

“There were trainers, racehorse owners and people from the media all kissing Bill’s arse.”

Zaiter also claims he helped Vlahos host members of the punters’ club at races in Dubai, a destination that figures in the rise and fall of “Dollar Bill”.




BY early 2010 the dogs were barking about Vlahos and the “secret” punting club he called “The Edge”.

In fact, a barrister with racing contacts telephoned racing integrity officers to warn them a scandal was brewing. And at least two bookmakers were privately warning friends and clients against the scheme, which was spreading fast despite — or because of — its supposed secrecy.

The Vlahos system’s main claim — the one that hooked the suckers — was what marked it as bogus. That was that the spreadsheets were “cooked” to show he averaged returns as high as 20 per cent. And although the suckers later talked of “Saturday morning” tip sheets, they didn’t actually see detailed spreadsheets until next day: in other words, Vlahos was producing his “results” after races were run and won.

The universal truth of betting is that the overwhelming majority of punters lose, a few break even and a tiny elite manipulate the market for a slim percentage profit on huge turnover. No legitimate punter wins big, month after month. If they could, bookmakers wouldn’t take their bets. But Vlahos had found people wanting to believe that he could do the impossible — and they in turn found others eager to jump on.

Meanwhile, Vlahos was threatening to sue if he was pursued and identified. He was a difficult target — a self-described “psychologist” and former accountant who appeared to have plenty of connections and no convictions. In the second version of the club he set up, he didn’t duck publicity — he exploited it.

Vlahos came up with a new front — a bloodstock enterprise, BC3 Thoroughbreds, which was nearly as legitimate as any horse dealing enterprise is. BC3 was a “concept” he’d supposedly bought from two American “pinhookers” — a colourful pair who had for a few seasons picked out weanling and yearling thoroughbreds in North America and developed them into successful racehorses to be sold at a profit.

Vlahos started to buy weanlings and yearlings, most of them as slow as any other buyer’s, buying more expensive horses as his credit rating rose. No one knew where his money came from — but while his cheques cleared, no one really cared.

The fact was that every time he was pictured holding a high-priced horse, it was a free advertisement for his cash cow. Behind the scenes, the punting club was growing bigger than ever.

It was simple psychology: pay big money for horses and why would anyone question your “success” or your credit? And encourage “clients” to keep it “secret” so only a supposedly select few would profit. Vlahos’s psychology qualifications might have been as suspect as everything else about him, but he knew precisely how to exploit greed and vanity and how to fake “exclusivity”.

What punting club “investors” didn’t realise was that their money was paying for the horses and a lavish lifestyle and that one day the music would stop. When it did, most of them wouldn’t have a chair.




THE wonder is not that the Vlahos scheme crashed but that it lasted so long. In various forms, it had been around about seven years when ominous cracks started to appear in early 2013.

The scheme had to keep attracting new money to maintain the illusion of deep pockets and an infallible betting system. Everyone loves a winner and the next best thing to being one is to play the part, which sums up Bill Vlahos’s greatest talent.

One way to do that was to bid $5 million for Black Caviar’s half-brother at the Sydney Easter yearling sales. Most buyers like buying as cheaply as they can but Vlahos did a strange thing — he predicted he’d pay the record $5 million for a colt that some shrewder judges of horseflesh thought was worth maybe $3 million, and that some didn’t fancy at all.

Of half a dozen veterinary surgeons inspecting yearlings for clients, only Vlahos’s vet did not discount the colt because of slightly suspect legs. Even Black Caviar’s little brother should need perfect joints to make a record price, because a racetrack failure has little future as a stallion. Yearlings that “fail” leg X-rays can make fools of cautious vets — but are usually bought far more cheaply than they otherwise would be. Not this one.

Vlahos’s extravagant bidding might have shored up confidence in him among outsiders — but hard-nosed racing people started questioning the source of BC3’s funds. The same insiders who had warned against Vlahos in 2010 again wondered about his ability to spend so big without any visible means of support.

It looked as if he were defying gravity. It reminded some of Mike Bastion, the high flyer who had jumped (or was pushed) to his death from a Hong Kong high-rise building in March 2000 after his Ponzi scheme collapsed, owing $35 million. Bastion had lured smart racing people into investing cash in a share market scam. Vlahos reversed it — luring outsiders into a race betting scam. Each relied on greed and ignorance outweighing caution.

“Investors” believed the quarterly statements that made them appear wealthy on paper but when they started trying to withdraw money it all began to unravel.

At the first sign that Vlahos was juggling money to pay people in dribs and drabs, others caught a whiff of trouble and demanded theirs, too. By midyear it had turned into a “run” on the club’s funds.

There were a lot more unhappy suckers than there was money to pay them. That might explain why Vlahos spent several months overseas, mostly in Singapore, although he apparently took key group leaders of his club on jaunts to Dubai, reputedly accompanied by strippers he had on the payroll.

By making sure each group leader was “on side” and paid handsome “dividends”, Vlahos ensured they would assure friends and relatives in the club that their money was safe.

Vlahos returned to Australia before the Spring Carnival. He presumably did not realise that a Supreme Court action by a group of overseas investors to recover $26 million would lead authorities to seize his passport. He was trapped near a lot of people who wanted their money.

When Vlahos appeared in court in Sydney on the first Friday of December, he told an incredulous judge that “$194 million” in a Westpac account had “vanished”. He suggested it had been taken by a mysterious associate in Dubai called “Daniel Maxwell”. But when the Herald Sun sent a reporter to the Dubai address Vlahos had given no one had heard of Maxwell.

Earlier, when punters were chasing their cash, Vlahos conjured a tragic story that Maxwell’s six-year-old daughter had slipped, hit her head on the pool ledge and drowned.

It was a lie. He knew what people wanted to hear and matched the message to the personality.

“Bill was physically shaking and crying, but now I think Maxwell did not exist,” one punter said.

By last November the fairy story of Black Caviar’s little brother “Jimmy” had also turned sour. The colt had allegedly been bitten by a white-tailed spider and was fighting for life.

News that the $5 million colt was being treated at the Werribee equine hospital raised eyebrows, then alarm bells. Spider bites are not unknown but extremely rare with horses. The odds against the blue blood colt being bitten were huge.

Whatever the cause of the infection that followed the supposed bite, it required strong antibiotics that affected the colt’s gut and caused acute laminitis, which eventually led to his being put down just after Christmas. This led to wild speculation Vlahos had orchestrated the horse’s death for the insurance.

The colt’s death upset more than animal lovers — several would-be owners had handed over hundreds of thousands of dollars but now found their names were not on the horse’s papers because he hadn’t been paid for. Their money had disappeared.

By the time Jimmy died, Vlahos was on the nose and on the run. His world had collapsed on December 8, a quiet Sunday night, after a bizarre episode at the property BC3 Thoroughbreds ran at Connewarre near Geelong.

At dawn next day the story broke that Vlahos had been assaulted by unknown men and his utility had been “torched”. Sceptical police quickly concluded his slight injuries were self-inflicted and that his garbled story of “Lebanese” or “Croatians” assaulting him was bogus.

As for his burnt-out ute, a farm worker told police the jerry can of fuel left next to the smouldering wreck came from a shed on the farm. The laptop holding all the punting club figures had burned with the car. This was convenient, as Vlahos was due to produce the records in court that week. Now they had gone the same way as the phantom Maxwell and the “vanished” $194 million.

As the new year began, questions about “Dollar Bill” piled up. A couple still stand out.

Who is Bill Vlahos and where is he hiding? And why did so many smart people believe him?

Crockfords casino accuses Phil Ivey of cheating by using the "edge-sorting technique" in card game punto banco.

Mr Ivey, considered one of the best poker players in the world, is suing the Mayfair casino for £7.7m, saying the technique is lawful.

He told the High Court in London: "I would never cheat in a casino."

Edge-sorting involves studying cards for imperfections.

The 38-year-old American played punto banco - a form of the card game baccarat - over two days in August 2012.

He was told his winnings would be wired to him, but they never arrived. His stake of £1m was returned.

Legitimate strategy?
The club argues the use of edge-sorting is not a legitimate strategy.

Genting Casinos UK, which owns Crockfords, says Mr Ivey's conduct defeated the premise of the game, meaning there was no gaming contract.

But he told the court the strategy was legitimate.

Mr Ivey said: "I consider that I would not be doing my job very well if I did not seek to use to my benefit weaknesses that I identify in the way that casinos set up or offer particular casino games.

"I use a variety of strategies whilst playing in casinos. No system is fail-safe and each time I play I risk failing to execute the strategy properly - some of these are very complex or difficult to execute - which usually results in me losing a lot of money.

'Unjustly treated'
"I consider all the strategies I use to be lawful and I would never cheat in a casino. It is not in my nature to cheat and nor would I risk my reputation by acting unlawfully in any manner."

Mr Justice Mitting, who is hearing the case, has been told by Mr Ivey's counsel, Richard Spearman QC, that the casino's case was "plainly unsustainable".

Phil Ivey
Mr Ivey is considered one of the best poker players in the world
He said edge-sorting involves nothing more than using information available to any player from watching the backs of the cards and making requests on the manner in which play is conducted.

Mr Ivey added: "We observe the unwritten doctrine: how do I find a legal way to beat the house? Any method that could amount to cheating would breach the doctrine and cause you to be ostracised by your fellow players - we are all very careful to stay the right side of the line and we discuss advantage play strategies at length."

'Substantial winnings'
He said he was angry when the casino refused to pay out. He told the judge: "I am highly successful in my job as a poker player and professional gambler and I would never do anything to risk my reputation.

"My integrity is infinitely more important to me than a big win, which is why I have brought these proceedings to demonstrate that I have been unjustly treated."

Mr Ivey also told the court he had used the technique in Australia and the United States with friend Cheung Yin Sun, who had introduced him to the strategy in 2012 and who he calls by her English name "Kelly".

He said: "We won substantial sums of money doing so and we also lost substantial sums along the way when we got the strategy wrong or were not able to execute the sorts because of effective casino game protection methods.

"At all times when edge-sorting, I considered that Kelly and I were playing lawfully and it never occurred to me that edge sorting could ever be viewed as an unlawful strategy. I continue to believe that it is lawful."

The case is expected to finish next week.

Phil Ivey v Crockfords is all over, and Ivey, who isn’t often a loser when it comes to gambling, finds himself in that position today. The High Court in London found in favor of Crockfords Casino in Ivey’s edge sorting case, saying that the casino was not obligated to pay Ivey the winnings he accrued through his high-stakes baccarat advantage play.

Judge John Mitting found that Ivey’s method of winning at baccarat amounted to cheating under civil law. The case dates back to August 2012, when Ivey won £7.7 million ($12.38 million) in high-stakes baccarat games over the course of two visits to Crockfords. While the casino gave Ivey back his initial stake, they refused to pay him his winnings, and the two sides failed to reach a settlement outside of court.

Cheating, Even If Ivey Didn’t Realize It

While Judge Mitting acknowledged that Ivey may well have honestly felt that he wasn’t cheating, Mitting still found that his actions did not constitute a legitimate way of playing the game.

“He gave himself an advantage which the game precludes,” Mitting said after the conclusion to the trial. “This is in my view cheating.”

Both the casino and Ivey agree on the events that took place, with the only dispute being whether those events were legitimate gambling activities or a method of cheating. Ivey and an accomplice played a form of baccarat known as punto banco at a private table in the casino. By getting the casino to use a brand of cards known to have imperfections in its cutting pattern, and then getting a dealer to turn some of those cards for supposedly superstitious reasons, Ivey was able to tell from the card backs whether a given card was high or low.

That wasn’t enough to guarantee that Ivey would know the outcome of each hand. However, it did give him a significant advantage over the casino by helping him determine whether he should bet on the banker or player on each hand. Ivey said this was a complex but legitimate advantage play; the casino saw it as simple cheating.

Crockfords “Vindicated” By Ruling

“We attach the greatest importance to our exemplary reputation for fair, honest and professional conduct and today’s ruling vindicates the steps we have taken in this matter,” Crockfords said in a statement.

Ivey, on the other hand, expressed disappointment at the ruling.

“It is not in my nature to cheat,” Ivey said through a spokesman. “I believe what we did was nothing more than exploit Crockford’s failures. Clearly the judge did not agree.”

The ruling may have hinged on exactly how far Ivey had to go to exploit those failures. Mitting pointed out that Ivey gained his edge “by using the croupier as his innocent agent or tool,” essentially getting the dealer to help him work around the normal procedures of the game without realizing it.

Crockfords also expressed disappointment that the case caused them to discuss their business with Ivey in public.

“It is our policy not to discuss our clients’ affairs in public and we very much regret that proceedings were brought against us,” a spokesperson for the casino said.

While Ivey was not given permission to immediately able to appeal the ruling, his lawyers will be able to renew their efforts with the Court of Appeals.

John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak. On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of the machine flashed, signaling a $4,300 jackpot. Kane waited while the slot attendant verified the win and presented the IRS paperwork—a procedure required for any win of $1,200 or greater—then, 11 minutes later, ding ding ding!, a $2,800 win. A $4,150 jackpot rolled in a few minutes after that.

All the while, the casino's director of surveillance, Charles Williams, was peering down at Kane through a camera hidden in a ceiling dome. Tall, with a high brow and an aquiline nose, the 50-year-old Kane had the patrician bearing of a man better suited to playing a Mozart piano concerto than listening to the chirping of a slot machine. Even his play was refined: the way he rested his long fingers on the buttons and swept them in a graceful legato, smoothly selecting good cards, discarding bad ones, accepting jackpot after jackpot with the vaguely put-upon air of a creditor finally collecting an overdue debt.

Williams could see that Kane was wielding none of the array of cheating devices that casinos had confiscated from grifters over the years. He wasn't jamming a light wand in the machine's hopper or zapping the Game King with an electro­magnetic pulse. He was simply pressing the buttons. But he was winning far too much, too fast, to be relying on luck alone.
At 12:34 pm, the Game King lit up with its seventh jackpot in an hour and a half, a $10,400 payout. Now Williams knew something was wrong: The cards dealt on the screen were the exact same four deuces and four of clubs that yielded Kane's previous jackpot. The odds against that were astronomical. Williams called over the executive in charge of the Silverton's slots, and they reviewed the surveillance tape together.

The evidence was mounting that Kane had found something unthinkable: the kind of thing gamblers dream of, casinos dread, and Nevada regulators have an entire auditing regime to prevent. He'd found a bug in the most popular video slot in Las Vegas.

As they watched the replay for clues, Kane chalked up an eighth jackpot worth $8,200, and Williams decided not to wait any longer. He contacted the Silverton's head of security, a formidable character with slicked-back silver hair and a black suit, and positioned him outside the slot area. His orders: Make sure John Kane doesn't leave the casino.


Virtuoso pianist John Kane discovered an exploitable software bug in Game King poker machines. MICHAEL FRIBERG

Kane had discovered the glitch in the Game King three months earlier on the other end of town, at the unpretentious Fremont Hotel and Casino in downtown's Glitter Gulch. He was overdue for a lucky break. Since the Game King had gotten its hooks in him years earlier he'd lost between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands annually. At his previous haunt, the locals-friendly Boulder Station, he blew half a million dollars in 2006 alone—a pace that earned him enough Player's Club points to pay for his own Game King to play at his home on the outskirts of Vegas, along with technicians to service it. (The machine was just for fun—it didn't pay jackpots.) “He's played more than anyone else in the United States,” says his lawyer, Andrew Leavitt. “I'm not exaggerating or embellishing. It's an addiction.”

To understand video poker addiction, you have to start with the deceptively simple appeal of the game. You put some money in the machine, place a bet of one to five credits, and the computer deals you a poker hand. Select the cards you want to keep, slap the Draw button, and the machine replaces the discards. Your final hand determines the payout.

When the first video poker machine hit casinos in the 1970s, it was a phenomenal success—gamblers loved that they could make decisions that affected the outcome instead of just pulling a handle and watching the reels spin. The patent holder started a company called International Game Technology that debuted on the Nasdaq in 1981.

IGT's key insight was to tap into the vast flexibility offered by computerized gambling. In 1996, the company perfected its formula with the Game King Multi-Game, which allowed players to choose from several variations on video poker. Casinos snatched up the Game King, and IGT sold them regular firmware upgrades that added still more games to the menu. On September 25, 2002, the company released its fifth major revision—Game King 5.0. Its marketing material was triumphal: “Full of new enhancements, including state-of-the-art video graphics and enhanced stereo sound, the Game King 5.0 Multi-Game suite is sure to rule over your entire casino floor with unprecedented magnificence!” But the new Game King code had one feature that wasn't in the brochure—a series of subtle errors in program number G0001640 that evaded laboratory testing and source code review.

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The bug survived like a cockroach for the next seven years. It passed into new revisions, one after another, ultimately infecting 99 different programs installed in thousands of IGT machines around the world. As far as anyone knows, it went completely undetected until late April 2009, when John Kane was playing at a row of four low-limit Game Kings outside the entrance to a Chinese fast food joint at the Fremont, smoke swirling around him and '90s pop music raining down from the casino sound system.

He'd been switching between game variations and racking up a modest payout. But when he hit the Cash Out button to take his money to another machine, the candle lit at the top of the Game King and the screen locked up with a jackpot worth more than $1,000. Kane hadn't even played a new hand, so he knew there was a mistake. He told a casino attendant about the error, but the worker thought he was joking and gave him the money anyway.

At that point, Kane could have forgotten the whole thing. Instead, he called a friend and embarked on the biggest gamble of his life.
Even before the phone rang in his suburban Pittsburgh home, Andre Nestor had a gut feeling that everything was about to change for him. Superstitious and prone to hunches, he'd felt it coming for days: April 30, 2009, would be exactly 15 years since Nestor ignored an urge to play a set of numbers that came up in the Pennsylvania lottery Big 4.

That was the story of his life—always playing the right numbers at the wrong time. Games of chance had been courting and betraying Nestor since he was old enough to gamble. In 2001 he'd moved to Las Vegas to be closer to the action, answering phones for a bank during the day and wagering his meager paycheck at night. That's when he met John Kane in an AOL chatroom for Vegas locals. Though Nestor was 13 years younger than Kane and perpetually flirting with poverty, they developed an intense addicts' friendship.

Nestor's records show he lost about $20,000 a year for six years before he gave up, said good-bye to Kane, and moved back to the sleepy Pittsburgh suburb of Swissvale, Pennsylvania, in 2007. For about two years he had a stable life, living off public assistance, gambling infrequently, and playing the occasional lottery ticket. Then Kane called to tell him about a bug he'd found in video poker. Nestor drove to the airport that night and camped there until the next available flight to Las Vegas.

Kane picked him up at the curb at McCarran airport. After a quick breakfast, they drove to the Fremont, took adjacent seats at two Game Kings, and went to work. Kane had some idea of how the glitch operated but hadn't been able to reliably reproduce it. Working together, the two men began trying different combinations of play, game types, and bet levels, sounding out the bug like bats in the dark.

It turned out the Game King's endless versatility was also its fatal flaw. In addition to different game variants, the machine lets you choose the base level of your wagers: At the low-limit Fremont machines, you could select six different denomination levels, from 1 cent to 50 cents a credit.


“You had complete control,” Andre Nestor says. “You could win $500,000 in one day.”  MICHAEL FRIBERG

The key to the glitch was that under just the right circumstances, you could switch denomination levels retroactively. That meant you could play at 1 cent per credit for hours, losing pocket change, until you finally got a good hand—like four aces or a royal flush. Then you could change to 50 cents a credit and fool the machine into re-awarding your payout at the new, higher denomination.

Performing that trick consistently wasn't easy—it involved a complicated misdirection that left the Game King's internal variables in a state of confusion. But after seven hours rooted to their seats, Kane and Nestor boiled it down to a step-by-step recipe that would work every time.

Nestor and Kane each rang up a few jackpots, then broke for a celebratory dinner, at which they planned their next move. They would have to expand beyond the Fremont before the casino noticed how much they were winning. Fortunately, Game Kings are ubiquitous in Vegas, installed everywhere from the corner 7-Eleven to the toniest luxury casino. They mapped out their campaign and then headed back to Kane's home for the night.

Kane lived in a spacious house at the far northeast edge of town. His Game King was in the foyer. A spare bedroom down the hall was devoted entirely to a model train set, an elaborate, detailed miniature with tracks snaking and climbing through model towns, up hills, across bridges, and through tunnels, every detail perfect. The home's centerpiece was the living room with its three Steinway grand pianos. Kane is a virtuoso pianist; in the early 1980s he was a leading dance accompanist in the Chicago area, and even today he sells recordings under the vanity label Keynote Records. He left the professional music world only after failing to advance in the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Now he ran a manage­ment consulting practice that claimed one-third of the Fortune 100 as clients.

