Excerpts
Holding The House Up
“Royalty is coming.”
Well, Johnny D. didn’t say it exactly like that. Mr. Royalty is what we’ll have to call a guy whose real name I can’t tell you. The House doesn’t reveal the identities of its gamblers. But Mr. Royalty is a good cover. There’s plenty of truth and irony in it.
The truth is Mr. Royalty was able to swagger into The Golden Nugget carrying a pillowcase stuffed with hundred dollar bills over his shoulder because of the royalties he was making off a line of video games that he’d created. If you’re a man between eighteen and forty, you know his games. You’ve probably played them. One of his games grew so popular, rumor is he sold it outright for $40 million.
The irony in the name is that there’s nothing regal about him. Even when he was winning millions at the craps table, he could be a five-alarm asshole. The dice never seem to come back to Mr. Royalty fast enough. “Gimme them!” he’d bark at the croupier. “Don’t mess up my rhythm!” When he was losing, he’d abuse everyone around him – not even the cocktail waitresses were immune.
Mr. Royalty had been thrown out of quite a few casinos around Las Vegas. The owner of one hotel swore that even if he had a crystal ball showing Mr. Royalty losing $20 million at his casino over the next year, he still wouldn’t let him through the doors. And my partner, Tim, was definitely conflicted about having Mr. Royalty at The Golden Nugget.
Tim has been described as a throwback – the oldest young man on the planet. Even though he was thirty-six and this was October of 2004, he lived his life to the tunes of Frank Sinatra. That was one of the reasons Tim and I bought The Golden Nugget in the first place. We’d try to restore it to the glory of the Sinatra days and at the same time bring some color to a faded downtown.
Sinatra was now buried under a tombstone inscribed with the title of one of our favorite songs: “The Best Is Yet To Come.” But an old friend of Frank’s was still around. So we’d brought in Tony Bennett to sing at The Nugget. We had the cast of The Sopranos in our swimming pool. We set up a reality TV show around our casino with the same producer who’d made “You’re Fired!” one of the most popular phrases in America. The idea was to create a buzz that would make people want to leave The Strip and take the twenty minute drive downtown to be at The Nugget. Most of all, we wanted The Nugget to be the spot in Vegas to place a bet.
If every other casino was offering gamblers five times odds, Tim figured, we’d give them ten. If your limit was $50,000 a hand at your hotel, Tim might let you play for $100,000 a hand at The Nugget. The strategy was pretty simple. We’d give you a better chance to win than anybody else and let you bet more.
When you throw that kind of chum into the water, you’re going to attract sharks like Mr. Royalty. We didn’t want his profanity, but we sure wanted his pillowcase. And more than that – we wanted the action.
We wanted people to tell their friends how Mr. Royalty had come with stacks of hundred dollar bills that had been wrapped in plastic, vacuum-sealed, and trucked direct from the U.S. mint. When other high rollers got a whiff of mint in the air, they’d want in on the action, too. There are less than a hundred gamblers in the world with more than a million-dollar credit line. At one point, four of them came to visit us on a single weekend.
There was only one problem. We were gambling. We were still building up our clientele. And we needed a few others betting like Mr. Royalty that night in order to make the percentages work for us. The numbers were still in our favor — even with the special odds Tim was cutting Mr. Royalty. But we wouldn’t have to sweat out a run of luck if others were betting big at the same time. Because, then, even if Mr. Royalty did win big, percentages pretty much guarantee that together the others would lose at least enough to balance the books.
So we were vulnerable that night. We were vulnerable to one wild wave of luck.
And it just so happened that Mr. Royalty was on the Bonzai Pipeline.