The Quotable Captain: Gambling

31 July 2018

By Frank Scoblete

(The late Captain was my mentor in gambling. I’ve written six books about him. This series contains some of his quotes, ideas and advice. This particular article concerns how the Captain views gambling.)

The Captain: “I have been gambling all my lifetime, be it in business ventures, or games of chance and skill. I made every mistake a gambler could make.” — The Captain’s Craps Revolution (1993)

The Captain thinks that you learn most from the failures you have experienced. If you don’t learn, you don’t move forward. Strict gambling, that is in a casino, is no different. In fact, sad though this is to say, many casino gamblers never learn from their mistakes, They just keep making the same mistakes over and over again thinking the next time their mistakes won’t turn out to be mistakes.

It is debatable whether the great Albert Einstein said the following: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Still, if he did or did not made that statement, it makes no difference. You do have to be out of your mind to think one plus one will someday equal 4,000. Repeated mistakes are just repeated mistakes.

I see the senior citizens lining up at the stationery store buying scratch-off lottery tickets. These tickets come in with 25 to 50% house edges. Not one of the legion of players is ahead of these games. But they keep playing and playing. The truly sad thing is that, based on their dress and the amount of money they have, these are not your yacht-owning citizens.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not calling casino gamblers insane but I am saying that many, if not most, just do the same things over and over and it costs them; sometimes it costs them dearly.

If you make the worst bets at craps, you have very little (or no) chance to win during any significant length of time. Yet go to any craps table and you will see players betting against house edges of four percent to 16.67% and sometimes they go against new bets with edges that hit 20 percent or more. This may not be insanity but it certainly is poor betting choices to go against such edges.

Those same craps players don’t want to stick exclusively to the best low house-edge bets such as the pass line with odds and the come with odds. (You can add the don’t pass and don’t come to the other two if you want to play the darkside of the game.)

The low house edge bets give you the best chance to win, even over somewhat long periods of time. You have little chance to win long-term with the bad bets; you have a decent chance with the good bets.

The Captain did recognize how much fun casino gambling could be. There is no doubt that people who go to casinos somewhat frequently enjoy doing so. The atmosphere of the casino is bursting with hope – it is also bursting with its own particular scent of cigarette smoke, adrenaline and alcohol.

Still, consistent losses can take the shine off the casino after a several-day stay. If you are someone who is playing poorly maybe you should take a note from the Captain’s playbook and learn from your mistakes.


Visit Frank’s website at www.frankscoblete.com. Frank’s latest 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. Available from Amazon.com, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and at bookstores.