Kane's business was lucrative, so he was accustomed to handling money. But now that they were on the verge of a windfall, he was worried about Nestor; he could see his younger friend returning every cent to the casinos at the roulette tables or blowing it all on frivolities. “If you had a million dollars, what 10 things would you do?” Kane asked him. He wanted Nestor to make a list and really think through his priorities.

Nestor started a list, but it would prove unnecessary. After another day at the Fremont, they branched out. To their surprise, the button sequence didn't work. Over the following days, they explored the Hilton, the Cannery, then the Stratosphere, Terrible's, the Hard Rock, the Tropicana, the Luxor, and five other casinos, drawing the same dismal results everywhere. For some reason, the Game King glitch was only present at the Fremont.


At the end of a frustrating week, Nestor headed to the airport for his return flight with just $8,000 in winnings. As a final insult, he lost $700 in a video poker machine while waiting for his plane.

Kane decided to wring what he could from the four Fremont machines. He learned to speed up the process by using the Game King's Double Up feature, which gave players a chance to double their winnings or lose everything. Respectable payouts that might once have satisfied Kane were garbage now. After five weeks using the new strategy, Kane had pocketed more than $100,000 from the Fremont.

Unsurprisingly, the Fremont noticed. In modern casinos, every slot machine in the house is wired to a central server, where statistical deviations stick out like a fifth ace. The four machines under the Chinese food sign shot to the top of the Fremont's “loser list” of underperforming games: They'd gone from providing the casino a reliable $14,500 a month to costing it $75,000 in May alone.

On May 25, a slot manager approached Kane after one of his wins and announced that he was disabling the Double Up feature on all of the Game Kings—he was aware that Kane used the option copiously, and he figured it must have something to do with his run of luck.

Kane took the development in stride: The bug, not the Double Up, was the real secret of his success. But he was in for a shock. The next time he played the Game King, the magic button sequence no longer worked. In an instant, the Fremont was no better than all the other casinos that had been immune to the glitch.

He phoned Nestor, who processed the news. With the Double Up option turned on, the bug worked; turned off, it didn't. Whatever internal stew of code made the Game King exploitable, Nestor concluded, the Double Up option had been a key ingredient the whole time. They just hadn't known it.

This wasn't bad news at all. It was the missing link. It explained why the bug had failed them everywhere but at the Fremont. Most casinos don't enable Double Up because it's unpopular with players. But that could easily be changed. High rollers and slot aficionados often have favorite game variants or features that aren't available by default but can be enabled by any passing slot attendant.

Nestor purchased two dress shirts and caught another flight to Las Vegas, where he joined Kane at Harrah's. Row after row of Game Kings were waiting, and, true to the plan, the staff didn't hesitate when Kane and Nestor asked for Double Up to be enabled.

Nestor got the first significant winning hand of the trip: four fours and a kicker for $500. He tapped the magic sequence, hit Cash Out, and watched with delight as his $500 became a $10,000 jackpot. He tipped the slot attendant $20.

There were no limits now. They could play anywhere and beat the house wherever they went. Nestor, who’d been scraping by on a $1,000-a-month welfare check, saw a whole new future unfolding: home ownership, an investment account, security, better clothes, and gifts for his friends back home. For his part, Kane was already well on his way to erasing the massive losses he’d suffered since moving to Sin City.

Working as a team had its advantages. While experimenting with the bug, they discovered that they could trigger a jackpot on the same hand more than once: All they had to do was lower the denomination again and repeat the steps to activate the glitch. They could effectively replay their win over and over, as much as they wanted. It was a risky play—even the busiest casino might notice the same player repeatedly winning with the same hand. But now that they were playing together, Kane and Nestor could ride on each other's jackpots. Nestor won $4,000 with four aces; then, after waiting a bit, Kane slid over to the same machine and replayed the hand for another $4,000.

They could even piggyback on other players' wins. No longer confined to four low-limit slots at a single casino, they prowled the floor at Harrah's looking for empty machines still showing a player's jackpot. Once they got an attendant to turn on Double Up, it took only seconds to replay the hand at up to 10 times the original value. Video poker wasn't even gambling anymore. “You had complete control over how much you could win,” Nestor says. “If you wanted to go to a casino and win $500,000 in one day, you could win $500,000 in one day.”

At the end of the evening, Nestor says they went to his cheap hotel room at Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon to settle up. As the benefactor of Kane's discovery, Nestor had agreed to give his old friend half his winnings. But now that the cash was rolling in, he was having second thoughts about the arrangement.

Every jackpot, he realized, was being reported to the IRS, and he'd already won enough from the bug to propel him into a higher tax bracket. If he paid half to Kane off the top, he might wind up without the reserves to pay his tax debt come April of the following year. He broached the subject with Kane: He'd be more comfortable holding on to the money until his taxes were paid. It was just a year. He'd happily give Kane half of his post-tax winnings then.

Kane was indignant but not surprised; leave it to Nestor to turn even free money into a problem to obsess over. He insisted Nestor honor his agreement, and Nestor grew more agitated, his voice rising in pitch. “What am I doing? Why am I even doing this?” he complained. “I'm not winning any money doing this if I'm giving you all this up front.”

Kane finally agreed to accept a third of Nestor's $20,000 take for the day. Nestor says he counted out $6,000 in hundreds onto an end table, and Kane said good night.

The tension between the men lingered the next day at the Wynn, a towering upscale supercasino with more than 1,300 slots. They played side by side, raking in money and continuing to argue over the split. Nestor was now of the opinion that he shouldn't have to pay Kane anything. It was Nestor, after all, who'd figured out that the Double Up feature was part of the bug. That should make them square.

“This was my gift to you,” Kane shot back testily. “If you'd found this bug instead of me, you would never have told me about it.”

The accusation stung. Nestor gaped at his friend, then he stood and walked away from the machine.

The next day Nestor nursed his hurt feelings with a solo trip to the Rio. He found a Game King displaying four aces and a kicker and hit it for $5,600. Then he wandered into the high-limit room and found another four aces. He punched this one twice: $20,000 at a $5 denomination, then, after a decent interval, $8,000 at the $2 level. Nestor's records show that he eventually left the casino with about $34,000 in his pockets. He didn't need Kane at all. “There was so much money to be made, what did it even matter?” he says.

On his last day in Vegas, Nestor continued his solo run, hitting a Game King at the Wynn for a combined $61,000. Back in his room at Bill's, he added up his winnings: He was going home with $152,250 in cash in his luggage. And he wasn't done yet. There were casinos in Pennsylvania, too, where he could operate without the slightest risk of Kane knowing what he was up to—or demanding a cut up front.

After Nestor left, Kane tore into Vegas with a vengeance. Official numbers have never been released, and Kane declined to speak for this article, but the FBI would later tally Kane's winnings at more than $500,000 from eight different casinos. The Wynn, where Kane kept four nines on one Game King for days, was the biggest loser at $225,240.

Back in Pennsylvania, Nestor targeted the newly opened casino at the Meadows Racetrack in Washington County. In contrast to Kane, who played the bug with joyless, businesslike intensity, Nestor was voluble and chatty at the Meadows. He dressed smartly and, according to court documents, brought along a small entourage for company: his roommate, a retired cop named Kerry Laverde; and Patrick Loushil, a server at Red Lobster who agreed to collect some of Nestor's jackpots for him, so they wouldn't all show up on Nestor's tax bill. Nestor hammed it up every time he won, gushing excitedly to the slot workers—“I'm so excited! Here, feel my heart!”—and tipping generously.

But it all began to unravel the night Kane found himself waiting for a payout at the Silverton. The casino's head of security stood just outside the slot area. Kane paced and huffed, spun the swivel chair back and forth like a metronome, and complained to passing slot attendants. Finally, three men strode up to him. The head of security directed Kane to an alcove, handcuffed him, and escorted him away from the video poker machines.

An armed agent from the Gaming Control Board arrived soon after. He sealed the machines Kane had been playing on with orange evidence tape and collected Kane from the back room, where he'd been handcuffed to a chair. Kane's wallet and the $27,000 in his pocket were confiscated, and he was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on suspicion of theft.

After a night in jail, Kane was released. On Monday he called Nestor to warn him that the bug had been discovered. He sounded more upset than nestor had ever heard him. “Stay out of the casinos,” Kane said. “Do not go back to the casinos.”

Nestor's heart sank for his old friend. It was painful to imagine Kane suffering the indignity of a night in jail, mug shots, fingerprints, being treated like a common criminal. But after the call, Nestor talked himself into an alternate theory. What if there'd been no arrest? What if Kane suspected—as he must have—that Nestor was using the bug and had made up the story about the Silverton to scare Nestor into stopping, so Kane could have the exploit all to himself? By this time Nestor had been back in Pennsylvania three weeks and had already won nearly $50,000 from the Meadow's Game King.

He decided to ignore Kane's story and started planning his next trip to the Meadows.

Three days later, in Las Vegas, engineers from the Nevada Gaming Control Board's Technology Division descended on the Silverton. The forensics investigation of the Game King scam had fallen to John Lastusky, a 25-year-old clean-cut USC computer engineering graduate.

Lastusky pulled up the game history on the two machines Kane had played and reviewed the wins, then slid out the logic trays, the metal shelves housing the Game King's electronic guts, and checked the six EPROMs containing the machines' core logic, graphics, and sound routines. There was no sign of tampering. He confiscated the logic trays and packed them up for the trip back to headquarters.

Housed in an anonymous office park near the airport, the GCB's Technology Division was formed in the mid-1980s to police video gambling as it began its Nevada ascent. The division helps set the rigorous standards that gamemakers like IGT must meet to deploy machines in the Silver State. A 3,000-square-foot laboratory at the back of the office is packed end to end with slot machines in various states of undress—some powered down, some in maintenance mode, others stripped to their bare electronics, though most are configured as they would be on a gaming floor.

A smaller, locked-down room adjacent to the lab is more important: It houses a permanent repository of the source and executable code for every version of game software ever approved in Nevada—more than 30,000 programs in all. The code vault is at the center of the gaming board's massive software integrity operation. Every new addition is carefully examined: Is the random number generator random enough? Does the game pay out at the advertised rate? Is there logic where there shouldn't be? “We're not necessarily looking for something nefarious, but the goal is to ensure the integrity of the product,” says division chief Jim Barbee.

There's a real, if mostly unrealized, danger of gaming software being backdoored. The concept was proven in 1995, when one of the GCB's own staffers, Ron Harris, went bad. Harris modified his testing unit to covertly reprogram the EPROMs on the machines he was auditing. His new software commanded the machine to trigger a jackpot upon a particular sequence of button presses—like a Konami Code for cash. He was eventually caught, and he served two years in prison.

HOW THEY BEAT THE HOUSE
The “Double Up bug” lurking in the software of Game King video poker machines sur­vived undetect­ed for nearly seven years, in part because the steps to repro­duce it were so complex. John Kane and Andre Nestor experi­mented until they could trig­ger it at will.



1. Locate a Game King video poker machine con­figured for multi-denomination play. If you're in Las Vegas, you're probably already standing next to one.


2. Flag down a slot attendant and ask them to enable the Double Up option. Say thank you and smile until they walk away.


3. Insert money or a voucher and select the lowest denomination level offered by the machine—for example, $1 per credit on a $1, $2, $5, $10 machine.


4. Choose your favorite game variant—Triple Double Bonus Poker is fun—and start playing.


5. Keep playing at the $1 level until you win a big hand. An $800 royal flush is perfect.


6. With your royal flush showing but not yet cashed out, hit the More Games button on the touchscreen and select a different game variation. Play it until you score a win.


7. Insert more money or a voucher into the machine.


8. Touch the More Games button again, and change to the maximum denomination—in this case, $10 per credit. Then return to your original $800 royal flush.


9. Press the Cash Out button. “Jackpot! $8,000” will appear on the screen and the light on the top of the machine will illuminate. Congratulations!


10. Wait for the slot attendant to show up with an IRS form W-2G (“certain gam­bling winnings”). Once you've signed it, they'll get the machine to spit out a jackpot ticket.
BRATISLAV MILENKOVIC

That stain on the board's integrity haunts the division to this day. But by all evidence, the division's paranoia, coupled with the game industry's self-interest, have kept video gambling code clean and mostly free of exploitable bugs. That made the Game King case an intriguing puzzle for Lastusky. Armed with the surveillance footage of Kane in action, Lastusky sat at one of the Game Kings in the lab and began experimenting. Within a few days he was able to reliably reproduce the exploit himself. He gave his findings to IGT, which rushed out a warning to its customers advising them to immediately disable the Double Up option. “Replacement programs are being expedited,” the company explained.

Every Game King on the planet running a vulnerable version would need a patch. The upgrade process would be grueling. When an operating system like Windows or OS X has a security bug, customers can download the patch in a few minutes over the Internet. Slot machines aren't online. New programs are burned onto EPROMs by the manufacturer and shipped in the mail in plastic tubes.

Blind to the firestorm erupting in Vegas, Nestor spent the rest of July and most of August playing at the Meadows, until August 31, when the casino finally got suspicious and refused to pay Nestor on a four of a kind. Nestor protested but walked away, breaking into a run as he reached the parking garage.

Nestor was up more than $480,000. The Game King ride was over, but he had enough money to last him forever.

At 1:30 pm on October 6, 2009, a dozen state and local police converged on Andre Nestor's split-level condo on a quiet, tree-lined street in Swissvale. He was dozing on his living room couch when the banging started. “State police! Open up!” The battering ram hit the door seconds later, splintering the frame and admitting a flood of cops into the house.

Nestor says he started toward the stairs, his hands over his head, when he came face-to-face with a trooper in full riot gear. “Get on the floor!” yelled the trooper, leveling his AR-15 at Nestor's face. Nestor complied. The cop ratcheted the handcuffs on Nestor's wrists, yanked him to his feet, and marched him into the kitchen.

For the next two hours, Nestor watched helplessly, handcuffed to a kitchen chair, while the police ransacked his neat home. They flipped over his mattress, ripped insulation from his ceiling, rifled his PC. At about 4 pm, Nestor's roommate, Laverde, arrived home and was arrested on the spot as an accomplice to Nestor's crimes.

It was the first major gambling scandal in Pennsylvania since the state had legalized slots in 2004. The media portrayed Nestor as a real-life Danny Ocean, and prosecutors hit him with 698 felony counts, ranging from theft to criminal conspiracy. The district attorney seized every penny of Nestor's winnings and gave it back to the Meadows. Nestor and Laverde spent about 10 days in the county jail before making bail.

A defiant Nestor vowed to fight the case—no jury would convict a gambler, he was certain, for beating a slot machine at its own game. But on January 3, 2011, when it was time for jury selection, Nestor was hit with another surprise. Two FBI agents showed up and pulled him from the Washington County courthouse. The Justice Department had taken over the case. Nestor and Kane had both been charged federally in Las Vegas.

As the agents walked him to their car, Nestor stopped in front of a television camera and let loose. “I'm being arrested federally now—for winning at a slot machine!” he shouted in disbelief. “This is what they do to people! They put a machine on the floor, and if it has programming that doesn't take your money and you win on their machine, they will throw you in jail!”

The Las Vegas prosecutors charged Nestor and Kane with conspiracy and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Passed in 1986, the CFAA was enacted to punish hackers who remotely crack computers related to national defense or banking. But in the Internet age the government had been steadily testing the limits of the law in cases that didn't involve computer intrusion in the usual sense. Kane and Nestor, the government argued, exceeded their otherwise lawful access to the Game King when they knowingly exploited a bug. The casinos only authorized gamers to play by the rules of video poker. “To allow customers to access previously played hands of cards at will, would remove the element of chance and obviate the whole purpose of gambling,” assistant US attorney for the District of Nevada Michael Chu argued in a court filing. “It would certainly be contrary to the rules of poker.”

The defense attorneys pushed for dismissal of the computer hacking charge, on the grounds that anything the Game King allowed players to do through its interface was “authorized access” by definition: The whole point of playing slots is to beat the machine, and it's up to the computer to set and enforce limits. “All these guys did is simply push a sequence of buttons that they were legally entitled to push,” says Leavitt, Kane's attorney.

The pretrial motions dragged on for more than 18 months, while in the larger legal landscape, the CFAA was going under a microscope for the first time since its passage. In January 2013, coder and activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide after being charged under the same law for bulk-downloading academic articles without permission, spurring calls for reform. Three months later, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out computer hacking charges in a closely watched case against David Nosal, a former executive at a corporate recruiting firm who persuaded three employees to leak him information from the firm's lead database. The Ninth Circuit found that pilfering contacts doesn't become computer hacking just because the data came from a computer instead of a copy machine.

Seeing parallels to the Game King prosecution, the judge overseeing Kane and Nestor's case ordered the government to justify the hacking charge. The prosecutors didn't even try, opting instead to drop the charge—leaving only an ill-fitting “conspiracy to commit wire fraud” count remaining.

Prosecutors had a weak hand, and they knew it. As a December 3, 2013, trial date approached, the Feds made Kane and Nestor separate but identical offers: The first one to agree to testify against the other would walk away with five years of probation and no jail time.

The old gambling buddies had one more game to play together. It was the Prisoner's Dilemma. Without speaking, they both arrived at the optimal strategy: They refused the offer. A few months later, the Justice Department dropped the last of the charges, and they were free.

Kane and Nestor haven't spoken since 2009. After his Silverton arrest, Kane began recording classical music in his house and uploading the videos to a YouTube channel. Last March, after the federal case was dropped, he sent a CD of some of his performances to his high school piano teacher. “I'm essentially now retired from a career in business, have remained single, leading a quiet suburban life,” he wrote.

Nestor's greatest regret is that he let the Game King bug come between him and Kane. “I didn't want it to go that far,” he says. “I thought he and I were friends long enough that these kinds of issues didn't need to happen.” He claims he always intended to pay Kane his cut from the secret jackpots. Now he can't. His roommate, Laverde, signed over Nestor's money in exchange for avoiding a trial of his own. (There are no court filings to suggest that Kane's winnings were seized.) Nestor says the Meadows still has his winnings, and the IRS is chasing him for $239,861.04 in back taxes, interest, and penalties—money he doesn't have.

If there's one silver lining, it's that Nestor has been banned from Pennsylvania casinos. He still gambles occasionally in neighboring states, but his more pressing addiction right now is Candy Crush, which he plays on a cheap Android tablet. He cleared 515 levels in two months, using a trick he found on the Internet to get extra lives without paying.

Dan Colman being refreshingly honest despite winning many millions, some say he's biting the hand that feeds him but his views are open.

First off, I don’t owe poker a single thing. I’ve been fortunate enough to benefit financially from this game, but I have played it long enough to see the ugly side of this world. It is not a game where the pros are always happy and living a fulfilling life. To have a job where you are at the mercy of variance can be insanely stressful and can lead to a lot of unhealthy habits. I would never in a million years recommend for someone to try and make it as a poker pro.

It is also not a game where the amateurs are always happy to be losing their money for the sake of entertainment. The losers lose way more money at this game than winners are winning. A lot of this is money they can’t afford to lose. This is fine of course because if someone is dumb enough to gamble with money they cant afford to lose, that’s their problem. I’m not really buying that though. In a perfect world, markets are based on informed consumers making rational transactions. In reality, sadly, that’s not the case. Markets are based on advertising trying to play on peoples impulses and targeting their weaknesses in order for them to make irrational decisions. I get it if someone wants to go and play poker on their own free will, but I don’t agree with gambling being advertised just like I don’t agree with cigarettes and alcohol being advertised.

It bothers me that people care so much about poker’s well-being. As poker is a game that has such a net negative effect on the people playing it. Both financially and emotionally.

As for promoting myself, I feel that individual achievements should rarely be celebrated. I am not going to take part in it for others and I wouldn’t want it for myself. If you wonder why our society is so infatuated by individuals and their success, and being a baller, it is not that way for no reason. It is there because it serves a clear purpose. If you get people to look up to someone and adhere to the “gain wealth, forget all but self” motto, then you can get them to ignore the social contract which is very good for power systems. Also it serves as a means of distraction to get people to not pay attention to the things that do matter.

These are just my personal views. And yes, I realize I am conflicted. I capitalize off this game that targets peoples weaknesses. I do enjoy it, I love the strategy part of it, but I do see it as a very dark game.

buzzer ty for posting that.it was an excellent read

the John Kane story

Glad you enjoyed it.

After starting as a bookmaker at the Mount Vernon greyhound track in his native Glasgow, John Banks soon established himself, in the 1960s, as one of the leading racecourse bookmakers of his generation. He was flamboyant, some would say flash, but there is no telling the respect he engendered in his fellow bookmakers and the punters. He was prepared to 'stand' horses for huge amounts, and famously lost £60,000 when Persian War won the 1970 Champion Hurdle. In the same month, he might have lost nearly three times as much on the Lincoln Handicap at Doncaster, but just escaped.

