When I first went to Vegas in the 1960s, it was a free-and-easy town. The casinos, as a rule, were small and friendly. The $100 chip was usually the top denomination in play at the tables, so it was standard procedure for a player to have a wooden rack close at hand to keep his chips in. A player could walk over to a blackjack table, drop greenbacks on the felt, and tell the dealer, “Money plays.” When the player won, he would pick up his bills, put them in his pocket and gamble with the chips he won.

Not in Atlantic City, pal! The first time I placed my greenbacks on the table for a bet, the dealer swiftly gathered them up and zipped them into the drop box, exchanging my money for chips.
Annoyed, I wrote it off as petty bullshit. But as time went by, it dawned on me how clever and sophisticated the marketing geniuses in the casino front offices had become. Now follow me on this: When you play for money, real greenback folding money, you’re more aware, more cautious. You’re looking down on cash you made by the sweat of your brow. But once the dealer exchanges it for the casino’s multicolored chips, it suddenly ceases to be “real” money. Now you’re playing with play money.

If you stand back a little and put it all in perspective, the pieces fit neatly into place. The player (read that as “patsy”) is in a controlled atmosphere where Father Time is an absentee dad. A place with no windows and no clocks, a place where low, soothing lights and music in the background puts the player in a perpetual Twilight Zone. Like Pinocchio on Pleasure Island, he is a kid again, able to have all his whims satisfied: free cigarettes and drinks served by half-naked Playboy centerfold-type waitresses at his beck-and-call (you never see a guy serving drinks). bet on football

As for the chips, he often bets them without restraint. And why not? They’re “only” chips, not the real money he barters in a work-a-day world. The dealers help feed the myth of make-believe for the player with their unique terminology: You’re not betting $25— you’re betting “a quarter.” You’re not betting five real dollars— you’re betting “a nickel.” You can begin to see how easy it is for the casino to lull the player into losing a sense of reality.

If you think all this is just applesauce, just think back on the times you were flying high at the table, a fortune in the casino’s chips in front of you. A shoe or two later—wham!—the tide turned in the casino’s favor, as it eventually always does, and you were soon tapped out.
If you weren’t so zonked and brainwashed by the casino’s controlled environment, you probably would have grabbed your chips while the going was good and headed directly to the cashier’s cage.

I know of what I write. I was the patsy too many times in the situations discussed above. Oh, how many times I had it, but greed consumed me and I stuck around for “just one more shoe.” And, dammit, how many times I lost it all!
So don’t be an ass like I used to be. Don’t get lured into the “casino trance,” where you lose track of your table/casino goal and get swallowed up in Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island syndrome. When you reach your predetermined goal, run out of the casino with your winnings. Don’t join me and Pinocchio in the donkey house.

• Casino – Mad Money (0)
• Casino And Borrowed Money (0)
• Casino And $5,000 Chips Part3 (0)

Though normally a casino owner will do just about anything in the world to coax a whale into his casino, MGM Grand owner Kirk Kerkorian flew a personal representative to Australia just to tell Packer face-to-face that his business was no longer welcome at the MGM Grand. Casino old-timers say this is the first time in living memory anything like this ever happened.
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The highest-stakes game I ever witnessed was a chemin de fer session in 1964 at Crockford's Casino in London, with auto magnate Henry Ford II, movie producer Otto Preminger, and an Arab sheik at the table. London chips get bigger as their value increases, and the chips I saw going back and forth across the table were HUGE.
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Only one time in all my casino cruising have I ever seen a craps table run out of chips. It was in the 1960s at the Sands. The table was elbow-to-elbow with High Rollers, all from Providence, Rhode Island. The table minimum was $100, a rarity in the 1960s.
Lady Luck really smiled on the enthusiastic Rhode Islanders as the black chips rapidly disappeared from in front of the boxmen, streaming across the table to the red-hot Providence crowd. To my astonishment, security men suddenly showed up with a rolling table, piled high with racks of the old, discontinued black chips of the 1950s—the cute ones with the smiling cowgirl and the logo, 'Gome As You Are." It was nice seeing them again.

