Mother knows best

29 March 2016

By Frank Scoblete

I am sure a small percentage of our readers remember a great television show “Father Knows Best” which starred Robert Young who grew old in the part. In the 1950s and 1960s it was customary to give television fathers a heap of credit for being really, really smart, hardworking and really, really loving.

Well, my mother was smart too. In fact, aside from being smart, she was a saint. True, she never finished sixth grade because her father died at the age of 39 in the midst of the Great Depression and she had to go to work along with her four other sisters. She survived World War II and married my dad and the rest — meaning me — is history.

But when I got involved in casino gambling, it frightened her. She knew too many people from the neighborhood who had sunk into gambling hell and she worried this might happen to me.

“Frankie,” she would say. “The casinos win because they are the casinos. The players lose because they are the players. That’s how it is. Be careful; you work too hard for your money.”

Oh, go ahead, laugh. Obviously my mother did not know why the casinos won the players’ money. To her the casinos were a kind of force – sort of the dark side of the Force.

She had no idea of the math behind the games or how slot machines worked. She just knew from observation that those friends and relatives who got involved in casino gambling were not making money. If they were playing to make money then why keep playing if they were losing money?

Of course, my mother only saw the casino gambling world in black and white terms. Gambling was bad; not gambling was good. She had no continuum where some gambling was fine and fun; some gambling could be an entertainment that could be enjoyed if the player had moderation and discipline.

My mother grew up in a harsh world in a harsh time and she did not expect such a world to be a nice place where people, places and things were there to make your life comfortable as opposed to miserable. In her mind casinos were in the miserable category. Comfortable came from family and hard work.

I did try to explain to her that one could go to casinos, play intelligently, lose little and have fun. She turned a deaf ear to that – literally a deaf ear because age had made her somewhat deaf.

When I started to become well-known because of my gambling writing she was not all that happy. “I hope you are not encouraging people to throw their money away.”

“Mom, mom,” I’d say. “I’m telling people how to play smartly with good strategies. I am also cautioning players to use their heads and not allow themselves to play foolishly.”

She’d always come back with “Frankie, the casinos win because they are the casinos. The players lose because they are the players. That’s how it is. Be careful; you work too hard for your money.”

If you are the type of player who loses his head while playing then think about what my mother said, because in your case, my “Mother Knows Best.”


Frank Scoblete’s new books are “I Am a Dice Controller: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Craps”; “Confessions of a Wayward Catholic” and “I Am a Card Counter: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Blackjack.” All available from Amazon.com, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and at bookstores.