In a prep race for Cheltenham, Persian War had run against Orient War, one of Banks's many horses, at Nottingham. Orient War's jockey told Banks that he could hear Persian War gurgling up the home straight, and that persuaded Banks to lay him heavily for the Champion. Banks, always outwardly magnanimous in defeat, was dining in the Queen's Hotel in Cheltenham on the evening after the Champion Hurdle, and sent over a bottle of champagne to Henry Alper, Persian War's owner who was at another table.

A few days later Banks was more successful - but he had to sweat. When Prince de Galles was favourite for the Lincoln, Banks fielded against him to such an extent that he stood to lose £156,000. Lester Piggott failed by a neck to land the gamble, and Banks had one of several notable victories over Ladbrokes, and their supremo Cyril Stein, who had been among the biggest backers of Prince de Galles.

Banks was extremely active off-course with 34 betting shops, which he referred to as 'money factories'. He sold them to Mecca in 1972 for a reputed £1 million. David McAllister, his right-hand man at the time, recalls some of the pioneering markets Banks established from his head office in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. 'He introduced handicap betting on the football and when Muhammad Ali fought Sonny Liston we stayed open through the night. He took bets on Come Dancing . In 1965, John even bet on when Goldie the eagle would be caught after he escaped from London Zoo.'

Banks was the master of self-publicity. He gave out yellow badges at the races, 'John Banks is my bookie', and would travel to the track by yellow Rolls Royce, E-type Jaguar or private plane.

Before his infamous 'warning off' for three years from 1978 for paying the jockey John Francome for information, Banks dominated the betting rings of the 1960s and 1970s, something that intensely annoyed Stein at Ladbrokes. Stein set out to put Banks in his place, and failed.

A story told by one of Banks's racecourse employees of the time, Jim Murphy, sums up that period. As much as Stein tried, Banks was one step ahead. Stein was using another bookmaker to send money back to the course to affect the market, but Banks worked this out and decided to do something about it. At one Newcastle meeting, a Banks horse, Thika, was down to run. The night before the race, Banks instructed McAllister to ring the suspect bookie first thing in the morning. McAllister was to place a bet of £100 on Thika. If Banks was right about the bookie's links with Ladbrokes, the bookie would be sure to contact Stein to tell him about the bet. Banks was expecting Stein to put two and two together and make five. And he was right.

It was the early stages of betting at the track and Ladbrokes reps were running around the ring backing Thika. One approached Banks himself, asking for £2,000 at 7-2. Banks played coy and laid 7-2 to £50. This made the rep even more certain that Banks was backing his own horse, so he asked for £2,000 at the new price of 3-1. Another £50 was laid. The price was now 5-2. Once again Stein's man went in, asking for '£5,000 to £2,000'. 'It's a bet,' said Banks.

The message came for the Ladbrokes men to put more money on Thika.

'What's the price now?' one asked Banks. 'Three to one,' he replied, and turned his back to face the members' enclosure. The price started to go out to 4-1, then 5-1 and Stein's employees panicked. One of them got on the blower: 'The horse is drifting now, what should we do?'

'Of course it is drifting, Banks must have backed it at starting price. Put more money on,' was the office's response. Thika trailed in down the field. Stein and Ladbrokes had been routed.

Other bookies took a pasting, too. When Banks's pilot, a former Qantas man called John Grindon, became well known around the tracks, Banks had an idea for a ruse at Thirsk. Banks asked Grindon: 'You know Mr Joyce, the bookmaker? He was with us in the plane the other day. Go and have a fiver on my horse, Stardale, with him.'

Grindon was rather distinctive in the betting ring in his full pilot's uniform. Joyce fell for the ploy and sent his men round the ring backing Stardale. When Stardale ran appallingly, it was not only Joyce who was distressed. Grindon told Banks: 'I thought you knew more about this business, I lost a fiver on that.'

'But I gave you the fiver!' said Banks, who had had a good bet on the winner, at odds augmented by the bogus gamble on Stardale.

When Banks returned from his enforced exile - he appealed against his ban but failed - his flamboyance and brashness had gone. He had toned down his act, kept out of the public eye and many thought he had been tamed. But he had, as one of his daughters, Sandy, puts it 'discovered life', spending more time with his family and taking up golf.

After his return to the course in 1981, he may have been less noticeable, but was still razor sharp, as two members of the betting fraternity discovered on a train from London to York. A noted backer, Johnny 'Lights' Hurndall, and bookmaker John Jenkins were looking for someone to play cards and Banks volunteered.

'What are you playing?' he said.

'Kalookie,' said Lights.

'I'm not sure I know that one. How many cards do you get?' asked Banks.

'Thirteen, John. Are you in?'

'I'm in,' came the reply.

By Peterborough, the game was over. Lights and Jenkins had not a penny between them, and as they arrived at the track in York, Lights was moaning to Murphy: 'I haven't got any readies, so I'm going to have to have all my bets on credit. He's a bit lucky at cards is Banko.' Murphy intimated that luck may not have played much of a part.

But Banks had a problem. His clerk, the man who wrote down the bets, had not turned up. Murphy had the solution: 'Lights knows how to clerk.'

So Lights ate humble pie and clerked for Banks all day. Six races, six winning races for the bookmaker. On the train home, Banks handed his substitute member of staff his wages for the day: £1,800. Lights' eyes nearly popped out of his head.

Banks continued to lay frighteningly big bets. His son, Geoffrey, now a rails' bookmaker in his own right, recalls a day at the 1990 Cheltenham Festival. 'He laid an each-way bet on a 66-1 shot, New Halen, in the last race on the second day to another bookmaker, and it won. He lost £62,500 on that one bet, but you wouldn't have known it. He was quite fearless and cracked away for the rest of the meeting. He finished up winning good money. There never was a bookmaker like him for turning things in his favour.'

When throat cancer took hold, Banks did not want nurses. He insisted that his wife, Anne Marie, and daughters nurse him. After all, as his daughter Joanna, speaking at his memorial service last Thursday, said: 'He was rather accustomed to getting his own way.'

A big step back in time

As towns sprouted in the 19th-century American West — outside Army forts, at river crossings along wagon trails, in mining districts and at railheads — some of the first structures built were recreational facilities. Recreation for the almost totally male population inevitably meant the triple-W vices of the frontier: whiskey-drinking, whoring and wagering.

Saloons, brothels and gambling halls would appear almost overnight. In the early camps, the structure might be only a lantern-lit, dirt-floored tent, the bar simply a board stretched between two whiskey barrels, the prostitution facility just a cot in a wagon bed for the use of a single female strumpet, and the gambling outfit only a rickety table, a few chairs and a greasy, dog-eared deck of cards. As the towns grew and prospered, these primitive facilities were replaced by one-story wooden buildings with false fronts to make them appear even larger. And if the community developed into a city, saloons were housed in imposing brick buildings with ornate bars, huge back-bar mirrors and brilliant chandeliers. Some brothels became elegantly furnished parlor houses with attractive 'boarders' managed by madams whose names were famous throughout the West. The best-known sporting men of the West presided over and patronized gambling houses that were often the most impressive and elaborately accoutered structures of the cities.

The popularity of gambling in the West can be attributed mostly to the fact that all who left the relative safety and comfort of the East to seek fame and fortune on the frontier were, in a sense, natural-born gamblers. In the early West, gambling was considered a profession, as legitimate a calling as the clergy, the law or medicine.

During the 25-year period prior to the Civil War, gambling flourished in the towns along the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis and was a staple attraction on virtually every riverboat. This golden age of gambling produced some of the most memorable practitioners of the art — legendary professionals like Charles Cora, J.J. Bryant, Jimmy Fitzgerald, John Powell, Charles Starr and Napoleon Bonaparte 'Poley' White.

One of the popular gambling games of the 19th century was a bluffing game that evolved into American poker. Another, vingt-et-un (twenty-one), introduced into the United States through the predominately French community of New Orleans, we now call blackjack. Still another was Mexican monte. But undoubtedly the most popular gambling game in the West was faro, which drew its name from the Egyptian pharaohs depicted on the back of the cards.

The foremost faro player on the Mississippi was Italian immigrant Charles Cora. After winning $85,000 and breaking several faro banks in New Orleans, Vicksburg and Natchez during one six-month period, he was banned from many resorts. J.J. Bryant, perhaps the best-known professional gambler on the lower Mississippi, lost thousands to Cora.

Jimmy Fitzgerald and Charles Starr were early standard-setters of the sartorial splendor that became a hallmark of the 600 to 800 professional gamblers plying their trade on the river. Their expensive black suits and boots were offset by snow-white ruffled shirts and dazzling brocaded vests. Ostentatious jewelry advertised the gambler's prosperity. Huge rings adorned his fingers. A stickpin with a large stone, called a 'headlight,' sparkled on his chest. In a pocket of his 'flowerbed' vest was an enormous pocket watch adorned with precious jewels and attached to a heavy golden chain that draped across the gambler's chest.

The discovery of gold in California and the resulting rush of 1849 attracted many of the paddle-wheel and Mississippi River town gamblers to San Francisco, the new El Dorado of the West. By the early 1850s Portsmouth Square, the center of the City by the Bay, was ringed by large gambling houses where the doors never closed and enormous sums changed hands over the tables.

There was the Parker House, originally built by its owner, Robert A. Parker, as a hotel, but quickly converted to a casino as the gambling craze swept San Francisco. A large room downstairs contained three tables for faro, two for monte, one for roulette and a seventh for any other game desired. Professional gamblers paid $10,000 a month for the privilege of conducting their games in this room. A smaller room behind the bar went for $3,500 a month. Jack Gamble, an appropriately named sporting man, leased the entire second floor for $60,000 and outfitted all the rooms for games of chance. It was estimated that at the peak of the California Gold Rush upward of half a million dollars was stacked on the tables of the Parker House on any given day.

Flanking the Parker House on either side were two other famous resorts, Samuel Dennison's Exchange and the El Dorado Gambling Saloon, owned by partners James McCabe and Thomas J.A. Chambers. Other houses on Portsmouth Square were the Verandah, the Aguila de Oro, the Bella Union, the Empire, the Arcade, the Varsouvienne, the Mazourka, the Ward House, the St. Charles, the Alhambra, La Souciedad, the Fontine House and the Rendezvous. As indicated by the several French names, some of these establishments were owned and operated by gambling syndicates from France, a country long known for its love of gaming.

As mining camps sprang up and grew in the hills surrounding San Francisco, the gamblers followed. Soon elaborate temples devoted to the goddess Chance were running day and night in Sacramento, Columbia, Nevada City and other Sierra boom towns.Among the former Mississippi riverboat gamblers who gained prominence on the California scene were Cora and Bryant. In San Francisco Cora continued to enjoy remarkable success at the faro tables, but luck completely deserted him after he resolved a difficulty with U.S. Marshal William H. Richardson on November 18, 1855, by shooting him to death on a San Francisco street. Shootings and stabbings were common occurrences in the city, and had this murder been committed a few months earlier Cora might have escaped punishment on the ancient claim of self-defense. But violence had reached such proportions in the city that residents were calling for reorganization of the Vigilance Committee that had been so effective against the criminal element in 1851. In that year vigilantes had executed or banished from the city many miscreants, and now, five years later, they felt another no-nonsense cleansing was called for. They tried Cora, found him guilty and on May 22, 1856, hanged him from the roof of their headquarters building.

Bryant's California fortunes were better. After his arrival, he had purchased the Ward House, refurbished and renamed it the Bryant House, and soon became one of the most prosperous and influential men in San Francisco. In 1850, when the first election for sheriff was held in the city, he ran for the office. Although he spent $50,000 on his campaign and bet another $10,000 that he would win, he was defeated by the popular Jack Hays, a celebrated former Texas Ranger. Bryant sold his gambling house and moved on to the outlying camps, where he was financially successful. By the time he left California in 1854, he had reportedly sent $110,000 in winnings to his wife while maintaining a lavish lifestyle for himself. He resumed his gambling operations in the South and continued to prosper, but at the end of the Civil War he found himself destitute, as his wealth was in worthless Confederate currency. He was reduced to 'roping suckers' into a sharper's crooked game. One of the suckers took offense and in 1868 shot him dead.

With the 1860s came the great mining excitement of the fabled Comstock Lode in Nevada. Most of the gambling activity in the Comstock was centered in Virginia City and nearby satellite communities. As in San Francisco, gambling houses dominated the main streets of the new towns. At the height of the boom an agent of the U.S. Geological Survey, studying recreational opportunities in Virginia City, found that the town of 18,000 had a gambling house for every 150 inhabitants. The best known of the many resorts in Virginia City was the Gentry and Crittenden Gambling Saloon, which featured a no-limit faro table presided over by the famous dealer Hamilton Baker. Other houses of note were Tom Peasley's Sazarac, named after a new cocktail introduced by Julia Bulette, the queen of the town's red-light district; the Delta Saloon, owned and operated by Jim Orndorff and Jack Magee; and Tom Buckner's Sawdust Corner. Other prominent gamblers of Virginia City in its heyday were James 'Kettle Belly' Brown, Matt Redding, Jesse Bright, Gus Botto, Billy Dormer, Tom Diamond, Miles Goodman, Joe Dixon, Ramon Montenegro, Grant Isrial and Joe Stewart.

Gold Hill and Carson City were also outstanding towns for the sporting element during the Comstock bonanza years. The undisputed top man in the game at Gold Hill was William DeWitt Clinton Gibson, who was later elected to the Nevada Senate. The Headquarters, the Magnolia and the Occidental were all first-class gambling halls in Carson, and the leading sporting men were Vic Mueller, Tump Winston, Henry Decker, Gus Lewis, Mark Gaige and Adolph Shane. Dick Brown ran two establishments — the Silver State Saloon on the divide between Virginia City and Gold Hill, and the Bank Exchange in Carson City.

One of the most important events of the late 1860s was the completion of the transcon-tinental railroad. As the Union Pacific snaked across the Great Plains to meet the Central Pacific in its historic linkup at Promon-tory, Utah Territory, on May 10, 1869, it produced a number of end-of-track towns that collectively became known as 'Hell on Wheels.' They were gathering points for some of the lowest dregs of the sporting world, including hundreds of tinhorn, thieving gamblers. When the railroad pushed on, most of these towns disappeared. The sporting crowd simply loaded their tents, shacks, whiskey barrels, cots, gambling equipment and other paraphernalia on flatcars and moved to the next location at the end of the line. But a few points remained as permanent communities, and today the cities of North Platte, Neb.; Julesburg, Colo.; and Cheyenne, Wyo., can trace their origins to Hell on Wheels. Most of the honky-tonk crowd who preyed on the railroad construction workers during this period were forgettable small-timers, but a few went on to prominence among the gambling men of the West. Most, like John Bull, 'Canada Bill' Jones, Doc Baggs and Ben Marks, claimed to follow the respected profession of gambling, but were in fact confidence operators who fleeced their victims with three-card monte, thimblerig and other crooked gambling games. When the steel rails at last spanned the country, many of these sure-thing gamblers continued to work their swindles on railroad passengers, using the rail center of Omaha as headquarters.

They joined a large contingentof other crooked gamblers who formed the lowest echelon of the profession. Gambling, with its basic get-rich-quick appeal, had always attracted a criminal element. Perhaps the most famous member of this gallery of rogues was Jefferson Randolph 'Soapy' Smith, who worked his crooked scheme in Colorado for many years. It was Soapy who coined the expression'sure-thing game,' once proudly proclaiming: 'I am no ordinary gambler. The ordinary gambler hazards his own money in an attempt to win another's. When I stake money, it is a sure thing that I win.'

Smith got his start and his nickname from a scam he developed in Leadville, in the Colorado Rockies. He had first worked the thimblerig game, a variation on the three-card monte swindle, which simply seemed to challenge a potential victim's quickness of eye. Manipulating three walnut shells and a pea on a board, he would induce the sucker to bet on which shell concealed the pea, when in fact it was under none of them, for he had palmed it. When that racket grew old, he devised a new scheme based on the same principle that the hand is quicker than the eye. From a pile of paper-covered soap bars he would extract a few, remove the paper and apparently wrap $20 and $50 bills around the bars before replacing the covering. He would then allow members of his audience to select any bar they wished at $5 apiece. Of course, none of them contained any bills, because he had deftly palmed them in the wrapping process.

The decade of the 1870s saw the advent of the great trail drives of Texas Longhorns to the Kansas railheads and the birth of the notorious cow towns of Abilene, Newton, Wichita, Ellsworth and Dodge City. All became great gambling centers during their early days, and some of the most celebrated names in Western history are associated with this period. James Butler 'Wild Bill' Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson are remembered today as fearless lawmen of the cattle towns, but all were professional gamblers who spent many more hours at the faro or poker tables than they ever did patrolling the streets. Joining them were other professional gamblers whose names are remembered today for their gunfighting notoriety: Doc Holliday, Ben Thompson and Luke Short.

It was no accident that many of the top-flight gunfighters of the Western frontier were members of the sporting fraternity. Tough, steel-nerved young men who had acquired gunfighting reputations either in personal difficulties or as boomtown lawmen found themselves in demand as dealers in gambling resorts. There were two reasons for this. First, gunfighters of renown attracted patronage, as miners and cowboys were quick to seize the opportunity to match wits and gambling skills with frontier celebrities across a green felt table. Second, since the open display of large piles of cash was a constant attraction for criminals of all sorts, ranging from sneak thieves to holdup men, the mere presence at the tables of famous personalities known to be adept at the art of the draw and shoot discouraged any attempt to steal.

The 1870s also saw more ore strikes and additional mining districts. New boomtowns quickly emerged, most notably Deadwood in Dakota Territory, Leadville in Colorado, and Tombstone in southern Arizona Territory. All three became gambling meccas, and their names have been associated with some of the most famous Westerners of the 19th century. Wild Bill Hickok was shot to death as he sat in a poker game in a Deadwood saloon, and the hand he held — aces and eights, the 'Dead Man's Hand' — became an enduring legend of the West.

Leadville, 10,000 feet high in the mountains, blossomed almost overnight into the largest city in Colorado, and at one point its boosters attempted to wrest the state capital away from Denver. At its peak, gambling opportunities were afforded in more than 150 resorts ranging from small saloons to elaborate theaters and concert halls. Some of the better known were Tom Kemp's Dance and Gambling Hall, which in 1879 featured vaudeville song-and-dance star Eddie Foy; the Texas House, where proprietors Bailey Youngston and 'Con' Featherly provided a dozen faro tables around the clock; and 'Pop' Wyman's Great Saloon, in which a large sign over the bar read: 'Don't Shoot the Pianist — He's Doing His Darndest.'

Most of the leading Western gamblers, including Ben Thompson, Bat Masterson, Luke Short and Doc Holliday, spent a good deal of time — and money — in Leadville. There is a story that after dropping more than $3,000 at faro one night there, the volatile Thompson in a fury turned over the table, jerked out his six-shooter and shot out all the lights, sending panic-stricken patrons scurrying for the exits. Holliday, suffering one of those streaks of bad luck and near poverty that plagued all gambling men, shot another sporting man named Billy Allen in Leadville in a dispute over a mere $5 debt (see 'Spitting Lead in Leadville: Holliday's Last Stand,' in the December 2003 Wild West).

Tombstone blossomed into a major city in the Arizona desert almost overnight and attracted many prominent professional gamblers, including Masterson, Holliday, Earp and Short. The leading drinking emporium in the boomtown was the Oriental Saloon. Its owner, Mike Joyce, leased the gambling concession to a triumvirate of Western sporting men — Dick Clark, a veteran of the Colorado mining camps; Lou Rickabaugh, a San Francisco sporting man; and Bill Harris, former owner of the famous Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City. When gambling became so popular in the Oriental that it adversely affected business at the other resorts in town, a group of competitors hired Johnny Tyler, a gambler of some gunfighting notoriety, to lead a gang of toughs into the Oriental every night, start a ruckus and intimidate patrons. The Oriental owners retaliated by offering Wyatt Earp, who had acquired a gunfighting reputation of his own, a quarter interest in the business if he would handle Tyler and his cohorts. To help him in this task, Earp employed Doc Holliday and sent for Luke Short and Bat Masterson to come to Tombstone and deal in the Oriental. This squad of gunfighting luminaries was too much for Tyler, who soon left town, and the Oriental returned to its air of decorum and its profitability.

