Excerpts
Mr. Royalty was filling the table with chips. Some bets he was winning, some he was losing. But the overall picture was not hard for a guy who’d been around the tables as long as Johnny D. to access. “He’s winning about $110,000 on every roll,” he said.
In a couple of minutes, we were down more than half a million.
Half a million bucks, and we weren’t even getting any atmosphere out of it. There’s no better sound in a casino than twenty people around a craps table, slapping hands, hugging one another, and screaming: “Open the suitcases!”
A scene like that makes anybody who’s passed through the doors happy. Even our dealers are happy, because the winners are tossing them tips. We need that spirit in The House. Because quietly, all around, we’re getting it back. People have to win. If nobody ever won, nobody would ever come back to Las Vegas.
But somehow Mr. Royalty had turned the tables on us. He was winning at a private table. The atmosphere around him was filled with profanity. And he’d been known to throw tips high in the air as if he were throwing a dog a bone — just to watch people jump for them. There was silence in the security room. A Led Zeppelin song coming out of a distant radio only seemed to magnify the tension.
Six wins in a row. Seven, eight, nine.
The sloppy mountain grew higher and wider. The mountain was what made Mr. Royalty scary. Most people stack their chips in neat piles. They like to know exactly how much they’ve got. They want to have their money near them, under their control, in a secure pile. Most people are not only scared to lose, Johnny D. will tell you. They’re also scared to win.
Mr. Royalty was fearless. He wasn’t holding anything back. Not only was he smart enough to know the exact value of all the chips in front of him, but he wanted them in play. A fearless gambler is the one who strikes fear in the heart of the House.
Ten in a row.
I felt my eyes close and my head shake. The odds of a roller winning ten straight at craps is 1,361 - 1.
Tim had been born with the stomach for this. But I was still trying to develop some kind of lining. I knew about gamblers who were up $900,000, who were driven to beat The House for a million — and in the process lost it all. I’d seen million dollar swings in a few hours.
Now, if Tim and I owned a large corporation that had a fleet of hotels, the million that Mr. Royalty had taken from us in less than an hour would be meaningless. Money would be surging into our business through celebrity-chef restaurants, the sale of jewels, designer clothes and hundreds of other sources.
But Tim and I weren’t a big corporation. We were two guys standing up to the pounding of Mr. Royalty’s luck – and the worst part about the beating was it was splitting us apart.
We’d become so close over the years we could finish each other’s sentences. But after Mr. Royalty had started on his tear, I didn’t even have to open my mouth. “I know, Tom, I know,” Tim would say before I could even get a word out.
Eleven in a row. Twelve. Thirteen.
As hard as it was to take, it was hard to argue with Tim. The casino was his world – not mine. And I certainly understood his thinking.
“Look, Tom,” he explained. “The odds are on our side and nobody beats the math. All I know is he’ll blow the money. It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow. It may not be next week. But in time, he will blow the money. And he won’t blow it at The Nugget if we don’t let him play. We’ve got the best of it. And if we got the best of it, why take a small shot? If I think I’m getting the best of it, hey, I’m betting as much as I can. It’s a ballsy proposition here. It’s gonna be a roller coaster ride. But we don’t have a public company to answer to. It’s just you and me. As long as we can pay our interest payments, who gives a shit? In the long run, we’ll get all the money. In the short run, we’ll just have to hold onto our balls and stick it out. We just have to keep him at the table.”
Fourteen in a row. Fifteen.
The yellow, white and blue mountain climbed over Mr. Royalty’s belly. How much longer could this go on? How much longer could we let it go on with more than hundred thousand on each roll?
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
I felt like I was going to puke.
Nineteen. Twenty.
Twenty-one.
What the . . . ?
The odds of a roller at craps going twenty-two straight are 7,869,881-1.
Sonavabitch!