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Best of Frank Scoblete
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Gaming Guru
Summing it up9 July 2019
Almost 30 years have passed since I became a casino player. My first journey to the casinos occurred in 1989 to research a role I was playing in a play, The Only Game in Town, for a role about a degenerate craps player Joe Grady. My co-star was the woman who would become my wife, the Beautiful AP. It was love at first sight. My first article, “Emotional Blackjack,” was published a year later, and a whole new life took hold of me. I have to thank Cecil Suzuki and Aaron Cohodes for taking their chances with this new writer. Then came Casino Player, a magazine I have been writing for since the beginning. My first book, Beat the Craps Out of the Casino: How to Play Craps and Win! was published in 1991. In that book I introduced my mentor, the late Captain of Craps. Thirty-five books later, he is still my mentor. There have been thousands of articles for magazines, newspapers, travel magazines and web sites, weekly articles, bi-weekly articles, monthly articles, plus television shows, movies, radio announcing and consulting to some of the biggest names in the country and companies in the business. I never geared my writings to whoever was paying me. I just told it as I saw it. I remember one television show I did called Mysteries at the Museum. The interviewer kept stopping me to tell me what he wanted me to say. I would tell him I couldn’t say that. “Why?” he’d ask. “Because it isn’t true,” I’d respond. I don’t even know if that interview ever went on the air. The same was true of the classes I taught and the festivals I held in the United States and Canada. I brought in great speakers and they gave it their all. These were great events attended by hundreds of people at a clip. It’s been some trip! And it is speeding by faster and faster. The landscape is zipping by. An overwhelming majority of the print publications for which I wrote are now out of business; some are long out of business. Many gaming experts have come and gone. Some have been giants; some are better forgotten. There have indeed been a few men and women that I truly respected and I will write about them in a future article, maybe when I am travelling 100 miles-per-hour. And what of the casino gamblers themselves? I mean my books and articles have been read by millions of players. How have they reacted to them? Have I had an effect – by that I mean a positive effect – on them? I have gotten wonderful emails on a daily basis but I have also gotten bizarre missives from truly strange people. Some of these missives are from supposed experts whose advice to players is extremely – how can I put this nicely? – extremely stupid. Systems sellers are the worse. If you buy their easy-to-use method you will own an island! Don’t think so. There are no easy advantage-play systems and that is for sure. Yes, there are better and worse ways to play the games; there should be no doubt about that. Here is a handy rostrum: The lower the house edge, the slower the game, the better it is for the player. The higher the house edge, the faster the game, the better it is for the casino. However, the sad truth is this: Most players play the way they like to play, they play the way they have been playing (and losing) for years, and most of these players have little idea of what the math of the games entail and what that math means for making or losing money, their hard-earned money. There are even players who actually attack the math of the games believing the math is false and misleading. I think if you were to take a survey of players in all of the casinos playing right this very second you would find that most have read almost nothing about the games, could care less about reading anything about the games, and while they know the casino will ultimately beat them, they have no idea why this is so. Players playing poorly at blackjack, a game that has many good books written about it; players making the absolutely worst bets at craps; playing speedy games such as mini-baccarat where they can face upwards of 200 decisions an hour while playing the “tie” bet too…yes, the casinos have ripe pickings for themselves. Still, players reading magazines such as this, reading books by reputable authors, certainly will give themselves a decent shot of keeping their losses low and maybe even nailing the casinos now and again. Looking back, it’s been fun; looking forward? Heck I can’t wait to see what the next 30 years will be like! How fast will time go when we’re using flying cars? All the best in and out of the casinos! Visit Frank’s website at www.frankscoblete.com. Frank’s latest books are Confessions of a Wayward Catholic!; I Am a Dice Controller and I Am a Card Counter. All of Frank’s books are available from Amazon.com, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, e-books and at bookstores. This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Recent Articles
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