Soon Bat Masterson and Luke Short also departed Tombstone — but not before Short had killed Charlie Storms, another well-traveled professional gambler of note, in a famous gunfight. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday stayed on to gain immortality for their participation in the most celebrated Western showdown of all, the so-called Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Holliday also joined Wyatt in his vendetta ride to avenge the murder of his brother Morgan and the crippling of his brother Virgil. They left Arizona as fugitives wanted for murder, but they returned to their gambling profession and were never tried.

As great cities grew in the West during the 1880s, gambling emporiums grew with them. San Francisco, where gambling had flourished since the first days of the California Gold Rush, now harbored the Barbary Coast, a sin center of worldwide notoriety. Denver, Kansas City, Omaha, Tucson, Hot Springs, Ark., and the Texas cities of Austin, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas were recognized as wide-open for gambling of all sorts — from cheating three-card monte scams to high-stakes poker and faro games in elaborate casinos. It was during this period that the Gamblers' Circuit developed, with professional followers of the goddess Chance traveling around the country, sometimes following the seasons but more often following the latest report of a mining strike or a cattleman's convention.

In the late 1890s, gold was discovered in the Klondike region of Canada's Yukon, and the last great rush to a new mining district was on. Of course, along with the prospectors and mining men who flocked to the Klondike were members of the sporting crowd, the same types who had been early arrivals at every boomtown in the West since the Forty-Niners first arrived in California. They opened saloons, brothels and gambling houses and did a flourishing business separating the miners from their gold dust.

Some of the most colorful professional gamblers of the American West made it to the north country. Wyatt Earp was there. He and his partner, Charlie Hoxie, ran the Dexter Saloon in Nome, which they advertised as 'The Only Second-Class Saloon in Alaska.' When he sold his interest to Hoxie and returned to California, Earp is said to have accumulated $85,000.

George Lewis 'Tex' Rickard, the former city marshal of Henrietta, Texas, joined the rush and ran gambling games, first at Circle City in Alaska and later at Dawson in Yukon Territory. He made and lost a fortune, owned and lost two gambling houses, and made another fortune. It was in the Klondike that he first began promoting prizefights, an enterprise that would lead him into worldwide celebrity as the promoter of the multimillion-dollar-gate bouts of the 1920s featuring heavyweight Jack Dempsey.

The memorable gamblers of the Klondike gold rush included 'Square Sam' Bonnifield, Rickard's mentor, and Louis 'Goldie' Golden, who once won $72,000 and Bonnifield's gambling establishment from Square Sam in a poker game. Goldie lost it all back later when Square Sam, supplied with fresh funds by admirers, cleaned him out. Gambler Harry Woolrich was about to board a steamer to leave the north with $60,000 in winnings when he flipped a half dollar on a faro layout and made what he said was 'one last bet.' Twenty-four hours later, he had lost the $60,000 and his steamer ticket. William F. 'Swiftwater Bill' Gates won $30,000 in a poker game in Nome but achieved national newspaper coverage for his many amorous adventures.

The crooked gamblers seemed to congregate in the north country at the port town of Skagway, where, under the leadership of Soapy Smith, they relieved new arrivals and departing miners of anything of value. In 1898 Smith was grand marshal of a Fourth of July parade in Skagway; four days later Frank Reid, a member of a citizens' committee, shot him dead in a gunfight in which Reid also received a fatal wound.

There were still a few wide-open gambling towns after the turn of the century, most notably the boom mining camps of Nevada, particularly Goldfield, Rawhide and Tonopah. Wyatt Earp and Tex Rickard were there, as well as such colorful gambling notables as George Wingfield, Riley Grannan and 'Diamondfield Jack' Davis.

Wingfield started out earning $25 a day as a dealer in the Tonopah Club, gambled successfully against other houses, invested his winnings in the mines, was worth more than $2 million by age 27 and became a power in Nevada politics. Grannan broke the faro bank in one saloon and bet his $52,000 winnings on one turn of a card against title to the house. He lost. When he contracted pneumonia and died in Rawhide, Herman W. Knickerbocker, a defrocked Methodist minister, delivered a moving eulogy to the famous gambler. Diamondfield Jack got his start as a bodyguard for Wingfield. Goldfield legend has it that when he expected trouble, he became a walking arsenal, wearing three overcoats with a pistol in every pocket, a bowie knife at his belt and a sawed-off shotgun slung across his back. Other fables attached to the man. He was said to have acquired his name from a field of diamonds he owned. The rumor that he had escaped death sentences on five occasions was greatly exaggerated; he had only been condemned to hang once, for a dual murder in Idaho, and had avoided the hangman's noose when another man confessed to the crime.

The great age of Western gambling ended with the closing of the frontier and the rise of antisaloon and woman suffrage reform movements that swept across the nation in the first decades of the 20th century. These led inevitably to constitutional amendments prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages and establishing the enfranchisement of women. State after state passed legislation outlawing casino gambling. Nevada alone bucked the tide. Casino gambling returned in the latter half of the 20th century on Indian reservations and in Las Vegas, a city devoted to gambling. Its great popularity led to legalization in many areas of the country, and now anyone wishing to wager money will have little difficulty in finding a place to do it. But the colorful professional gamblers of the Western frontier are long gone and generally forgotten.

One of the more popular British tribal rites is the celebration of the annual Bank Holiday on the first Monday in August. The day has long featured a gay mass exodus to the seaside, the countryside and the nation's playing fields, sporting arenas and amusement parks, not to mention the neighbourhood pubs. This preoccupation with revelry provides an ideal background for a shady enterprise, and thus it was that the Trodmore Hoax came into full larcenous bloom in London on the Bank Holiday morning of Monday, Aug. 1, 1898.

As usual, the diversions included special race meetings throughout Great Britain, many of them held at small tracks scattered across the countryside. None of these events was so obscure as to be beneath the dignity of London's off-track bookmakers, particularly if a potentially profitable wager appeared. London's bookies were, and are, famed as an obliging breed in this regard. On this festive morning they were up bright and early working the streets, corner shops and pubs, on the usual lookout for a good thing. Along with the routine heavy play on the established tracks, they observed some interest in an obscure meeting in the south-western county of Cornwall called Trodmore. The full Trodmore program was carried on the racing pages of that morning's edition of the widely read London journal Sportsman. The adventurous were making bets on a 3-year-old named Reaper, scheduled to run in the fourth race of a six-race card and quoted at approximate starting odds of 6 to 1.

The bookies were not unduly curious about this flurry of interest in a little-known horse since most of the wagers were placed in the pubs that opened at 10 a.m., where clients were notoriously inclined to spells of poor judgment after a pint or two. Also, operating individually, as they did throughout the sprawling precincts of London and its suburbs, the bookies were not aware of the full extent of the support for the horse. So when the report came that Reaper had won, the bookies were in trouble.

It wasn't that Reaper was really a good horse. Or even a bad horse. The fact was that he was no horse at all. Not only that, there was no fourth race at Trodmore, there was no race meeting at Trodmore, there was, indeed, no such place as Trodmore. These were the basic ingredients of the holiday caper spawned by an organization subsequently vaguely known, and in some quarters greatly admired, as the Trodmore Syndicate. The curious course of this affair is traced in the files of Sportsman and the rival Sporting Life, two London journals at the time engaged in a fierce battle for street sales. It was the reports exclusively in Sportsman that had provided initial information on the phantom meeting.

Although it had been several weeks in the making, the gambit emerged as a full-fledged swindle on the August Bank Holiday morning when the final details of the Trodmore meeting appeared in the Sportsman. The report listed the entries, jockeys, owners, post times, distances, purses, approximate odds and all other pertinent information. In a modest way this was a clear scoop over Sporting Life, which carried not a word of information on the event.

Now a highly reputable and widely read newspaper such as the Sportsman does not treat the publication of such information lightly, and certainly not without having first been satisfied as to its authenticity. In the judgement of the editors, sufficient assurance had been provided by an impressive and highly official-looking mass of correspondence that had begun arriving several weeks before. The first advice concerning the Trodmore meeting had been received in the mails in late July in a letter from the Fox and Hounds Hotel, Trodmore. Preliminary details appeared under the tastefully engraved letterhead of the "Trodmore Hunt Club."

Enclosed in this first missive were all the data required for the official posting of the event: rules, purses, the names of patrons, stewards, sponsors and officials. It was respectfully noted that the Fox and Hounds was Race Headquarters, and that further information would be forthcoming from the Clerk of the Course at that address.

Further information was subsequently received as promised, with letters noting the progress of preparations and listing early entries. The Clerk of the Course also advised the Sportsman that the patrons would be most grateful if word of their modest charitable project could be passed along to the readers. Pleased to receive this information on an event in the west counties, the editors were happy to oblige through the paper's regular race-news columns, but the editors said that unfortunately they would not be able to staff the meeting itself: their west counties correspondent would be busy at a larger event at Newton Abbot. However, if the patrons or the stewards could recommend a reliable person to wire in the results....

Enter Mr. Martin, the gentleman from St. Ives. A few days later a letter bearing his signature appeared in the Sportsman offices in an envelope with a Trodmore postmark. Mr. Martin wrote that he had been informed by the Race Committee of the problem regarding coverage of the Trodmore meeting and said that he would be pleased to offer his services. Later, over the phone, an agreement was reached whereby Mr. Martin would cover the event for the Sportsman at the standard fee of one guinea, full results to be wired at the conclusion of the meeting. At his suggestion, applauded by the Sportsman editors, it was further agreed that the Trodmore results should be exclusive to that paper.

Everything was in great shape as Bank Holiday Monday morning dawned, and a swarm of carefully briefed men from the aforementioned Trodmore Syndicate prepared to make the rounds. Each carried a copy of the Sportsman, turned to the racing section that carried the details of that day's Trodmore program. The tactic was the soft sell and the fast move... concentrate on the pubs, always heavily worked on days like this; have a pint; flash the Sportsman; suggest a fancy for Reaper in the fourth at Trodmore. If faced with any questions or reluctance, back off. Pay cash, and arrange to collect the next day. The agents moved swiftly from pub to pub, and bets were laid and accepted without trouble. Business was brisk right up to the scheduled 1:30 p.m. first post time at the first meeting of the Trodmore Hunt Club in Cornwall.


In what Mr. Martin enthusiastically described as a highly successful and exciting inaugural meeting, the following winners were recorded, along with the official closing odds: First race: Jim, 5 to 4; second race: Rosy, 5 to 1; third race: Spur, 2 to 1; fifth race: Curfew, 6 to 4; sixth race: Fairy Bells, 7 to 4. And, oh yes—fourth race: Reaper, 5 to 1. These results appeared in the Tuesday edition of the Sportsman, which was on the street at 7 a.m. The rival Sporting Life was out shortly after, but with no report from Trodmore. Again clutching copies of their favourite newspaper, the Reaper fanciers swarmed back across London, this time to collect.

At first there were only the normal grumblings as bookies paid off, willing to accept the official results as published in the Sportsman. Then, with just a small portion of the take in the till, there was trouble. It began with a bookie over in Chelsea who balked at paying because the results were not carried in Sporting Life. The fellow said he wasn't quarrelling over the official nature of the lone report, but wanted confirmation of the odds, which just might have been published in error. The agent involved didn't press the matter. He retired quietly, as did his mates across London as word of the challenge sped along the bookies' grapevine. With the enterprise under dangerous, if unsuspecting, scrutiny, the jig was up. Or was it?

Not at official Race Headquarters at the Fox and Hounds, Trodmore, it wasn't. Word from there or thereabouts went out to lie low until Wednesday. And by late Tuesday afternoon the editorial offices of Sporting Life were bombarded with calls from indignant readers demanding to know why they had not carried the Trodmore results. The editors checked, saw that the Sportsman had carried the results, and apologized for their delinquency. One of the late callers was a Mr. Martin, who noted the general indignation and said that he would be pleased to help out by sending the full results, as he had been on hand at the Trodmore meeting in an official capacity. The offer was accepted. It was agreed that Mr. Martin would wire his story later that evening, in time to placate readers of the early Wednesday edition. But then, to make things a little easier for a work shift that was coming straight off a long day's celebrations, it was decided that to save time the Trodmore results would be copied direct from the Sportsman.

The Syndicate men were there waiting when the first edition of Sporting Life appeared, all set to toddle off with the confirmation needed to collect the rest of the bet money. The Trodmore results were there all right, but there was one small problem. The closing price on Reaper, the winner in the fourth, was quoted not at 5 to 1 as in the Sportsman but 5 to 2—the result of a printer's holiday hangover error. The swindle was now in real trouble, and discretion clearly being the better part of valour, the frustrated bettors swiftly and quietly disappeared. It was just as well. The bookies who had paid off began screaming for information on the Trodmore Race Meeting. They were joined by interested fellow professionals, then by the usual outraged public. Who knew anyone connected with the Trodmore Races? Who had witnessed the event? Where, in fact, was Trodmore? Who knew anything about Reaper? Who knew anything about anything?

Swamped with angry calls the two highly embarrassed newspapers tried to get the facts. A check with the post office and telegraph services revealed that despite the Trodmore postmarks on all that official correspondence from the Fox and Hounds Hotel, there was no such town as Trodmore. Not in the county of Cornwall, nor anywhere else in Britain. That information wiped out the Fox and Hounds, the Trodmore track and all the distinguished local citizens who served as patrons, sponsors and stewards. Not to mention Reaper, no matter what the closing price. The few things certain were that some £1,000’s of real money had changed hands, and that there had been a gentleman who went by the name of Mr. Martin—although where he went nobody would ever know. He and the rest of the Trodmore Syndicate simply faded into the British countryside, leaving a baffled racing fraternity wiser by this much: never bet on a horse named Reaper in the fourth unless you have personally checked his teeth.

Reminiscences Of A Stock Operator is one of my favourite books and it's difficult to compound the life of Jesse Livermore


When Jesse Livermore made his first stock trade at the tender age of 15, he didn’t hedge his bets. He consulted the charts he’d compiled working as a chalkboard runner in a Boston brokerage firm, and when the figures for the company in question, Burlington, checked out, he went all in, investing everything he had—all $5—in the railroad. Two days later, he cashed in his shares, for a profit of $3.12.

It was 1892.

Exhilarating, that first taste. The pendulum had begun to swing.

Livermore began to roam the streets of Beantown, frequenting its bucket shops, gambling counters that took bets on stocks without executing actual trades. His ability to recognize patterns in the ticker tape stood him in good stead. In six months, he’d accumulated $1,000. Five years later, it was $10,000—enough to make him persona non grata to every pseudo-broker in the city.

So he moved to New York and graduated to trading with real Wall Street firms. Something, however, was wrong. His system wasn’t delivering as expected. He watched his stake drop, first to $2,500, then to zero. At an age when most contemporary youth were still preoccupied with fraternity smokers and petting, the “Boy Plunger” (turn-of-the-century slang for “reckless gambler”) had already gone through a full cycle of boom and bust.

Livermore decided the problem lay in the lag time between the stock order and the execution of the purchase itself. So he borrowed $500 against future gains. The pendulum began to swing wider. Quickly making back what he’d lost, he increased his stash further, to $50,000. Then, on May 9, 1901, he lost it all, every penny, largely due to the frenzied pace of the day’s trading.

Again he hit the bucket shops, again accumulating a stake that allowed him to get back into the game. He returned to New York with what he termed a “fair-sized roll.” Then, on April 16, 1906, he was hit by a premonition. With no warning, he yielded to a strange urge to sell short a thousand shares of Union Pacific railroad—an urge even he admitted he didn’t understand. Two days later, the San Francisco Earthquake hit. Union Pacific was decimated; he’d made $250,000 literally overnight. Inexplicable, the sudden intuition, but just as inexplicable was what happened next: again trading in shares of Union Pacific, he violated two of his most cherished principles—never heed insider information, and always keep your own counsel—and sold short when a friend tipped him off that the stock was about to tank. It didn’t. His net loss: more than $40,000.

The arcs described by the pendulum continued to widen, the swings to grow ever more vertiginous. During the Panic of 1907, Livermore again shorted the market, earning $1 million in the course of a few days. He then proceeded to lose everything in an attempt to corner the cotton sector, declaring bankruptcy and running up debts of over $1 million by 1916. Once again, he amassed sufficient capital to recover, making first $3 million (in assorted commodities), then $10 million (in wheat). Then came his greatest moment: sensing the impending 1929 crash, he again shorted the market, emerging from the rubble of October 29 with a net profit of $100 million—well over a billion dollars in today’s money.

Five years later, he was bankrupt, his vast fortune completely wiped out, for reasons that remain mysterious even today.

Livermore rallied from his subsequent depression in the late 30s, pooling sufficient energy to write a book detailing his trading principles. But on November 20, 1940, the pendulum swung finally, irrevocably against him. In the cloakroom of the Sherry Netherland Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, he shot himself in the head with a .32 Colt automatic. A suicide note was found scribbled in his notebook: “I am a failure,” it said.

Who was Jesse Livermore? How could the world’s greatest trader, the author of one of the most staggering fortunes America had ever seen, end up hitting the wall in just five years? What drove him to take ever more manic risks with his trades, to the point where the harmonic oscillator of his own speculations ended by ripping him apart?

Livermore himself gives us a clue to his own mystery in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, the book of interviews he wrote with the journalist Edwin Lefèvre:

The speculator’s chief enemies are always boring from within. It is inseparable from human nature to hope and to fear….The successful trader has to fight these two deep-seated instincts. He has to reverse what you might call his natural impulses. Instead of hoping he must fear; instead of fearing he must hope….It is absolutely wrong to gamble in stocks the way the average man does.

The great trader liked to style himself as a dispassionate analyst. Repeatedly in Reminiscences, we find him stepping back from the welter of the trading floor to admonish himself with conclusions drawn from his market smash-ups—conclusions that read like oracular utterances brought down from the sacred mount of traders: “I learned you must give up trying to catch the last eighth, or the first: these two are the most expensive eighths in the world,” and the like. But the excerpt above intimates that perhaps cold-blooded calculation wasn’t the whole story. That beneath the rational exterior lay something that was not rational, that had to do instead with dreams and forebodings and hidden compulsions. That this aloof, seemingly imperturbable man was in fact deeply attuned to the obscure rumblings of chaos.

For chaotic his life was, in spades. His broker, reflecting on his penchant for cruising the Manhattan streets at night in his canary-yellow Rolls Royce in search of young girls, quipped, “When Livermore is speculating, he is thinking of screwing, and when he is screwing he is thinking of speculating.” His first wife, Nettie Jordan, separated from him one year after their wedding, following a tearful scene in which he begged her to pawn her jewels to finance one of his bankruptcies. His second wife, Dorothy Wendt, was an 18-year-old Ziegfield Follies showgirl who responded to Livermore’s philandering by taking up with a Prohibition agent; after separating from both men, she went on to shoot her 16-year-old son, Jesse, Jr., through the chest with a .22-caliber rifle. Both Livermore’s son and his grandson were manic-depressive and suffered from alcoholism. Both committed suicide.

Nor was chaos a mere by-product of Livermore’s personal eccentricities—it was his stock in trade. The Great Bear of Wall Street made his greatest profits when he sold short, that is to say, when he capitalized on other traders’ helplessness in the face of their own hopes and fears. In an age when Wall Street optimism was almost an American religion, he learned to read, and profit by, the dark anxieties that flowed just beneath the surface of the zeitgeist and that were liable to break out at any moment. He was an expert at sensing the nature and scope of mass hysteria, the thresholds at which men begin to panic. It’s no accident, then, that his favorite book was Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the Scottish philosopher Charles Mackay’s dark treatise on the power of the irrational in history. Nor is it an accident that, in seeking to harness the forces of unreason that he knew so intimately, he ended up betrayed by them—betrayed and, ultimately, destroyed.

The man who all his life sought to codify the workings of the market into a foolproof set of rules was the same man who consistently violated those rules, helpless to resist his own compulsions. The man who proclaimed clear-sighted analysis as the key to the charts was also a man haunted by irrational dreams and forebodings, who depended upon an uncanny sixth sense to tell him which way the market was moving, and who ultimately succumbed to the same delusions he fought so hard to keep at bay.

Traders are not the same as investors. Investors, however aggressive, are devotees of the long term. Personality-wise they tend to be more sober, more thoughtful and restrained, a la Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch. Volatility is, if not their enemy, then at best an unpredictable confederate, to be regarded with suspicion. Traders, by contrast, live in the moment. They operate by learning to feel the market, sensing when to cut their losses, when to double down, when to follow the trend and when to go against everyone. Far from being adverse to volatility, they secretly hope to get inside it, to understand it and so ride it to victory.

Like all traders, Livermore dreamed of beating the market, pinning his hopes to the forces of order: reason, logic, calculation, monetary self-discipline. Yet like all traders, he ultimately came face to face with that which cannot be rationalized, not just in the great hurly-burly of Wall Street but inside himself, in the shadowy realm where desire becomes compulsion and ambition self-destructive obsession. So that in the end, his battle with the market was a stand-in for his larger battle with himself.

