Gambling's Greatest Wins, Runs, Records and Legends - Part 3

CRAPS TALES

In the area of craps, the greatest interest is usually centered around monster rolls, rolls that last more than 20-30 minutes and make everyone at the table a bundle of money. I have had two monster rolls, one for 45+ minutes on April 2, 1999, at Binions Horseshoe in Vegas that I wrote about in Casino Player, and another in July of 2000 at Sunset Station of approximately 30-35 minutes duration. Those are my personal bests to this point.

How do my monsters stack up against the greatest rolls of all time? Like Gremlins to Godzilla! The greatest "verified" roll of all time was one Stanley Fujitake, the famous "Golden Arm" from Hawaii, who rolled for over three hours at the California Club in Las Vegas in the 1980s. He is said to have had (unconfirmed) one to two hour rolls at Caesars Palace in Vegas as well.

There was a report of an even bigger roll at the Binions Horseshoe in Tunica -- a four-hour monster in 1999. When I investigated it, my reliable source (Madeliene Bizub who writes about Mississippi matters), told me that the roll was actually only (only!) 2 hours 15 minutes in duration and was not at the Horseshoe but rather at the Sheraton, which is next door. How did she know? She was there!

I personally witnessed two back-to-back hour-long rolls at The Frontier during the summer of 1995, during that awful Union of Culinary Workers' strike. The table was composed of nothing but red-chip players, but after the two fellows finished two hours later, everyone was betting green, black and purple chips! How much did I make? About $37 -- because I was playing blackjack at the time, not craps. But I had a great view of the craps game, if that's any consolation.

Atlantic City has had its share of great reported rolls. A two-hour roll was said to have occurred at Caesars in the mid-1990s but I could get no confirmation of it. I do know that the famous "Arm" of Atlantic City has had many 20 minute to one-hour rolls over the past two-dozen years, and that one special night, New Year's Eve (1990?), at the Claridge Hotel, she had five or six 20-minute or longer rolls -- one after another -- because every other player passed up his or her turn to shoot and let the "Arm" roll the bones exclusively! I did not personally witness this event but several members of the Captain's Crew verified that they were there when this happened. Literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, were won by those high-rolling players in a single session. (Robert Renneisen, the former Claridge President, obliquely refers to the Captain's Crew and episodes such as this in his excellent book How to Be Treated Like a High Roller Even Though You Are Not One.) Supposedly the "Arm" was triumphantly boosted on the shoulders of the winning players and carried out of the casino like Michael Jordan after a championship, with all the attendant whooping and hollering. A happy New Year, indeed!

Of course, there are famous craps players as well; that is, players who are known for running up big wins with small investments, not necessarily on their own individual rolls. Because craps is a game with many long-shot bets, some paying as high as 30 to 1, a craps player can catch a "lucky streak" and ride small buy-ins to big wins. It's rare but it does happens. Michael Konick in his excellent book, The Man with the $100,000 Breasts and Other Gambling Stories tells of one character known as Fast Eddie, "an octogenarian jockey who has on four separate occasions run $100 up to more than $250,000." That ain't hay!