• Casino And Borrowed Money (0)
• Casino – Money Doesnt Play In Atlantic City (0)
• Casino – Mad Money (0)

Gambling Today reported in their January 25, 1999 issue that so far five people have filed complaints about Binion's chip-cashing policies with the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Former casino owner Bob Stupak is among the complainants. Stupak was turned away by the casino's cashiers, so next time he showed up flanked by an impressive entourage of supporters and media in order to put the casino on the spot, and force them to pay up. The result? He was turned away again! An anti-gambling activist to whom Stupak had given one of his chocolate chips also was unable to redeem it for cash.

I read in the Summer 1998 issue of The Intelligent Gambler of yet another customer run-in with a casino over the cashing of chips, and again the amount involved was $5,000.
Abdul Jalib, a resident of Las Vegas and a "professional gambler," writes about a friend of his who was playing blackjack at the MGM Grand casino for several days, losing steadily. At last his luck turned, and slowly but surely he hacked away so that finally he was even. At the cashier's cage he was asked where he won the money, and he explained that he won it little by little at tables all across the casino. The MGM Grand is a large place, with lots of blackjack tables, making his story entirely plausible —even common.
Incredibly, the cashier refused to cash his $5,000 in chips, and after a hassle she begrudgingly agreed to cash $2,500's worth. When he took the other $2,500 in chips to another cashier, the first cashier rushed over, screaming, "Don't cash those chips!" Only after the player went to see the casino manager and bitterly complained was he finally able to redeem the rest of his chips. Needless to say, he informed the manager in no uncertain terms that he would never ever again patronize the MGM Grand.
If it should happen to me, neither would I. And neither should you. If any casino becomes a hassle, avoid it and gamble elsewhere.

aren't like you and I. They number a scant few hundred, but they are the real meat-and-potatoes of big casino action. The gamblers I'm talking about make the fabled Nick the Greek look like a penny-ante player.
The majority of them are Asians who fly in on chartered jets with a retinue of bodyguards, mistresses, cooks, and interpreters. Whole baccarat pits are reserved just for them and are often specially redecorated to suit the tastes of these Very Special Players.
Casinos will go to extraordinary lengths to attract them. They wager in huge sums, and their limits at the tables can reach mind-boggling numbers. They are referred to in casino inner-circles as "whales."

Akio Kashiwagi was a whale. Baccarat was his game. According to a feature story in The National Enquirer, this High Roller literally broke the bank when he raked in $22 million from an Australian casino, and then followed up by winning another $12.2 million from one of Donald Trump's casinos. Trump successfully lured him into returning, and his casino was able to win back $10 million of it. But that didn't faze this Japanese jetter—he still had $24 million left in winnings when the smoke cleared.

Kashiwagi often brought $10 million as seed money, gambling for as long as fourteen hours a day. He took his gambling seriously, turning a large part of his mansion in Japan into a miniature casino, complete with baccarat table, dealer—even a cocktail waitress! When at home, he practiced ten-hours-a-day just "to keep in shape."
Kashiwagi was a wheeler-dealer in Japanese real estate, operating on the fringe of legitimacy. Finally his luck ran out, not at the tables but with his real estate dealings. When his house of cards collapsed, Kashiwagi committed suicide.

Kerry Packer, Australia's wealthiest man, is another whale who gambles for gigantic sums. He stuck it to Steve Wynn when he won a hefty six million bucks from his prize casino, the Mirage. His coup degrace occurred in 1996 when, in less then two hours, he beat the Las Vegas MGM Grand for almost $24 million. This adventurous Aussie—a casino owner himself in his native Australia—was betting as much as a quarter-of-a-million dollars a hand!