Livermore was well aware of the chaos inside him. That’s why, early in his career, he invested in $800,000 worth of annuities for his wife and children that he himself would be unable to touch: “I knew a trading man will spend anything he can lay his hands on. By doing what I did my wife and child are safe from me.”

In the end, Livermore’s dream was the great, illusory dream of gamblers everywhere: to impose form and coherence on chance itself. But he failed to treat chance with the proper respect: he got too close. His story reads like a dark pendant to that other great 1920s story of lives lost to the pursuit of wealth, The Great Gatsby. Like Fitzgerald’s hero, Livermore sought to define himself against the huge forces that were shaping an America on the verge of empire. His failure, no less than Gatsby’s, is a grim parable of the fate of the individual in the age of money.

How do I get the the last page of this?
Yes I am stupid, so what..........

AAAhhhhhh, got it and I read that boring book.   Almost as boring as Dave Nevison's book.   ALMOST

It's totally different from Nevison's books. Each to their own but it gave me some priceless nuggets when I first read it many years ago and I still have a copy that I read even now.

Thanks for putting these stories up Bazzar. Very entertaining reading. Please share more if you have any.

"Greed, if you want it in a word," said Simon Cawkwell, otherwise known as Evil Knievil, one of the stock market's most fearsome bear traders. "That was my primary motivation for getting into spread betting."
The self-confessed compulsive gambler admits that its lure is making money from the financial markets free of tax, although these days he claims the intellectual stimulation is more important the riches.
Because players do not own the underlying shares, their profits are free of stamp duty and capital gains tax – making a spread bet the perfect medium for the daredevil independent investor. Its method is also extremely risky.
The challenge of working out which companies are under and overvalued is "a bit like doing the crossword", Mr Cawkwell said. But unlike mere puzzles, spread betting allows punters to wager much more than the cash they pay up front and it is not always obvious how much money they could stand to lose.
The small matter of the worst economic crisis to hit the world since the Great Depression is not even a hiccup for Mr Cawkwell. Indeed, he sounds positively indignant at the suggestion that the volatile markets could upset his success.
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"All markets are always unpredictable. The market is always difficult," he said. After all, betting that stocks will go down is just as profitable as betting that stocks will go up. In fact, Mr Cawkwell loves a good downturn.
"That's when people are stupid," he claimed at the height of the banking crisis in October last year, boasting that he would probably make £3m during the recession. This is the man who announced that he made a million shorting shares in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks – before promptly losing the money again as the markets rose.
Most impressively, he warned in November 2007 that Northern Rock's shares would be worth 5p and that the bank's woes represented the "greatest shorting opportunity" he'd ever seen. He took his own advice, and booked his usual £1m profit, but apparently he could have won more.
Thanks to an oversight, he incurred a tax liability of £300,000 when the usual bookies couldn't take large enough punts and he had to put part of his bet through agency brokers.
The 62-year-old former accountant does not just bet on the financial markets. He reportedly has a multitude of television screens at his home and office, most of which show financial information, but several display the horses or other traditional betting sports.
For more than a decade, he has made this his office, which he calls Evil Towers, putting in 10 hours a day for six days a week. "Of course I enjoy it," he admits. "I love trading and sport betting. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't."
In one famous trade, he bet against Sporting Index's predictions on how northern hemisphere teams would shape up against southern hemisphere teams in the Rugby World Cup. He cashed in at £250,000 after siding with the southern hemisphere – despite not having watched a rugby match since school.
Mr Cawkwell has never revealed the secrets of his success, despite writing at length about his experience as a compulsive spread better in his books – The Notorious Diaries of Evil Knievil and Evil's Good: Book of Boasts and Other Investments. But he did give away several invaluable tips for the novice spread better.
"You've got to know about the stock market," he declared. "It's never easy, whether you're in a recession or not. Anybody who's traded properly will know that. And you must take it slowly at the start. Don't put too much money in all at once when you are just beginning."
Most of Mr Cawkwell's research is done on the internet and by speaking to people on the phone all day. Reading the newspapers, studying each company, arming yourself with a good instinct and nurturing an appetite for risk will also increase the chances of doing well.
But becoming a full-time professional takes complete dedication. In a rare burst of modesty, Mr Cawkwell pointed out that he might be the most famous proponent of spread betting, but there were hundreds of worthy gamblers who can give him a run for his money.
"People keep on publishing the fact that I'm successful," he said. "But there are plenty of other people around that make plenty of money." Most of the stocks he looks at closely are apparently not members of the FTSE Index, but smaller company shares that are more volatile and less well researched.
The man who claims he was the first to expose the accounting irregularities of Robert Maxwell has an extremely sharp eye for spotting overvalued stocks. "There are surges of uninformed interest in the market," he tells me. "But in the main, a trader will find it hard when he's up against other traders as well informed as he or more than he."
So can anyone make a good better simply if they work hard enough and study the stocks? In theory, anyone can engage in spread betting. However, Mr Cawkwell said that many were too cowardly to have courage in their convictions and stick out positions over the long term.
Others were unnerved by initial losses and lacked the tenacity to keep trying. "Many private investors have been burned to the point of never coming back," he said. "It does attract the kind of people who are used to and enjoy taking risks."
Such words are hardly encouraging for players new to the tough world of the spread better. But this veteran's advice is medicine that has to be swallowed if people are serious about making a career out of placing winning bets on the stock market.
In the end, he says, no book or course or experienced investor can teach someone everything they need for expertise in spread betting. You have to learn on the job, keep alert and work hard, Mr Cawkwell argued.
"Anybody who assumes it's easy will be carried out of there in a coffin, I guarantee it."

I've put up a story about Stu Ungar before but this is perhaps a more 'personal' insight from his friend Mike Sexton



I first met Stu Ungar in the late 1970s. That’s when I happened to be in Las Vegas, visiting my friend Danny Robison, who was partnered with Chip Reese – and they were two of the hottest guys on the poker scene. So, even though I was playing $30-$60, because of my friendship with Danny I was around the high stakes players. And suddenly Stu, this tiny kid who couldn’t weigh 100lb soaking wet, was right in there with them.

Stu came to Vegas from New York, specifically to play Gin Rummy. Danny, at the time, was known as the top Gin player in America. He travelled around the country and destroyed people. But he couldn’t beat Stuey. Nobody could. What really wowed me, though, was how decisively Stu beat Danny and all the other Vegas giants – guys like Doyle Brunson, Puggy Pearson, Billy Baxter. Those guys were phenomenal Gin players and the world’s greatest gamblers. It got to the point where Stuey had to give them huge spots – I remember him letting Danny see the bottom card in the deck, which is a massive advantage – but he still slaughtered them.

Right away, even before I got to know him very well, I liked Stuey. He was a fast-action gambler, he dressed sharp, and he had the quickest mind of anybody I’d ever met. The amazing thing to me was what happened after the Gin action dried up. That’s when Stuey began playing poker, and he didn’t start small. He sat right down with the top guys in all of the biggest games – $200-$400 limit Hold’em or no-limit Deuce-to-Seven, both at the Dunes – before winning the first poker tournament he ever played in (the 1980 World Series) and the 1981 Series as well. He made plenty of money at poker – Stu was an incredibly quick learner – but after the games broke up he still had to be in action. And that decimated his bankroll. He would take his poker winnings and use it to bet on craps or sports or horses or Blackjack (until he got barred for card counting).

Straight from the horse’s mouth
In truth, Stuey received good information on horses, and he managed some decent earns. But Stu was such an action guy that he had to bet every race, whether he knew anything about the horses or not. Gambling was the only thing that interested him. He wasn’t the kind of person who’d take time to see a show or go on vacation. Even when he went off with a girl, it was only for 20 or 30 minutes – and he considered himself to be the world’s greatest lover. Many times I went out for dinner with Stu, and he left me halfway through the meal. He paid the tab, but he couldn’t stand to enjoy a steak when he could be gambling in the casino.

A very sick leak for Stu was golf. It was unbelievable how much he lost at that game. His first time on the course, soon after winning a Super Bowl of Poker [a $10,000 buy-in tournament that had been hosted by Amarillo Slim], was with Jack ‘Treetop’ Strauss. Now Jack was one of the shrewdest gamblers you could come across. He knew his suckers, treated them properly, and recognised Stu as prime tuna. Stu grew up in New York and had never seen a golf course, but after 10 minutes he and Jack were putting for $500 a hole. Within two hours, on the first day he’d ever been to a golf course in his life, Stu lost $78,000 on the putting green. I’d like to bet that that’s never happened before or since.

ungar happy
Stu Ungar won the WSOP Main Event three times, in 1980, 1981 and 1997

Once he actually got out on the course, Stu had no golf etiquette and no understanding of the game. He wore two gloves all the time and was allowed to tee his ball up for every single shot – on the fairway, in the sand traps, wherever; that was his spot. He had a four-foot tee and was allowed to use it in the water. Some guys who played with us would see Stuey doing that for the first time and it blew their minds. They’d refuse to gamble under those conditions. And we would say, ‘Okay, you’re out of the group.’ All the sharp players knew that it didn’t matter what you gave Stuey, he’d find a way to blow off money. Early on, I remember asking Chip what he thought of Stuey. I probably commented on this guy being the greatest Gin and poker player in the world. Chip said, ‘Mike, you’re right. But the problem with Stuey is that he doesn’t understand the object of the game. The object of the game is to increase your wealth, improve your lifestyle, make a better life for your family. It’s not to gamble every day until you go broke.’ That was Stuey’s problem. Even worse, though, if he wasn’t in action, he got bored and started in with the drugs.

Years before I met Stu, back in the 70s, he was already doing cocaine real big. But all the players were doing it then. It seemed like a miracle drug that allowed them to feel good and play forever. I remember one time when Stuey stepped back from a poker table and headed up to his hotel room. Danny Robison looked at me and said, ‘Mike, go up with Stuey. He’s gonna give you something for me.’

Well, I went up to that room and the door was ajar without a Do Not Disturb sign on it. Inside there was a glass-topped desk and it appeared to be covered with a pound of sugar. I don’t know anything about drugs, but I was aware enough to recognise that the white stuff was cocaine and to realise that I needed to get out of there. Stu gave me an envelope for Danny, and to this day I don’t know what was in it. It might have been money or cocaine or pills, but I didn’t ask any questions. I was just a gopher back then.

Money down the drain
For all of Stu’s bad habits – beyond the drugs, he was the world’s worst money manager and never paid a bill in his life; he’d have $2m in his pocket and no electricity in his house – there was nothing better than sweating him at the poker table. I remember sitting behind him while he was playing a $100-$200 no-limit cash game of Hold’em during the World Series. Everybody had about $20,000 in front of him, including Stuey. Stu was in the big blind and a guy raised the pot, coming in for $800. Stuey had 5-6 of diamonds and he called the $800. Then the flop came J-10-2, no diamonds and all different suits. Stuey led out and bet $1,500 at the pot. The guy called him. At the turn, a Seven came off. Stuey bet $2,500. The guy called again. On the river, the board paired Sevens. With no hesitation, Stuey pushed $8,000 into the pot. This other guy went in the tank for three minutes, trying to figure out what to do. Finally, he turned over his cards, showed the A-10 of hearts and mucked.

As Stuey raked in his chips, he leaned toward me and said, ‘Sexton, remember this: there are a lot of guys who’ll fire one shell at a pot. Some guys will bluff a second time. But not many guys have it in them to fire three shells at a pot.’ By bluffing at the pot three times, he got this guy to lay down the winning hand. And Stuey was right, few people have the guts to do it. But that’s why it worked.

Stu was so fast that when he played a $10,000 tournament he was under torture for the first three levels. They started with blinds at 25-50, then went to 50-100, then to 100-200. Each level lasted two hours and they didn’t put an ante on until the fourth level. That was when Stuey came to life. Once the antes came into play, each pot had a lot more money, and Stuey was able to steal. Players anted with green chips, and within a couple hours Stuey usually had big stacks of greens.

Away from the table, though, Stuey’s problems were catching up with him. In the late 1980s and early 90s drugs started taking control. He began going on cocaine binges instead of gambling and he was always in debt. Bookies gave him credit because they knew he was a big fish – Stuey’d bet every game on the sheet – but they also knew he had earning power. Same thing with the drug dealers. I doubt that many drug dealers will put you on a tab. But Stuey owed them all and he didn’t care. He had protection, so to speak – guys who
would straighten out anyone who tried putting too much heat on him.

When it became obvious that things were getting bad with the drugs, some poker players tried to help Stuey. Chip and Danny and Billy Baxter were all willing to send Stu to rehab. Chip told him, ‘Stuey, if you play $75-$150 every day for an entire year, I will stake you. Then, at the end of the year, I will put you into the highest games you want to play.’ But Stuey couldn’t do that. He couldn’t play in a game knowing that there was a bigger game being spread. He would rather do drugs than play in the second-biggest game.

Midnight run
I remember one night in the 1990s when Stu woke me up at 4am, phoning from the seediest part of downtown Las Vegas. He was broke and asked me to come get him. I got out of bed, started getting dressed, and my girlfriend said, ‘Don’t you dare go down there. You’re liable to get yourself killed.’ But I had no choice. I had to go get Stuey. He was wandering the streets, he was completely out of it, and his fingers were blackened from smoking crack. He told me he had to go someplace where nobody could find him. He owed money to some real bad drug dealers and was afraid that they’d track him down and kill him. So I checked him into a small, out-of-the-way motel, under my name. Nobody would expect him to be there.

ungar chips
Ungar in happier times when he was accumulating chips as fast as he was attention

Then, two days later, he called me and said, ‘Sexton, you got to come get me. They’re gonna find me and kill me.’ I wondered how anyone could know where he was at. He admitted that he had called another drug dealer and had him make a delivery. So now the word was out. I came over and moved him to the Gold Coast, over on Flamingo. I got him a room for $49 a night and figured it would cost me $1,500 a month. Then, after just a few weeks, I stopped by to check on the bill and it was $6,000. Stuey had been ordering room service everyday and watching Pay Per View movies. I turned white as a sheet because I didn’t have the money to pay that bill. Stuey kept telling me he was sorry, and I put the $6,000 on my credit card. It really hurt.

Through the 1990s, Stu was on a downhill slide. By opening day of the 1997 World Series Championship, nobody thought Stu stood a chance of winning. He came down to the Horseshoe that morning, high as a kite and trying to find someone to stake him. Finally Billy Baxter reluctantly put up the money, and, by six o’clock that night, Stu had $16,000 in chips. But he was in a zombie state, coming off drugs and gasping for air. He told me that he couldn’t take it, that he couldn’t continue playing. I told him that he had to make it through the day’s final sessions, get some rest, and that he’d be fine. Something must have clicked because by the end of that first day he was second chip leader. By the close of day two he was chip leader and he never looked back. Stu won his third World Series in ’97 and it was unbelievable. It looked like he’d turned a corner. Not only did he have money, but he also had personal pride and status.

The day Stu won the ’97 Series he had no ID on him. So he couldn’t collect his 50 percent of the $1m first prize. Stu asked Billy Baxter for ‘walking around’ money and Billy offered him $5,000 or $10,000. Stu said, ‘No. I need $50,000.’ Billy said, ‘You need $50,000 to walk around?’ But Stuey had been broke for so long that he desperately wanted to have a good chunk of cash in his pocket. Billy was baffled, but he gave him $50,000 anyway.

I stayed with Stu for an hour after the tournament ended. Then, as I understand it, he went over to the Lady Luck casino and played Blackjack. It’s the one place where he wasn’t barred and he lost all his money. They gave him $25,000 in credit and he lost that, too. The rest of his $500,000 went to sports, poker, horses, drugs and more Blackjack. Very little was used to pay off his debts. Nobody was shocked when Stuey ended up broke again. That’s simply the way he was. And for Stu, a $500,000 bankroll just wasn’t very big.

Go for broke
During most of the 1980s I owed Stuey money, but in the late 90s he was in debt to me for as much as $16,000 – and that was a lot of money to me at the time. I remember being broke once myself and needing some of the money back. So I went up to him, to see where he stood financially. But Stuey was such a good reader of people that before I got to him, he said, ‘Sexton, I know what you’re going to ask me. And if you mention one word about the money I owe you, you’re going right to the bottom of the list.’ I didn’t say a word and just hoped that things would turn out okay.

Stu-Ungar late
Ungar’s friends could see what he was doing to himself but were powerless to help

By the 1998 World Series he was flat broke and Billy had agreed to stake him again. Stu spent the first weeks of the tournament in his hotel room at the Horseshoe, played in none of the preliminaries and, three days before the Main Event, he was fresh and ready to go. Then, that evening, I went to his room with Todd Brunson and Bob Stupak. As soon as we walked in, it was obvious that Stuey was high on drugs. Bob stayed up there, to speak with Stu in private, while Todd and I went downstairs to the Horseshoe bar.

Todd told me that Stu’s behaviour was making him sick. And suddenly he came up with an idea: kidnap Stu, tie him up, put him in a car, and take him someplace where there are no dope dealers. I was ready to go along with it and suggested that we drive him up to Doc Earl [a poker player by the name of Phil Earl, who knew Stu well and was able to reason with him] in rural Nova Scotia. But we never followed through with the plan and Stu didn’t show up at the 1998 Series.

That summer and autumn he continually called poker players, trying to get money. But nearly everyone had cut him off; most of them would have been happy to pay for rehab, but they had no interest in giving him money for drugs. Just a couple of weeks before Stu died, though, Billy Baxter came through with $25,000. He said, ‘I know I’m throwing this money away. But I’m doing it for old friendship and to give you a shot. But if this goes, don’t call me again.’

Stu took the money, went to the Bellagio, and lost $10,000 in the poker room. Then he dropped out of the game, left the casino, and two weeks later the hard drugs finally took a toll on him. He was found dead in a cheap motel on the north end of the Vegas Strip.

The real shame is that he never lived to see the poker boom. With all these tournaments and a $10,000 buy-in every other week, I believe Stu would be off drugs, playing high stakes poker, and getting the publicity and recognition that he craved. He would be the greatest poker player out there and so famous that number two would be 10 miles behind.

It took just six years for Daniel Tzvetkoff to go from working for minimum wage at a Brisbane Pizza Hut to raking in $3 million per week in Las Vegas. In that time the 25 year old splashed out on a $30 million mansion, a 100ft yacht, a private jet, twenty luxury cars, a nightclub, and a V8 racing team. It was a meteoric rise for one man – but the eventual fall, when it came, proved to be catastrophic not just for Tzvetkoff, but also for everyone involved in the US online poker industry.
Back in 2002, when the 19-year-old son of a market trader was still flipping dough, such largesse must have seemed an impossible dream. The young Australian didn’t have a single qualification to his name. He was still living at home, and the bus was his favoured mode of transport. The future looked bleak.
And then Tzvetkoff stumbled upon the underground world of internet payment processing.
At the turn of the millennium, banks and credit card companies were sceptical of handling funds which came from companies based online, particularly those who dealt in pornography, pharmaceuticals or gambling. Many companies from those industries were often blacklisted, which left some close to collapse.
Into the breach stepped a new breed of middlemen, known in the trade as ‘high risk payment processors.’ These middlemen did whatever was required to process their client’s money, often by bundling prohibited and clean money together, or by miscoding transactions so that a bank would assume that the funds were from the sale of permitted goods, such as golf clubs, rather than a porn subscription.

To the young and sharp-minded Tzvetkoff, the set-up seemed too good to be true. There was no barrier to this supposed gold mine. The industry was not only unregulated, but qualifications and experience were not a prerequisite. All that mattered to the desperate hordes of online businesses was whether a processor could deposit their money into a bank account. And Tzvetkoff could, better than anyone else in the game.
Tzvetkoff founded payment processing company ‘Intabill’, where he partnered up with high powered IT lawyer, Sam Sciacca. Sciacca not only brought his considerable legal expertise to the table, but he also added a professional sheen to Tzvetkoff’s raw genius. The fledgling start up swiftly attracted a host of new clients, who were particularly attracted to the duo’s professionalism in an industry that was often akin to the Wild West. To begin with, the business bubbled away without making waves. And then, in 2007, the online poker industry came calling.
Sam Sciacca (left) and Daniel Tzvetkoff (right)
At the time, it was an industry in crisis. Online poker had exploded in 2002 when amateur player Chris Moneymaker came from nowhere to win the World Series of Poker. Revenue surged from $87.5 million in 2001 to $2.4 billion by 2005, while one of the most successful sites, PartyPoker, floated on the London Stock Exchange for £1 billion. But the US government passed The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) in 2006 that prohibited banks processing money that was connected to it. The poker companies were suddenly unable to process their player’s wins and losses. The end seemed all but inevitable.
Intabill stepped into the breach. Having sought expert legal advice, Tzvetkoff and Sciacca believed that they could solve the issues quickly, effectively and (most importantly) legally. Companies such as PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker quickly jumped on board, employing Intabill to process their transactions. Soon the ex-Pizza Hut worker was handling almost every penny generated by online poker in America.
Tzvetkoff embarked on an epic spending spree, earning himself headlines in Australia after buying one of the country’s most expensive properties. But he was also tempted by a proposal from brash, cigar chomping businessman, Curtis Pope.
Sat in a Jacuzzi, on the back of Tzvetkoff’s yacht, Pope suggested that Intabill invest the poker money into his Las Vegas payday loan company. Pope’s proposal offered Intabill many benefits, not least turning a $30m investment into a $100m profit, the ability to disguise poker money as payday loan payments, and the opportunity for Tzvetkoff to move to Sin City with his fiancée, Nicole Crisp.
Unleashed in Vegas, the wide-eyed kid from Brisbane rubbed shoulders with the likes of Mike Tyson, lavished extravagant gifts on friends and family (including a Ferrari for Pope), and splashed out over $150,000 on a party at The Palms hotel. Wall Street soon took note, with investors willing to plough over $100m into Tzvetkoff’s latest venture. It seemed that the party would go on forever.

And then, in August 2008, Intabill lost a large chunk of money to a bank in Tblisi, which resulted in Tzvetkoff and Sciacca making a dramatic escape during a Russian air strike. Tzvetkoff's stock was falling, and worse was to follow. A number of banks froze Intabill’s accounts, and an associate was alleged to have stolen over $4m dollars. Almost overnight, Intabill transformed from a cash cow to a company haemorrhaging money. With Tzvetkoff continuing to spend wildly, repayments to the poker companies became increasingly intermittent.
Despite trying to keep the ailing company afloat, Intabill was soon ripped from Tzvetkoff’s grasp when Pope, his trusted Las Vegas partner, struck a deal with the poker companies behind his back. Overnight Tzvetkoff lost everything: his clients, his company, his fortune, as well as someone he had once counted as a friend.
Worse followed. As the bankrupt Tzvetkoff reeled from the betrayal, he was beset by a flurry of law suits, not least from Full Tilt Poker and his former partner, Sam Sciacca, who accused him of misappropriating funds. Tzvetkoff struggled to keep them at bay, but the web was tightening; at the age of 26, he found himself on his knees, in the lobby of Las Vegas’ Encore hotel, with the gun of an FBI agent pointed at his head.
The legal advice that Tzvetkoff had operated on was wrong. In the eyes of the Department of Justice, processing for online poker in the US was a crime. Tzvetkoff was charged with money laundering and bank fraud. Facing the prospect of 75 years in jail, he played the only remaining card he had left and turned government informant, winning his freedom and also the opportunity to take down those he felt had betrayed him.
Armed with information about the intricacies of processing for online poker and how money was mixed in with payday loans, The Department of Justice prepared to strike.
And strike they did. On April 15, 2011 – a day now know as Black Friday in the poker world – PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker were summarily shut down and their bank accounts seized. Players accounts were frozen and owners were indicted on criminal and civil charges. By this time Pope was already behind bars, serving 21 months in Miami; Sciacca was cleared of any wrongdoing and returned to law.
As online poker burnt to the ground, anger quickly turned to Tzvetkoff, who was long enrolled in a witness protection programme. Rumours started to circulate that he had stashed millions of dollars away and had been pictured on a Bali beach, with his fiancée, sipping champagne. Tzvetkoff protested his innocence. A total of $50m remained missing, but no evidence existed to suggest he had the money.
Tzvetkoff may have lived every young guy's dream, but it came at a horrendous cost, for him and for millions of online poker players. It seemed Tzvetkoff had forgotten Sin City’s cardinal rule, ‘What goes on in Vegas, stays in Vegas.’

The Church Team was a card counting blackjack team that operated from 2005 – 2011. It was started and managed by Ben Crawford and Colin Jones. Over the years the team was comprised of approximately 30 investors, 40 players, and various levels of managers and trainers. The team was primarily based out of the Seattle area but had almost 15 players from the Cincinnati area as well as players from California, NY, Oregon, Nevada.
The team, at it’s highest point, was playing with $1.2 million of investors money and in the course of the 6 years won more than $3 million from casinos. The team would come together and meet quarterly in the Seattle area to discuss goals, business model changes, introduce new players, and test old players out.
The team was put together as a series of LLCs that represented the management and investors and all wins were reported to the IRS. Although the team itself had no official religious goals or affiliation, the majority of the team members considered themselves Christians with a high percentage of them in paid ministry positions. The lineup included pastors, worship leaders, and church planters. Other jobs served before, during, and after include law enforcement, fire fighting, internet startup entrepreneurs, a lot of barista work, construction, music recording and a variety of other fields.
Throughout the team’s existence various team members struggled with judgement from families as well as religious people and organizations, numerous run-ins with law enforcement, random security guards, the DEA, FBI and TSA (many of whom did not understand the legality or nature of advantage play or card counting.) The team dealt with wrongful imprisonment, theft, numerous searches, an IRS audit, and a seizure of more than $100,000 by the US government border patrol which was eventually returned.
From 2007-2010 the team was followed with cameras and the footage was turned into a feature length documentary called Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians.
In 2011 the team officially disbanded. In June of 2011 most of the players, investors, managers, and alumni came together for the first time at the release of the documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival. Players, investors, and managers shared their thoughts, sentiments, and stories from their involvement with the team.

It’s not often that you get a second chance in life. Thankfully for UK poker legend Neil Channing he got just that in 2007. After squandering a million pound fortune, built up through poker and sports betting, Channing was at his lowest ebb ever – deep in debt, and physically on the verge of dying.

Driven by his relentless work ethic Channing bounced back, building up a bankroll in low-stakes tournaments before hitting the biggest score of his life at the 2008 Irish Open to take him right back to where he started. Here is Neil Channing in his own words explaining how he managed to turn his life and career around…

Downswing
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The worst times started in 2003 and went on into 2005. I was making lots of money from everything – poker, horse racing and I also had a day job working in betting. I was at the races all the time, playing poker as much as I could and working – I never slept. My bankroll got as high as £980,000 and I felt I was untouchable. Then it all started going wrong in the middle of 2003.

I was betting around £4,800 every day on horses and had a bad run for four months where I lost every day, and was spending more and more money on pitches at the racecourse – me and my partner invested £600k in that venture before it collapsed and we eventually sold them on for just £30k. And just if I didn’t have enough things to gamble on at that time I lost £100k on the stock market! I was watching all my life savings go away.

My £1 million was no longer there. I’d lost it all and now owed 36 people a lot of money! The only way I thought I could get out of it was to gamble some more.

Life and death situation

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I had a friend who gave me £10k to bet with and told me to be bold and fearless with it. I immediately lost £7k at the races and he just told me to punt the final £3k. I did and twenty months later it had become £380k! I never left my house and didn’t have a break except for the WSOP. I was playing poker three nights a week at the Vic, would order a bottle of wine, get pissed and play every hand. It was my release from my day job – I still broke even but was not playing well.

The reason I was working so hard was to pay everyone back. I would withdraw £5k every week, give a little to my friend and pay £500 to eight different people I owed. In September 2005 I still owed £120k to various people. I was in a terrible physical state, I was up to 248lbs and living on takeaway food. I was depressed and agoraphobic – then one day I just collapsed in the Vic. I was rushed to hospital with acute pancreatitis and there was a good chance that I would die.

I eventually got home, but I was ill. I had just £2k to my name, internal burning and if I bumped into somebody it might cause me to haemorrhage so I had to avoid busy places. I’d pop out to the Vic mid-afternoon as it would be quiet and stress free. I sat in the £30 tournament at 2pm and played every day – I was the biggest winner by far and when I got stronger I started hanging around for the cash games. I was getting healthier, winning a lot in the cash games and then I went to the Irish Open in 2008…

Upswing
Winning the Irish Open was life-changing for Neil Channing
Winning the Irish Open was life-changing for Neil Channing

Winning the Irish Open in 2008 was a life-changing event. I finished off paying all my debts at Christmas 2007 and was now a free man. I paid every penny I owed and that was really important to me. I have a working class work ethic and wanted to be able to look myself in the mirror and say I have cleared it all.

I was one of the few UK players that always went to Vegas and I knew that I was well known in the UK community. In London I was the king of the cash games, and people thought I never lost. But when I won the Irish Open all of that multiplied by one hundred. More than the money, my ‘poker fame’ was life changing when I won the Irish Open. I remember being very relieved to win the money because money had been on my mind every day for five years. From having a million to losing it all I now had a second chance. I pissed away the first million and by a total freak – and winning a tournament like that with 680 players is a freak – I had most of it back. I played for a large percentage of myself, 82%, so it was pretty good!

A perfect stake

What it means was that I could play in the big cash games in the Vic. We had an average sit down of £12,000 now because the games were much bigger. It sounds a bit miserable but I actually ran like sh↔t in those cash games for the next 18 months! I played against Andrew Pantling in a £28,000 pot where I had a set and he hit a gutshot on the river with all the money going in on the turn. Then there was a hand versus Andy Black where I had Aces in a straddled pot – he moved all-in for £17,000 with pocket Jacks and hit a Jack. I still won about £100,000 that year but it felt like it should be a lot more.

After the Irish Open I didn’t slow down, I kicked on. I started going mental with the staking. Staking James Akenhead was pretty incredible. The year before the November Nine he was the runner-up in a $1,500 WSOP tournament – I’d backed James in a ton of tournaments but couldn’t even remember if I had a piece of him in this one! So I finally asked him and he was like, ‘you f↔cking know it is!’ I went over to watch him play heads-up and I fell asleep! He eventually finished second and the very next day I was playing in a $1,500 event when he came over to me. He then threw $125,000 in chips to me across the table – the other guys on the table looked at us like we were mental! Confidence is a massive thing and I was buzzing after the Irish Open. I felt like I couldn’t be beat.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation bust in Las Vegas is highlighting connections among three of the most lucrative gambling worlds—Macau high-roller junkets, online sports betting and high-stakes poker.

U.S. regulators and an international sports watchdog say the combination is worrisome, given alleged organized-crime links and money-laundering risks in all three areas.

The FBI in July raided luxury villas at Caesars Entertainment Corp. ’s Caesars Palace resort in Las Vegas, where some junket executives and their entourage took up residence during two big events this past summer: the World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil and a major poker competition in Las Vegas. Junkets—most prominent in the Chinese casino hub Macau—are middlemen that use underground banking networks to facilitate ultra-high-stakes gambling.

For its monthlong stay, Caesars gave the group five villas at no charge, along with more than $90 million in casino credit, according to papers filed in Nevada federal court. The villas, which would typically rent for at least $25,000 a night, come with grand pianos and private pools, according to Caesars’ website.

FBI agents descended on the villas after Caesars told authorities that the occupants could be conducting an illegal sports-betting operation, according to papers filed in the case. Some Caesars employees became suspicious after the group requested an unusual amount of electronics to “keep up on the World Cup,” the papers indicate. The casino had installed eight computers, more than 20 monitors, three television sets, DSL lines and Wi-Fi in one of the villas, for which 19 door keys were issued, a government filing said. Caesars hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing.

On July 29, a federal grand jury in Las Vegas indicted eight people from Asia, including Macau junket figure Paul Phua, on charges of running an illegal sports-betting operation. Mr. Phua has had prominent roles in Macau junkets, owns one of the world’s biggest sports-betting companies, according to the FBI, and is a well-known high-stakes poker player who has helped build up the game in Macau. In addition, Mr. Phua has ties to organized crime, the FBI alleged in court papers.

Nearly six weeks earlier, Mr. Phua had been arrested in Macau on similar charges and after his release from custody flew to Las Vegas on his jet, court papers say. Through his lawyers David Chesnoff and Thomas Goldstein, Mr. Phua denied he was involved in illegal gambling in either location and denied that he had any connections to organized crime. The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office and authorities in Macau declined to comment.


The alleged connections among junkets, poker players and sports-betting operations have been building for years as the three businesses grew exponentially. Junkets have long brought high rollers from China to play baccarat—their game of choice—at the casinos in Macau and acted as financial intermediaries by moving money across borders, making loans and collecting debts. Junket clients accounted for roughly two-thirds of Macau’s $45 billion in gambling revenue last year, and they have also become increasingly active in casinos around the world, including in Asia, the U.K. and the U.S.

In recent years junkets also began wading into the world of poker, which hadn’t traditionally been popular in Asia. With high-stakes cash games and tournaments in Macau, they have attracted wealthy Asians, including Mr. Phua, and pros from the U.S.

The FBI is concerned that some poker players get financial backing from junkets that authorities suspect possess criminal ties. The agency has been tracking the links between the two gambling communities, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Soon after his arrest in Las Vegas, Mr. Phua and his son, who was also indicted, were bailed out by two prominent American poker players: Phil Ivey and Andrew Robl, according to court papers. Other poker players including Tom Dwan agreed to let members of the alleged gambling ring stay at their homes in their custody during the legal proceedings, according to court papers. A lawyer for Mr. Ivey said the U.S. poker player helped Mr. Phua because he is “a trusted friend from the days they first met playing poker.” Messrs. Dwan and Robl didn’t return requests for comment.

In addition, records from Caesars submitted in the July case show that Mr. Phua’s associates paid the $1 million per-person entry fees for a poker tournament at another Caesars property for at least three players from outside the U.S. None of the poker pros were accused of wrongdoing.


Alongside the internationalization of high-stakes poker, sports betting has also exploded globally, with at least $1 trillion in bets—legal and illegal—placed each year, according to Chris Eaton, executive director of sport integrity at the Doha-based International Centre for Sport Security, a nonprofit organization that advises governments, leagues and event organizers among others.

Sports betting is widely prohibited in Asia and the U.S., and governments have stepped up their enforcement of the laws. Because of their ability to move large amounts of money across borders and evade capital controls, “junkets became one of the solutions to respond to Asia’s crackdown on illegal sports betting,” said Mr. Eaton, a former head of security for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, the international body that regulates soccer.

U.S. law-enforcement officials call junkets, sports betting and poker a dangerous combination that could enrich organized crime and facilitate money laundering. Sports betting can be used for money laundering because there are many illegal bookmakers and betting sites licensed in loosely regulated jurisdictions that don’t require bettors to identify the source of their funds, they say.

Poker is considered an important money-laundering risk at casinos because players bet against each other rather than against the house, and because players typically capitulate without ever showing their cards, so it is harder for casinos to monitor the action, U.S. law-enforcement officials say. For example, a player could arrange to transfer illicit money to someone through a poker game by intentionally folding, even if their cards would have won the game.

Five of the eight people indicted in the Phua case pleaded guilty and were fined and banned from the U.S. for five years. Charges against one of the defendants were dropped. Mr. Phua and his son pleaded not guilty.

Mr. Phua, who had been an owner of the Star 888 Ltd. junket in Macau until October, according to Macau corporate records, also owns Philippines-licensed IBC Bet, which the Las Vegas betting ring used to process some of its bets, the FBI alleged. IBC is one of the world’s two largest online sports-betting sites, and often takes in more than $2 billion in bets per week, according to the ICSS’s Mr. Eaton.

According to records the FBI says it seized from the betting ring, names matching some of the bosses of at least two major Macau junket operators—David Group and Heng Sheng Group—were among the ring’s customers. The group was also using companies linked to two other big junkets—Neptune Guangdong Group and Suncity Group—to process the transactions, court papers filed by the government indicate. Neither the individuals nor the junkets were accused of wrongdoing. Their representatives all declined to comment.

Falafel’s real name is Matvey Natanzon, but no one calls him that, not even his mother, who calls him Mike, the name that he adopted when they emigrated from Israel to Buffalo—one leg in a long journey that began in Soviet Russia. Now even Falafel calls himself Falafel.

Falafel was in Atlantic City to support a friend he calls The Bone, a professional poker player who was registered in a tournament at the Borgata. The Bone, who is from Ukraine by way of Brooklyn, used to play backgammon, but he switched to poker because there is more money in it. Falafel is either a purist, or unable to master poker, or too lazy to really try, or all of the above. He is committed to backgammon, which is his main source of income—to the extent that he can find wealthy people who want to lose to him in cash-only private games. There are more of these than one might expect, but not a lot. Finding them and hanging on to them is a skill.


The jitney that travels between the Atlantic City hotels is run-down and slow, a horrible way to travel. Falafel would never take it. He can make ten thousand dollars in half an hour playing backgammon; he can make many times that in an evening—and he can lose it all just as easily. The money comes and goes. Currently, he has no home. He has no driver’s license. Until just a few months ago, he had no cell phone, no bank account, and no credit card. Pretty much everything that he owns can fit into a large black suitcase. Still, he allows himself certain luxuries, and one of them is to hire a car rather than sit in a jitney.

Falafel had promised that he would be in the Borgata’s poker ballroom, and when I arrived, at four-thirty on a gray January afternoon, the ballroom was half empty. To the non-gambler, the interior of an Atlantic City casino is in no way a place of obvious joy. For Falafel, who wanted to dabble in a few quick hands while he waited for The Bone, the atmosphere was energizing. He is a big man, both in the tall way and in the overweight way, and he was dressed to relax: a soccer jersey with the logo of a Turkish cell-phone company on the front, and on the back the number seven and “FALAFEL.” Propped up on his head was a yellow knitted cap, giving him the appearance of an oversized garden gnome. Nylon shorts extended below his knees. Fiddling with a dumpy black cell phone, he looked up, smiling, and asked, “How did you recognize me?”

Falafel is typically unshaven, but the stubble is not forbidding, and his face easily fills with warmth. In 2005, an Israeli filmmaker made a documentary about him, called “Falafel’s Game.” In a scene filmed late one night in his hotel, Falafel says, “I’m like a kid inside. I feel like a kid—in my principles, the way I think about things.” He is forty-four. He has known hardship: he once lived on a park bench. Pickpockets have stolen from him. Lowlifes have taken advantage of him. He has learned to be streetwise, but something kidlike remains. He lives life as if it were a game.

Falafel bought three hundred dollars in chips and sat at a table. Soon the piles before him were getting taller. He attributed this not to his skill at poker but to his gambling instincts, which are formidable in some circumstances (backgammon, mainly) and horrendous in others (sports betting, mainly). As he played, he glanced at the cards occasionally, but mostly he jabbered. When an elderly man in a leather jacket sat down and, by coincidence, began to talk about backgammon, Falafel could not contain himself. “Oh, you play?” he said. “I like to play, too.” The man nodded. A round of cards was dealt. “You know,” Falafel said, “I’m the No. 1 backgammon player in the world.” He glanced at a card. “None of you could beat me.”

A skeptical player wearing a Miami Dolphins cap picked up his smartphone to verify. To his left, another old man asked, “Is it in the Google?”

“I’m checking,” the skeptic said. “I’m just getting a lot of restaurants.”

The dealer slowed play, so that the matter could be resolved—which it quickly was, generating a wave of smiles. Suddenly, a celebrity was among them. “O.K., Mr. Falafel,” the dealer said. “What will it be?”

In two hours, Falafel was sitting behind five hundred dollars. Things were looking up. “A year ago, if you found me then, my life would have been so much different,” he said. For a time, Falafel was living in Las Vegas, with a roommate—a young backgammon whiz whom he calls Genius or Lobster, depending on his mood—but he rarely left the couch, where he watched sports, and watched the money that he bet on sports disappear. Now he saw opportunity. “This year, I am travelling a lot, playing more backgammon,” he said. From Atlantic City, Falafel was planning to go to a tournament in San Antonio, and then there were trips to Los Angeles, Israel, Denmark, and, in August, Monte Carlo, for the world championships. In each place, the prospect of cash side games lay in wait. An Internet gaming site was interested in coöperating with him. He had taken on a student. Falafel was filled with a sense of purpose. He was ready, he told his friends, to turn his fortunes around.