• The Casinos Cashiers Cage (0)

Sounds far-fetched, I know. You've probably never even seen a $5,000 chip, let alone owned one. But here are three horror stories about $5,000 chips, one told to me, one that I witnessed, and one fairly recent episode I read about in a 1999 issue of Gambling Today.
The first instance happened on what was supposed to be a jolly and carefree, fun-filled junket to a Caribbean island casino. The husband, who gambled, took along his wife, who didn't. She was just eager to soak up a little winter sunshine.
While strolling through the casino the wife spied a chip on the floor and picked it up. To her amazement and delight it turned out to be a $5,000 chip. Now grandiose thoughts danced in her brain, like how she would surprise her husband with extravagant gifts, etc. Her dream turned into a nightmare when she went to the cashier's cage and tried to cash the $5,000 chip. Immediately the shift boss and the casino manager closed in on her, asking her exactly where she got the chip.
She wasn't a junketeer gambler known to them, and no one had ever seen her at the tables. She told them that she had found it, but that didn't satisfy the casino bosses. Without going into all the nasty by-play, I'll just say that she and her husband fled the island paradise, threatened with arrest! Truth be told, they probably were lucky to get out in one piece.

Another episode concerning a $5,000 chip happened on my watch recently at Caesars in Atlantic City. I was at a $25-minimum blackjack table, as is my wont. Sitting next to me was a young guy, who couldn't have been much older than eighteen, by law the age requirement for gambling in a New Jersey casino.
He pushed a chip toward the dealer for change—a $5,000 chip. The dealer froze and stopped the action. He immediately summoned the pit boss, who asked the kid a few questions and then called over the shift manager. Meanwhile all action at the table stopped.
After the shift manager had interrogated the kid, an impressive casino executive appeared, probably an assistant casino manager. He asked the youth for his ID and then wanted to know where he got the $5,000 chip. Still no action at the table. The lad explained—claimed—that his father had given him the $5,000 chip.

After a short sotto-voce conference between the three Caesar stooges, they pushed the chip back to the kid and told him to have his father bring it in. Red-faced and crestfallen, the kid left the table, and at last—the game went forward.
I relate these two $5,000 chip episodes, which occurred thousands of miles apart, to alert you to the perils of accepting high-denomination chips. I wonder what happens to the schnook who stumbles upon a $10,000 or a $25,000 chip.

In 1998 an entirely new set of problems arose over the $5,000 chip, this time in Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. It appears that some very enterprising counterfeiter successfully cloned the casino's $5,000 chocolate chip, panicking the management. Hamid Dastmalchi, winner of the 1992 World Series of Poker, tried to redeem the five-grand chips for $815,000, but was rebuffed at the cashier's cage. The explanation he was given was that, with counterfeit chips in circulation, Binion's would only cash big-money chips they could verify as having been bought or won at the casino.

• Casino – Money Doesnt Play In Atlantic City (0)
• Casino – Mad Money (0)

Casinos, with all their flash and glitter, might appear to the first-time visitor to be laid out in a somewhat haphazard manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. Casino owners and managers are heavy-hitters, investing Big Bucks in a grim, hard-ball business. You better believe these moguls leave nothing to chance every step of the way, from the positioning of water fountains and restrooms to the location of the cashier's cage, to figuring out where the craps and blackjack tables will be, to the exact aisle space between the rows of the slot machines. (Notice the ample walking space in the rows of the half-dollar and dollar machines, both of which are positioned near the casino entrances.)

If you hit it big, big enough to cash in at least $5,000 in chips, find out if the casino cashier cage has a side entrance, where there are private booths where you can do your cash transactions away from the milling crowd. There you can request a "certified bundle"—an already-banded pack of fifty-$100 bills, initialed by the tellers. (When my chips count is not quite $5,000, I just add the necessary cash to my pile of chips to receive my neatly-banded certified bundle.) Two casinos in Atlantic City that have the private side entrance are Caesars and the Sands. There are others.

• Casino And $5,000 Chips Part2 (0)

Money is the real name of the game in the casino.
In 1960, when I first started to gamble in casinos, currency was frequently used as a betting unit in baccarat. Players would put greenbacks on the betting squares and, if they won, the dealer would count out paper money to pay off the bet. $100 chips were top dollar betting units at both blackjack and craps, with higher denomination chips mostly in play at the baccarat table. The cry, "Money plays," with the bettor tossing greenbacks onto the green-felt cloth, was heard frequently in casinos.