“We should go now,” Falafel said, as he cashed out; he needed to find The Bone, who was finishing a round in his tournament. The two men met in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when Falafel was in New York, living in Washington Square Park, and playing chess. The Bone, whose real name is Arkadiy Tsinis, is tall and thin. He is a disciplined gambler; recruiters from Wall Street have tried to bring him into their game. “That’s him,” Falafel said, pointing to a man wearing a floppy leather hat and sunglasses perched on an aquiline nose. The Bone was locked in a stare-down with another player. The visible portions of his face were impassive. Eventually, with only a few chips left, he folded. Falafel tried to cheer him up as they walked over to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Falafel’s homelessness was of his own making. In 1972, when he was four, his mother, Larissa, fled Soviet Russia (and Falafel’s father), moving to the Israeli town of Azor, near Tel Aviv. In Falafel’s memory, Azor is ever warm and sunlit, filled with soccer matches and schoolyard friends. Larissa worked long hours at the airport, and so Falafel was often free to do as he liked—until he was fourteen, when she told him that she was marrying an Israeli-American biophysicist, and that they were moving to Buffalo, to live with him. Falafel resented the move. Buffalo was cold and foreign. He didn’t know the language. His stepfather, a Holocaust survivor, was caring but stern, and pushed him to think of life in pragmatic terms. Falafel rebelled. He did little but play chess; he drank, and even went to school a little tipsy. He went to college halfheartedly, and after graduating he lost his savings by betting on sports. Larissa refused to help him unless he found a job, and so, instead, in the winter of 1994, he hitched a ride with a friend to Manhattan, to hustle chess. “I just went through the motions,” Falafel says. “My only thing was to make a bit of money so that I could survive.”

Falafel knew little about Washington Square Park—a Hobbesian gaming arena in the center of Greenwich Village. “I called it Jurassic Park,” The Bone said. Some of the chess players were fast-talking charmers; some had learned the game in prison. There was Sweet Pea, Elementary, the Terminator. When well-known fish—players of middling skill with money to lose—would turn up, a frenzy would erupt to vie for their action. Falafel became friendly with a wizard at blitz chess named Russian Paul, who adopted a half-mentoring attitude, involving avuncular insults about Falafel’s game or his laziness or his self-destructive habits.

“I can tell you how I discovered him,” Russian Paul says. “I used to play at my favorite table, and one weekend morning I came, and there was somebody snoring, sleeping under it.” He hired Falafel—two dollars every morning—to hold his table for him. Before long, Falafel was playing, too. By the standards of the park, where grandmasters sometimes stopped by, Falafel was in no way exceptional—“Stupid, stupid, that’s stupid,” Paul would mutter as he played him—but he enjoyed the camaraderie of the hustlers. Two dollars was enough to get him a falafel, which he ate every day, often for every meal. One night, Russian Paul found him passed out with patches of deep-fried chickpeas stuck to his face, and the park’s newest hustler earned his street name.

H. G. Wells once said of chess, “It annihilates a man.” But Falafel wasn’t seeking annihilation; he wanted a way out of his self-made chaos. On a good day, he might win thirty dollars, but he lacked the easy duplicity of the more ruthless hustlers. “He does not like deception,” Peter Mikulas, a former N.Y.U. employee who used to play in the park, says. “He’s a Big Daddy, from ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ Mendacity, falseness—it bothers him.”


Some of the men in the park played backgammon, which, Falafel noticed, could be far more lucrative than chess. He once watched Russian Paul beat an N.Y.U. student out of a hundred dollars. Falafel had no real understanding of the game, but he was cocky and insistent, and so he sat down to play Russian Paul, who told me, “I learned how to play backgammon two weeks before him, so I took all his money.” With other players, Falafel lost relentlessly. One told him, “Listen, you just don’t know stuff. For thirty dollars an hour, I’ll teach you.” Falafel insisted on playing him for fifty cents a point. Soon he was a hundred and forty points behind.

Backgammon is sometimes called the cruellest game. In 2008, during a snowy November outside Moscow, two strangers played on a board that one of them had carved in a labor camp. When the match ended, the winner got up, walked out of the room to get a knife, and then made good on their wager: “We had agreed to play backgammon—whoever loses dies,” he explained at the time of his arrest. He was drunk-seeming, and probably a psychopath, but the story has come to serve as a parable in extremis of fortunes lost and won over the board. People have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in single sessions; one expert player lost his home. Bruegel painted the game into his apocalyptic panorama “The Triumph of Death.”

Unlike chess, backgammon is tactile, fast-moving, even loud, with checkers slammed down and tiny dice sounding like rattlesnakes as they traverse the board. Casual players who believe that they are good persist in the illusion because the element of chance obscures their deficits. At its heart, backgammon’s cruelty resides in the dramatic volatility of the dice. Even a player who builds flawless structures on the board can lose to a novice. The good players simply win more often. As a result, backgammon is often played in marathon sessions that reward physical stamina, patience, and emotional equilibrium. One notable match lasted five days, with both players getting up only for bathroom breaks. The loser fell to the floor.

Like many who have become hooked on the game, Falafel found the omnipresent possibility of winning seductive. After living in the park for half a year, he moved into a tumbledown gaming club near Wall Street, a no-name place run by a gambler called Fat Nick. Stock traders would come. An associate of Vinny (the Chin) Gigante would come. Falafel slept on a recliner, and played whoever would sit with him. He also began turning up at the New York Chess and Backgammon Club, in midtown, where hard men from the Colombo crime family mixed with working stiffs and professional gamblers, and a caged white dove called Squeeze Bird watched over them all. He kibbitzed and tried to hustle opponents into playing “positions”—arrangements on the board that contain a hidden advantage. When he was not playing, he would collapse into sleep wherever he was, and snore loudly. “You couldn’t tell him, ‘It’s time to go home,’ because he didn’t have one,” a player told me. Falafel lost a lot, but he also improved, and began making a few hundred dollars here and there. When Fat Nick’s shut down, he returned to the street, or he slept at the White House, the last of the Bowery flophouses. One night, he recalled, “I was asleep, and a guy next to me was able to reach into my pocket. He took fifteen hundred dollars, and left me two fifty-dollar bills. Maybe he missed it.”

Falafel’s friends urged him to get off the street. One found him a room, but he could barely pay the rent. Then fortune turned his way, with the arrival of one of the game’s most famous fish, a wealthy French philatelist, Internet entrepreneur, and fraudster known as Marc Armand Rousso, or, in the world of backgammon, as the Croc. He was an eccentric—at the board, he would sometimes mutter, “Yum, yum, yum, yum, my little crocodiles,” Falafel recalled—and, more significant, he was a terrible player with satchels of money to lose. “He comes in, and he loses a hundred and fifty thousand dollars cash in half an hour,” one opponent told me. “Then he leaves and comes back two hours later for more—but now, instead of money, he’s come in with fifty pounds of gold!”

Falafel played the Croc a little, but mostly he bet on the Croc’s opponents, including a skilled player named Abe the Snake. In a few months, Falafel won enough money to buy a small apartment, had he desired one. “I picked up some pants—I wanted to put something in the pocket—and I reach in and I find four thousand dollars,” he told me. “I didn’t even know it existed. That’s how good it was.”


When he was homeless, Falafel had promised himself that if he ever made enough money he would return to Israel. “I wanted to get back and feel some love and warmth and affection and some closeness,” he told me. He yearned to be married. But ever since his arrival in Buffalo he had been shy with girls, and while he was living on the street relationships were no easier. For several years, he rented a place in central Tel Aviv, and in 2001 he got in touch with a girl he had known in middle school. But things didn’t work out. Relocating the warmth was not so easy.

Falafel took to spending fifteen hours a day online, playing backgammon, with the shades drawn, determined to master the game. Clothes and trash piled up. He ate and ate and gained weight. Sometimes he played at a dingy backgammon club nearby. “I saw Falafel there, this big fat guy with his baseball hat backward, playing this big, dark-skinned Israeli guy,” a friend says. “They were playing high stakes, a hundred dollars a point, and the room was packed with people. It was a gladiator fight, you know, just alive, in a place you would least expect it. Falafel, with his special looks—he just looks like an idiot, and everybody here was thinking that he’s just a rich American **** who is going to donate. And Falafel was teasing everybody. He told them that they are all idiots, and he is going to take all their money. And, the thing is, Falafel cleaned up the club. He just cleaned everybody up, and people were going insane, and the stakes got higher. He had everybody play against him. He said, ‘You can consult, because you’re so bad it doesn’t matter. I want to hear all the stupidity.’ And they would basically want to kill him, because he took their money, he took their pride, and he was really, really cocky.”

Every two years, the top backgammon players around the world vote to pick the best of their peers, for a roster called the Giants of Backgammon. In 2007, Falafel was No. 1. “At some point, he woke up and became the best player in the world,” Elliott Winslow, a top player, told me. The title is unscientific, and often debated, but no one could contest that Falafel had achieved greatness. “We can never know for certain who is the best player in a given year, but we can confidently eliminate 99.99 per cent,” Jake Jacobs, the roster’s auditor, says. “Falafel survived the cut.”

Falafel reacted to the news humbly, citing other players he thought were more deserving. “I didn’t end up making a living as a backgammon player by accident,” he said at the time. “I couldn’t function properly in the ‘normal’ world.”

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Falafel is intensely loyal to the people who befriended him in Jurassic Park, and at the Borgata he decided to stay in Atlantic City for as long as The Bone could keep up his run—even if it meant delaying his trip to the backgammon tournament in San Antonio, which was about to begin. When I called Falafel to see if he was going to make it to Texas, the best he could say was “I rate it a favorite.” Backgammon is a highly probabilistic game, and Falafel’s world is rarely defined by certainties. I booked a ticket not knowing for sure that he would show.

The tournament was held in the Menger Hotel, a dusty old building just opposite the Alamo. When I arrived, after 11 P.M. on the first day of play, Falafel had not yet turned up. In a small conference room, a couple of dozen people were milling about, and a few matches were still under way. One was between a Bulgarian man from South Carolina, Petko Kostadinov, and Ed O’Laughlin, an older player from Virginia. Kostadinov—compact, with neatly parted graying hair—was intently focussed on the board. O’Laughlin, a wiry man, was dressed all in black, and his legs were folded up in his chair like crushed origami. He moved his checkers in abrupt jabs, then touched the pieces as if to confirm their solidity.

In the past half century, backgammon tournaments—like backgammon itself—have undergone a profound transformation. The game, which has been around in some form since the time of the Pharaohs, is most popular in the Near East, and in the nineteen-twenties it became a popular club game in the West. In the sixties, the game acquired a certain glamour. Lucille Ball played, and so did Paul Newman. The world championships were black-tie—though many competitors were mediocre, a condition that soon attracted the attention of genuine gamblers, who set out to unlock the game’s money-making potential. Backgammon is far more mathematical than chess, but, while chess has a literature that dates back centuries, backgammon had no real theory until the nineteen-seventies, when gamblers at New York’s Mayfair Club began to take the game apart systematically. Chess players can visualize what the board might look like twenty moves ahead, but in backgammon the dice offer twenty-one random possibilities at each turn. The game must be encountered frame by frame. The players at the Mayfair drew up tables: If one checker is twelve slots from another, there are three ways to attack, and an eight-per-cent chance of doing so successfully. They rolled out positions, playing every permutation to identify the best move. Rollouts could take hundreds of hours. Players attempted to calculate, at each position, their game “equity”—the more the better. By shaving off any trace of error, they could hedge against the chaos of the dice. To the uninitiated, they undoubtedly seemed astoundingly lucky. The Mayfair denizens won a lot of money, until their skill became too conspicuous.


For players of Falafel’s generation, the early theories were given a tremendous advance in the nineteen-nineties, when an engineer at I.B.M. figured out how to apply neural-network computing to the game. The laborious rollouts were no longer necessary. One of the old Mayfair hands, Jersey Jim Pasko, a bodybuilder with a math degree, told me, “I’m spoiled. I want to do a lot of mathematical analysis, and I don’t want to allow anybody else to do any.” He said that many new players came into the game with a single-minded desire to make money, and lacked any sense of style and social grace, so he had dropped out of the circuit.

In San Antonio, while Kostadinov and O’Laughlin played, an official observer with a laptop computer entered their moves into a program that can roll out thousands of possibilities in seconds and calculate errors to three decimal points. Many younger players assume that its judgment is close enough to perfect. Michihito Kageyama, a former McDonald’s employee from Japan who is now fourth on the Giants of Backgammon list, told me that he had created a database of ten thousand positions. He reviews thirty a day on his Kindle, as a morning exercise.

Falafel has no patience for memorization. Because he is undisciplined, he regularly makes small mistakes early on, but in the complex middle game—where checkers are spread out in ambiguous arrangements, and the differences between plays can be hard to measure—he excels. “He’s very special,” Kageyama told me. “He doesn’t calculate equity. He’s just seeing it.” Perry Gartner, the president of the United States Backgammon Federation, put it this way: “Truthfully, out of the top sixty-four players that I know, there isn’t anyone who has his intuitive understanding of the game.”

I should have bet on Falafel: by the time the main tournament in San Antonio began, he and The Bone had arrived. The event was held in the Menger’s Grand Ballroom, though most of the attendees—a hundred and thirty people—were middle-aged men in T-shirts or casual wear. “Backgammon used to be a lot more glamorous,” one of the few women there told me. Falafel was wearing red Air Jordan sweatpants, a black-and-white plaid shirt, a green hoodie, and his yellow cap. His first opponent was Carter Mattig, a sound engineer from Chicago and a jocular trash-talker. Looking at Falafel, he said, “That’s quite a color combination he’s got today,” and that afternoon he posted a photograph online of Falafel in the ensemble, titled “The Angriest Elf.” Falafel was sore about it for days.

The two men found an empty spot at one of the folding tables that filled the room. When Falafel plays, his manner is casual but focussed—unless he is losing, in which case his head droops as if it were filled with sand, and his body curls over the board. If an inferior player beats him, he might say, “He played horribly.” When Falafel wins, he is not always gracious, and he often seems unaware of his lack of tact. Once, on a backgammon forum, Mattig wrote, “I do vomit a little in my mouth when he speaks of his ‘modesty.’ ”

As a few spectators looked on, Falafel played Mattig, who put in earbuds and listened to music—to block out Falafel’s “crying,” he said. The play was brisk, and with each move Falafel, like all the Giants, was looking for fractional advantages. For most people, it is difficult to see the difference between a superlative player and a very good one. Later in the tournament, Jeremy Bagai, who is No. 40 on the Giants list, pulled me aside during a game between two competitors who were playing at an exceptionally high level. “I haven’t seen anything like this,” he said. As a computer made clear, each move was just marginally better than the one Bagai would have made, but the aggregate effect was undeniable. Backgammon is a game of nano-distinctions.


Falafel beat Mattig, 5–4, and afterward a debate arose over one of his moves: was it mathematically correct, or had luck aided him?

“I would be happy to bet on this, Falafel,” Mattig said.

The stakes were set at fifty dollars. The position was entered into a computer, and players crowded around the screen.

“Oh, the move is right!” Falafel called out. “You owe me!”

“Wait, where is the move right?” Mattig said.

“Right here,” Falafel said. “It’s significant. It’s like one per cent.”

Falafel called Kageyama over, showed him the position, and asked him what he would do. Kageyama gave the same answer that Mattig had, and Falafel nodded, smiled, and told him, “That’s a mistake.”

Falafel was slowly making his way upward in the brackets. He had an easy time against Gary Oleson, a Walgreens pharmacist, who had come dressed in a black nylon shirt featuring a dragon strangling a tiger. While Falafel was up, 2–1, it was announced that the tournament would break for dinner. He stood and stretched, which emphasized his hemispherical belly.

“So is it true you have a bet to lose weight?” O’Laughlin asked him.

“Yeah,” Falafel said.

At any given time, Falafel has more bets going than he can keep track of. He has bet on his abilities at tennis, on his dancing skills, on whether he can win an argument about Islam. (Many bets are for a thousand dollars—a “ruble,” in Falafel’s lexicon—or much more.) When he was thirty-eight, Falafel bet five rubles that he would be married in two years. (He lost.) In San Antonio, he told Perry Gartner that he had a long-standing bet: for every day he did not have a child before turning fifty he owed someone five dollars. Gartner, perplexed, asked how that was even a bet. “Right,” Falafel said. “My downside is unlimited. But it is going to happen.” Lately, it seems, Falafel has been trying to bend a vice into a virtue—and no bet has more potential in this regard than his weight bet.

“So what is it?” O’Laughlin asked. “A lot of money?”

A woman walking by answered: “It’s for a ton of money!”

“Thanks,” Falafel said.

“Well, what is it?” O’Laughlin said. “A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?”

Falafel, who has a gambler’s habit of speaking evasively, cradled his belly. “It’s for money,” he said.

The weight bet originated last October, when Falafel flew to Tokyo to play in the Japanese Open. One night, he and several other backgammon players were crammed into Sushi Saito, a three-star Michelin restaurant that seats only seven people. A question was posed: Could Falafel and his ex-roommate Genius achieve the same weight in a year’s time? By then, Falafel, who was enduring a difficult stretch of sports betting, had reached three hundred and ten pounds. Genius, who has a slight frame and is four inches shorter, weighed only a hundred and thirty-eight. The question began to take on the contours of a wager, and the next day a taker emerged willing to give them fifty-to-one odds. The taker is a legendary backgammon hustler, perhaps the must successful in the game’s history. He hustled me into referring to him only as Mr. Joseph—even though anyone on the backgammon circuit will immediately recognize him. He has played Saudi royalty, and he claims to have won as much as three hundred thousand dollars in a match. He once told another gambler, “I used to say I’d like to have a hundred-thousand-dollar day. I’ve had those, both winning and losing, many times since then. Now I say I want a million-dollar losing day, which means I am wealthy enough to have a million-dollar winning day.” His bet with Falafel might help him lose tremendously. No one involved is keen to see its magnitude documented, so just imagine the contents of a large armored suitcase in a James Bond movie.

Mr. Joseph was in San Antonio, too. An enormous man, he was dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, and, when Falafel and The Bone walked over, he and Genius were playing a variant of backgammon involving only three checkers, for five hundred dollars a point. He told Falafel, “You never win in tournaments. The Bone wins. He knows how to win. You find a way to lose to the worst players.”


“I want to win, too,” Falafel said. “But sometimes I get into a spot.”

The Bone interjected, “It’s going to change now that he is losing weight.”

“I play better if I am in better shape,” Falafel said. Since Sushi Saito, he had lost about sixty pounds, and Genius had gained twenty. Just about any time I ran into Genius, he was eating a J.J. Gargantuan Unwich sandwich (seven hundred and thirty-nine calories), from Jimmy John’s. Mr. Joseph was unconcerned; he seemed to take pleasure in the bet’s manipulative aspects. In 1996, he told another player, Brian Zembic, that he would give him a hundred thousand dollars if he got breast implants and kept them in for a year. Months later, Zembic got them, size 38C, and, to everyone’s surprise, he liked them. They helped him meet women, and he ended up marrying one of them. A year came and went—and a hundred thousand dollars was wired to a Swiss bank account—but still he kept the implants in. Once, when Falafel came to visit, Zembic unbuttoned his shirt and danced. Falafel smiled and blushed.

In his own way, Falafel wanted to be transformed, too. He wanted to be healthier, more mindful, more purposeful. “My life, I just got into a situation,” he said. “Some of the hardships I endured, I did so without realizing that they were hardships. I should have a family. That is a big missing part of my own puzzle.”

Once, in an airport, Falafel sat next to a rabbi, and asked him for his thoughts about gambling. The rabbi said that it was not prohibited, but that a life of gambling was unsanctioned by God. Falafel told me, “I see religion for what it really is: just a bluff,” but he couldn’t get the interpretation out of his head. One evening, outside a casino bathroom, I saw him stop a young bearded man in a yarmulke and say, “I have a question for you: Do you know what Jewish law says about gambling?” The man was taken aback. It didn’t matter—Falafel was already answering. “I think it is that you can gamble, but that you can’t earn a living from gambling. Is that it?”

At the Menger, Mr. Joseph had rented the Presidential Suite, and on Super Bowl Sunday he filled it with food and with backgammon players. By then, the tournament was over. The mood was relaxed. Falafel had lost in the semifinals, to a longtime player from Texas, and he had been upset. But now, in Mr. Joseph’s suite, the loss was easily forgotten. There was the Super Bowl to distract him—he had bet many rubles on the Baltimore Ravens. And there was his weight. He stood near an elaborate buffet that Mr. Joseph had arranged. “You can eat this,” a player from Germany said, pointing to a tin of celery. Falafel already had a stalk in his mouth. He took a few carrots and a bottle of mineral water and walked over to a couch. A plate of cheesecakes was set down in front of him. “Those pies,” Mr. Joseph said, casually. “Have one of those pies.”

“No,” Falafel said, cradling his belly. “I can’t.”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks right now to eat one of those pies,” Mr. Joseph said, pulling out a crisp bill.

“How many calories?” Falafel said.

“Thirty,” Mr. Joseph said.

“Bullshit!” The Bone said.

Falafel looked at the money and hesitated. “Jeez,” he said. “You’re giving me a fifty?” But he held his ground.