I promised you that this book would be anecdotal, so I can't resist telling you about the most unusual loan I ever got. I went along on one of book publisher Lyle Stuart's all-expenses-paid trips to the Sands in Las Vegas for his office crew and friends. As this was during my fledgling years, I was still learning the art and science of wagering, and I was not adroit in either blackjack or craps. The result: My bankroll soon slimmed down to almost nothing. I sometimes tagged along with Lyle on his gambling sprees but, as I was just about tapped out, I explained to my friend that, with the meager funds left at my disposal, I was going to cool it for the rest of the trip and stick with the slot machines. Obviously amused, Lyle led me to the Sands' baccarat table, where he was greeted warmly by the dealers. Lyle stood there, with his hands in his pockets and just stared at the table for a couple of seconds. Then he simply announced, "Two thousand on Player."

That was it. Lyle, just standing there, didn't even take his hands out of his pockets, and of course he didn't put up any money.
"$2,000 on Player for Mr. S," intoned the Caller as the cards were dealt. "The Bank has a natural eight," the Caller announced.
The player at the table with the biggest bet on the Player's side turned his two cards face-up.

"A natural nine for the Player. Player wins, nine over eight. Pay the Player's side."

The dealer counted out twenty-$100 bills and placed them on the cloth. Now, for the first time since we got to the table, Lyle took his hands out of his pockets and reached down to pick up his winnings, which he handed over to me.
"Here, kid, here's a loan. C'mon, let's head over to Caesars. Their baccarat table opens in twenty minutes."

With my newly enhanced bankroll, I resumed my custom of tagging along with Lyle. We went to Caesars and I had my usual exciting time watching my bon vivant friend in action. Did I gamble with Lyle's windfall loan? Not a penny, dear reader. Not a sou. Which brings me to my next rule for you. If you want to be a winner, never—NEVER—gamble with borrowed money. I returned the twenty $100 bills to him as soon as our return flight to New York was in the air.

• Casino And $5,000 Chips Part3 (0)
• Casino – Money Doesnt Play In Atlantic City (0)
• Casino – Mad Money (0)

My then-girl friend Stella, now my wife, also regards my gambling winnings as "found money" to be splurged on fantasies. Of course, when I lost I would explain it was just loose money, the loss of which didn't affect our standard of living, but she still had a few thousand choice words of vituperation for me.

When we were wed, Stella and I spent our honeymoon at the Sahara in Las Vegas—where else? Thinking all good things must come to an end, I found myself standing on the check-out line, feeling good because the Las Vegas tables had paid for our honeymoon. I felt a tap on my shoulder,- it was my blushing bride.
"We need a necessity for our apartment."

Warily I asked, "What 'necessity'?"
"A ZEBRA LOUNGE neon sign," she answered, nudging me off the check-out line and pointing me toward the blackjack tables. "You're not finished winning yet," she added.
An explanation is required here.

Our Manhattan apartment has a zebra motif—zebra sheets, zebra covers, zebra figurines, zebra pictures—zebras everywhere you look. We are up to our ass in zebras.
I shrugged my shoulders, and muttered "what the hell," and headed back into the casino and over to the nearest blackjack table. There, I laboriously ground out another $400 before checking out.

The next afternoon found us at a sign shop in Greenwich Village. We designed a splendid ZEBRA LOUNGE neon sign, which still, as of this very morning, was shining like a beacon over the table as I sipped my breakfast coffee.

Follow my advice: When you win it, go out and spend it! If necessity dictates, then yes, go out and buy that mattress you put off getting because you couldn't afford it. However, if you've got the necessities covered, then dream-that-dream that you dared to dream and make it come true with the "mad money" that you just won! And always remember: If you win it and spend it, the casinos can never win it back. The Sahara Hotel will never ever win back our proud ZEBRA LOUNGE neon sign, that's for sure!

• Casino – Money Doesnt Play In Atlantic City (0)
• Casino And Borrowed Money (0)
• Casino And $5,000 Chips Part3 (0)