It used to be that tournaments were the center of big-money side games, but these days the few players who make their living from backgammon must look in deeper waters for big fish. Before leaving the Menger, one top player told me in hushed tones that he was going to see a billionaire who puts him up in a hotel near his house so that they can play all-night games for a thousand dollars a point. The billionaire is so obsessive that he can play for fifteen hours uninterrupted; the player told me he had to bring a friend to cover for him during bathroom breaks.

From Texas, Falafel and The Bone headed for Los Angeles, where they rented a business suite at a Manhattan Beach hotel. Word had been quietly circulating about a group of wealthy amateurs playing for enormous stakes. Not merely fish—a pod of whales. Who would they be? Ted Turner? Carl Icahn? George and Barbara Bush host a private tournament at Kennebunkport. One of the most-read books in the Bush family is “Backgammon for Blood,” a handbook from the nineteen-seventies. (“Unfortunately, that’s one of the worst books,” a mathematician told me. “It was written under a pseudonym, and some people say it was intentionally bad so that people reading it would play worse.”) Falafel thought he could find a way into the action from the West Coast, but he was fanatically secretive about what he knew. The money was too big—too important to his future. “This is a fantasy,” he told me, by which he meant that the games were just an ephemeral opportunity, a blinding spark.

Falafel’s hotel was a favorite of Jersey Jim’s, who had also come, with his wife, Patty. Every day, they went across the street to a gym the size of an LAX hangar. Falafel was relying on them to help him lose weight. But he did not want to lift, or run, or exert himself intensively. Instead, he decided to restrict his diet to a thousand calories per day, and to walk. Jersey Jim and Patty worked on him until he agreed, at least, to climb the Manhattan Beach dune: a steep, two-hundred-and-seventy-foot incline near an Army Reserve facility, where athletes like Kobe Bryant come to work out.

On the morning that Falafel and The Bone arrived, a lean man with bleached dreadlocks, shirtless and deeply tanned, was doing yoga on a blanket at the base of the dune. Falafel looked a little intimidated. He watched as The Bone began striding up the incline and then slowed down. “Gee,” he said. “The Bone, he’s realizing that it takes a lot of energy.”

Patty turned to Falafel. “This is how you lose weight,” she said.

“Yeah, for sure,” Falafel said. He gazed at the hill uncertainly. At his last weigh-in, he was two hundred and forty-five pounds. But things were looking up. He had won on the Super Bowl. He was flying back to Israel to attend a wedding, and to spend some time near his childhood home. Then he was off to Copenhagen, for the Nordic Open—informally known as “Denmark vs. the World.” Falafel, who was captaining “the World,” was putting together an international team, and hoped to bring in Genius and Abe the Snake. The whales seemed increasingly within reach. Squinting in the bright Los Angeles sun, Falafel pushed his feet into the hot sand. Slowly, he began to climb.

Who in fact was Pete Tan Hoang? Some knew him as a modest Vietnamese waiter. In the casino circle he was best known as being a high roller. He progressively become a professional money launderer. He laundered over a billion dollars in Australia's casinos and did this for over a decade. Hoang progressively aroused enough suspicion to capture the attention of the Australian authorities.

It became obvious that what appeared to be legal casino winnings were actually drug money. Then after a furtive affair with the Australian justice system in 2012, Hoang became the victim of his misdeeds; He was gunned down, with a shot to the head, in what appeared to be as mob-related shooting.
From humble beginnings
In the day time, Pete was probably just an ordinary guy, who seemed to be living off welfare and his meagre salary as a waiter. Pete was a co-tenant in a modest Bankstown apartment. He drove a vintage-type sedan. Nothing seemed more normal for this Vietnamese-born orphan living on a refugee visa.  At nights though, things got a little fairy-tale like. He was transformed into well-known high roller who gambled and laundered millions of dollars in Australia’s glitzy hotels. However his double life was publicly exposed when 36 year old Hoang was viciously murdered by a shot in the face while lurking in a dark suburban Sydney alley.

Then it all became public, and Australian gambling news reporters had a field day. It turned out that Hoang wasn’t just a known gambler at casinos. He actually money laundered for narcotic mobsters, gambling away millions over a ten-year period. Most of the gambling and money laundering took place in Australia's biggest casino, the Crown Melbourne.

Hoang, born in Vietnam in 1997 became an orphan. Twenty years later he arrived on Aussie shores on a student’s visa. In order to stay in the country he applied for a student visa with an Indonesian passport showing his name to be Petrus Keyn Peten. Applying for refugee status, he changed his name to Minh Tan Nguyen and was granted Australian citizenship in 2001.
Pete Hoang, ‘person of interest’
By the time Hoang became a citizen, he was a regular figure in Australian poker rooms and casinos and was soon banned from Sydney's casino, The Star. Then in In May 2012, not only was he banned again from the same casino but he was also banned from Jupiter's Casino in Brisbane.

It became obvious by then that he was dealing with a very ‘high proportion of gambled funds” which had to “other people's money at casinos under instructions” says Michael Purchas, head of was dubbed the ‘Operation Gordian’ by the Australian Crime Commission (ACC). Narcotics investigators started to consider him as a ’person of interest’.

Michael Purchas, who headed the Gordian operation, spent months observing Vietnamese-Australian criminals, including Hoang, who sold drugs and laundered the profits. Between 2005 and 2006 the ACC operation revealed that Hoang was good at eluding the police even though he was suspected of heroin and other illegal drug trafficking.

Only a handful of small group Vietnamese-Australians were arrested for laundering about $93 million in drug profits in a year. Later, it became obvious that Hoang was actually involved with several Vietnamese-Australian drug trafficking syndicates in Sydney and Melbourne.

Finally, in October 2012, he was arrested at the Crown Casino, as he tried to gamble an extravagant $1.5 million in cash on high stakes. It was later made known that Hoang had accumulated $75 million worth of chips at Crown in 12 years from 2000. This corresponded to around $225 million, or as much as $1 billion being laundered.
Murder linked to money laundering
Mick Willing, New South Wales Police homicide squad commander, proclaimed that it was highly probable that “Hoang's background in drugs and Asian organized crime syndicates played a role in his death...We have certainly considered that he was involved in drug trafficking and moving money through casinos - [that] may have been a catalyst for his death".

Aussie Law enforcement officials suggested that Hoang was indeed involved with Ong Ngoai, a Hong Kong-based crime group that dealt in global drug trafficking. It had an illicit network stretching from Asia, to North and South America, with an Australian connection.

Australian police also revealed that the Vietnamese narco-group also had links with 24 dozen drug syndicates. Investigators also said that Hoang’s ‘remarkable gambling patterns’ at the Crown Melbourne made the casino come under scrutiny.
Hoang gets royal treatment under the Crown
The casino seemed to approve of Hoang playing under four different names – Pete Hoang, James and John Ho and Patrick Lu. He was showered with perks and benefits ranging from business class flights from Sydney, a villa in the Crown Towers, free food and alcohol, to minimum $1 million buy-in, as well as a cut of gambling turnover, in the form of cash gifts, amounting to $100,000.

Although under Australian gambling laws, Crown had to reveal Hoang's transactions to federal authorities; it all but refused to comment on these exclusive gifts. However Crown assured everyone that it was fully cooperating with state and federal law enforcement agencies concerning Mr. Hoang.

Let's move up to date.

On Tuesday in the United Kingdom, United States law enforcement arrested futures trader Navinder Singh Sarao and froze more than $7 million of his assets in banks around the world. The Department of Justice says that Singh manipulated commodities markets and partially caused the May 6, 2010 “Flash Crash” that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging 1,000 points in minutes.

Sarao’s Flash Crash involvement is a nice news hook and Michael Lewis, who wrote the book about this kind of thing in Flash Boys, should have a lot to say about it.

But, keep this in mind: Sarao traded for more than four years after the Flash Crash, utilizing the services of futures exchanges that are meant to serve as the frontline of industry self-policing. The Flash Crash was gone in an instant (stock prices recovered that day). This alleged market manipulator operated for years.

Not only did he temporarily crash the stock market, but he was free to do it again.

The commodity at issue here are futures contracts tied to the S&P 500, the most liquid of the U.S. stock indexes. The government’s criminal complaint describes these contracts as “one of the most popular and liquid equity index futures contracts in the world.”

Sarao is said to have made $40 million in profits by manipulating markets between 2009 and the spring of 2014. That’s a lot of money, but by global market standards, Sarao is a small player. The government will have to prove that such an insignificant market participant can have such a large effect on prices.

Not only did he temporarily crash the stock market, but he was free to do it again.
But in a world where speed rules, size matters much less. According to the criminal complaint, Sarao used specialized trading software to place large buy and sell orders and had preprogrammed his systems to adjust and cancel most of his orders so that they were never executed.

When Sarao wanted to drive futures prices lower, he placed large sell orders. If prices fell towards his asks, he moved them or cancelled the orders before they were filled. Similarly, if he wanted to drive markets higher, he bid high and then moved the bids or cancelled them before he’d have been required to pay up.

The practice of placing fake bids is known as “spoofing.” The government says that Sarao could do all of this in fractions of a second.

The size of Sarao’s spoof trades, says the complaint, were much larger than the typical trade sizes of other investors. Sarao typically bid for between 200 and 900 lots of contracts at a time. To put that in perspective, the average market sized order is for 7 lots.

Basically, Sarao was a minnow disguised as a humpback whale.

He concentrated his trades in the E-Mini S&P 500 Futures Market where contract sizes are 1/5th the size of the standard S&P 500 futures. These are instruments for smaller investors.

On the day of the Flash Crash, says the complaint, Sarao’s spoof trades accounted for 20 percent of the imbalance between selling and buying pressure. The government contends that the selling pressure from the E-Mini futures markets spilled into other derivatives markets and into the stock market itself. That’s where the real, large, fast-moving players and their trading algorithms cascaded towards failure.


One interesting aspect of the futures markets is that they are self-regulated by exchanges, in this case by the CME Group. The exchanges exist to make sure that participants live up to their promises. If I sell you $1,000 barrels of oil to be delivered a year from now at $60 a barrel, the exchange makes sure that you get what was promised—even if the price of oil has risen. Exchanges do this by forcing contract holders to post collateral but can also ban shirkers and other bad actors.

But Sarao seems to have uncovered lax monitoring by the CME Group and other exchanges, the government says. Gregory LaBerta, the FBI agent whose affidavit accompanies the criminal complaint, says that Sarao was contacted by various exchanges in 2009 and 2010, questioning his cancellations of large orders.

Sarao responded that he “frequently canceled large volumes of orders but falsely asserted that he did so manually, without the assistance of an automated trading program.”

On the day of the Flash Crash, the CME Group wrote to Sarao that, “all orders entered into Globex during the pre-opening are expected to be entered in good faith for the purpose of executing bona fide transactions.”

Four days later, Sarao told his broker that he had responded to the CME and “told ‘em to kiss my ass.”

Sarao went on to trade for years. When the Eurex, a German futures exchange, questioned his tactics, Sarao assured the exchange that his trades were “100 percent at risk, 100 percent of the time.” When the Financial Conduct Authority of the UK questioned him he described himself as a talented, “old school” trader with fast reflexes.

Exchanges should be willing to ban bad actors. They saw Sarao entering phony trades and responded by sending him letters.

This is no surprise. Exchanges don’t make money by kicking people out of the game. Volume is everything.

No one seems even to have noticed that Sarao kept a good chunk of his trading gains in the accounts of “Milking Markets Limited,” a tax shelter he had incorporated in tropical Nevis Island. Perhaps whoever issued the wire transfers thought he was in the dairy business.

Is the plunge protection team still in operation

A colloquial name given to the Working Group on Financial Markets. The Plunge Protection Team was created to make financial and economic recommendations to various sectors of the economy in times of economic turbulence. The team consists of the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Chairman of the SEC and the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

"Plunge Protection Team" was the nickname given to the Working Group by The Washington Post in 1997. The team was initially perceived by some to have been created solely to shore up the markets or even manipulate them. The team was created in response to the 1987 market crash.



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BRENDAN STEELE HAD a feeling things were going a little too well. It was the Tuesday before the 2013 Players Championship, and Steele and Keegan Bradley stood on the 12th green at TPC Sawgrass with a 2-up lead on Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler in a best-ball practice match. Bradley was staring down a 10-foot putt that would give them a three-hole advantage with six to play -- not an insurmountable lead, but close enough. As Bradley read the putt, Phil spoke up from behind.

"Let me tell you," Mickelson began. "This is the whole match."

His voice was even, almost thoughtful. An onlooker might have mistaken it for candor. But Steele and Bradley did their best to tune him out. They'd been playing in practice rounds against Mickelson for two years now, and they knew what was coming -- a piece of vicious psychological warfare cloaked in a veil of objective philosophy. Money was on the line, real money, and Mickelson wasn't about to go down quietly. He had the commitment of a method actor in these moments, and to engage him, even just a little, would be to let him inside your head.

"If you make this putt," Mickelson continued, in his earnest way, "then we're going to be 3 down, and it's going to be too much to come back from. You guys are going to be excited, and you're going to have all the momentum."

The 42-time PGA Tour winner indulged in a dramatic pause. Bradley was ready to putt, but that didn't matter. The rhythm of Phil's monologue had to be respected. Truth be told, Steele and Bradley were caught up in the act too, even if, like a film they'd seen a hundred times before, they could recite the best lines along with him.

They'd had plenty of time to learn. Since the 2011 Players, when they'd been invited to their first of many Tuesdays With Phil, they had practiced girding themselves as he cycled between sarcasm, open mockery and his dreaded faux sincerity. The point of the matches was, in a way, to simulate the anxiety they all felt on Sundays, and nobody could ratchet up the pressure like Phil. He was, in Steele's words, an evil genius.

"I get in these games," Bradley said before the 2012 Ryder Cup, "and I've got more nerves than I do in the tournament." And so as Bradley finished lining up his putt, it hardly escaped his attention that he and Steele had the chance for a rare blowout win. Deep down, he knew Mickelson was right. If Bradley made the putt, it could put the match away.

"But!" Mickelson stressed, louder now, letting the word ring out for emphasis. "If you miss this putt, you're going to be so devastated that you're going to give us a hole in the next couple. After that, one of us is going to hit it close, and we're going to take another hole. And you're going to be so worried about blowing the lead that we're going to win the match.

"So be careful," he concluded, with a show of paternal concern. "You don't want to quick-peel this one low side."

And so it was that Bradley hit ... a quick peel on the low side, watching as the ball ran past the hole. And then he and Steele gave away the 13th with two bogeys. And then, on 15, Fowler stiffed one for a tap-in birdie to square the match. And two holes later, on the famed island green, Mickelson and Fowler sealed the match -- and the cash.

Walking off Sawgrass that day, Steele and Bradley were seething. And if someone had stopped them to say that it was only Tuesday and the loss didn't really matter at all, that person would have been lucky to get away with only an angry glare.

To his colleagues, Tom Hayes was Tommy Chocolate – so called because he preferred cocoa to alcohol when out drinking with City friends. In court, Hayes, 35, who has a wife and child, complained he was being portrayed as “the Jesse James of Libor, the Bobby Dazzler of Libor”. At the end of his trial, the former trader was confirmed not only to have been a “gambler” but the “ringmaster” of the “biggest banking crime in history”.

Perhaps it’s natural that the first man to be convicted as a result of the momentous scandal – which saw bankers rig a key global lending rate that determines the cost of loans worth trillions of pounds, from mortgages to student loans – should have so many names and labels placed on him. The one likely to stick to Hayes the longest, however, may be “Rain Man”.

Before the trial, Hayes was diagnosed with mild Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. The former trader was surprised to be told he was afflicted by the developmental disability, saying: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me.” Yet he added: “It does explain certain character traits I have. The obsessionality.” Hayes admitted this trait made him “different” to others in his office and led them to give him the nickname of the Dustin Hoffman character in the Oscar-winning film Rain Man. He told Southwark Crown Court: “They thought I was a little bit strange, I took things very literally. They used to laugh at me.”

One source of amusement was the fact that, even in his late twenties, Hayes still had the same superhero duvet cover on this bed that he had gone to sleep under as an eight-year-old. “It still served its purpose so I didn’t see what was wrong,” he explained.


There were serious ramifications for the trial, however. The judge, Mr Justice Cooke, told jurors that the diagnosis meant Hayes tends to only see the world in “black and white” and has difficulty in social situations – and warned that his speech could be rapid and peppered with jargon.

The answers he gave doctors during a medical assessment were literal, intense and lacking in social niceties, Mr Justice Cooke added; they contained no irony or humour.

Throughout the proceedings, in which he was repeatedly asked to slow down by his lawyer during his testimony, Hayes sat in court with an independent intermediary who would intervene on his behalf to ask for a break from questioning. And when probed by the prosecution about matters which went to the heart of the morality and criminality of some of his trades, Hayes would focus solely on the technical aspect of the question in ways which might have made him seem evasive. Hayes said he was obsessed with financial markets, and missed his former career after this case brought it to an end.

“It was a huge part of my identity,” he said, and according to his lawyer, Hayes “lived, breathed and slept Libor all because he wanted to do a good job for the bank”.

“I’ve always wanted to do my job as perfectly as I could, whether I was cleaning a deep-fat fryer or deboning a chicken,” Hayes said. “They always gave me those jobs because they knew there would be no chicken left on the bone and no fat left in the fryer.”

So how did he come to be at the heart of an operation that cost banks billions in fines and led to global outrage? Hayes was born and raised in Hammersmith, west London. He and his brother Robin, four years his junior, grew up in a comfortable middle-class home. His parents divorced and remarried other partners. He excelled academically and studied maths and engineering at university. Even before graduation, a host of banks were inviting him for interviews at their offices.

He joined RBS in 2001 as a junior trader. After a period working for the Royal Bank of Canada, he joined Union Bank of Switzerland in 2006 in its Tokyo office selling yen derivatives. It was there, the court heard, that his Libor-rigging education began by “osmosis – picking it up from the people he sat next to”. The Financial Conduct Authority concluded the bank’s Libor culture was “evasive” and the practice of submitting rates to suit its trading position was an “open and accepted practice”. But soon, the prosecution said, Hayes had learned to “cajole,” “beg,” and “bribe” other brokers into “corrupt” trades to fix the rate.

He was a “ringmaster” orchestrating colleagues, rival dealers, and independent brokers to secure Libor fixes that benefited his trades. On one occasion this even involved asking his younger stepbrother, Peter O’Leary, to buy a “few drinks” for a colleague at HSBC to influence the rate, and offered to hand over $100,000 to another associate if he helped.

Hayes claimed he was anything but a rogue trader, saying that pretty much everyone was at it. But he would later admit to investigators that, while it was commonplace, he was a “serial offender”.

The motive was simple greed. Hayes could win millions of pounds for every point (one hundredth of one per cent) the Libor rates moved in his favour – and following his arrest in 2012, he told investigators: “You want every little bit of money you can get.”

Hayes earned UBS more than £260m in three years trading. His reward was a pre-tax salary of £1.8m a year – but he did not think this adequate. His skills did not go unnoticed and several rival banks tried to hire him, including  Goldman Sachs.

When he eventually joined US bank Citigroup, his pre-tax salary jumped to £3.5m. Despite his new salary, his colleagues said he maintained a low profile, eschewing Tokyo’s expensive night life, preferring instead to dine in fast-food restaurants. Nor did he look like a suited and booted City trader: he could usually be seen wearing jeans and jumpers worn thin with use.

His time at Citigroup was brief and bloody. His attempt to manipulate Libor was noticed by the bank’s legal department, which ordered an investigation. Hayes insisted he was unaware he had done anything wrong. In September 2010, two weeks before his marriage to 35-year-old lawyer Sarah Tighe in England, he was sacked – but he kept his £2.2m signing-on bonus. The couple have made their home in Fleet in Hampshire. Throughout the trial his wife and mother, Sandra, have attended in support.

The US bank reported the incident to US, UK and Japanese regulators, resulting in both the US and the UK seeking his arrest. The case reportedly sparked a rare spat between the Serious Fraud Office and the US Justice Department. Yesterday’s outcome will help rebuild transatlantic co-operation.

His fear of a US jail sentence prompted him to “tell-all” to the SFO to ensure he faced charges in the UK. In more than 80 hours of interviews, he outlined in great detail how every bank was endeavouring to influence the rate. His confession, he said, was born out of fear of being taken away from his wife and newborn child.



However, the judge concluded that he was “by nature a gambler” – which extended to his remarkable decision to later plead not guilty despite having confessed to his methods, Mr Justice Cooke said in a pre-trial hearing.

The judge said the evidence showed it was an “open and shut case” but that Hayes hoped the jury might be bamboozled by technicalities and let him off. “He may gamble with a jury but what I am not having is a long trial which is confused by the sort of material that has been put forward.”

It was a bet he lost, at the cost of 14 years in jail.

What book do these stories come from?