Picking Pockets: Games of Chance

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“Though gamblers will deny it, many are careless people. In 2007, when the Sands Casino in Atlantic City removed all the machines prior to demolishing the place, workers found over $17,000 scattered about on the floor. Gamblers may guardedly study the odds but, meanwhile, they have forgotten the baby in the parking lot. One mother played video poker so long on a hot day in South Carolina that she returned to her car to find her ten-day-old daughter dead in her car seat. Carelessly, the jury gave the woman five years’ probation.” Skip Eisiminger

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”—Wayne Gretzky

“Please pay for your gas before buying lottery tickets.”—Sign at a Georgia filling station

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—2/11/2013—When Mr. Herbert Chaffee, the millionaire capitalist and great-grandfather of a friend, read of the first peacetime income tax, he decided to gamble

If passed, the Wilson-Gorman Tariff would “penalize” him and others making more than $4,000 a year, so he purchased a policy from Lloyd’s of London to protect himself. Feeling threatened by a 2 percent tax and knowing how tariffs have a way of snowballing without thawing, Chaffee bought a $250,000 policy against the bill’s passage. In 1894, it passed, and his British insurers paid him $500,000 before the bill was repealed a year later.

As always, it takes money to make money.

Capitalizing to the end, Chaffee was concerned after booking passage on the Titanic when he read that the new liner was the fastest of its kind and, moreover, “unsinkable.” Knowing how a rash captain might be tempted to take some unnecessary risks on such a ship, Chaffee raised the bet and doubled his life insurance policy before sailing. His widow collected his “winnings”—$147,000—the largest sum awarded to any of the ship’s survivors (which included some underinsured Astors and Guggenheims).

As a businessman and North Dakota land speculator, Chaffee might have chosen the motto: “Leave no sheep un-fleeced.” Indeed, it might have served for the entire Gilded Age in which he lived. My paternal ancestors apparently were cut from a different bolt of fabric, because I have no knowledge of their risking any money on the whims of Congress or the presence of ice in the North Atlantic. To the Bingo-averse Eisimingers of East St. Louis, cash pocketed due to anything other than brow sweat comprised a dishonest gain.

As soon as my mother’s people could afford something better than denim or gingham, they began rolling the mercantile bones with considerable success. All three of Mother’s brothers died worth millions in cattle, blue-chip stock, strip malls, and restaurants.

Bill, however, the eldest and least successful, showed his hand when he hit on a scheme to win $10 million from Publisher’s Clearing House: he bought all 120 magazine subscriptions that the company offered. The postman who had to carry those 1,400 magazines never forgave him and, despite the purchased “guarantee,” my uncle lost his bid to win a pie in the sky (though he did leave his daughter a natural-gas well on land bought to pasture cows). More than anything, Bill and his brothers had cast-iron stomachs . . . which enabled them to keep their lunch down when they crawled out on a limb.

I don’t know for certain, but Bill may have acquired his taste for laying a bet from his father, my grandfather, a jockey-lot* horse dealer.

I recall once when I was about twelve, Papa took me to a country grocery after a trip to his farm and offered, I thought, to buy me a Nehi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehi) and pack of Tom’s peanuts. I considered this a generous gesture until he suggested, “What do you say we make it double or nothing?” Not really understanding what he meant, I agreed. When the flipped coin turned up heads just as he called, I was expected to buy his snacks and mine. When I pulled my pockets inside out, he said, “Let that be a lesson.” But what was the lesson: invest in a two-headed coin, keep your money in your pocket, or travel broke?

Except for entering a betting pool on the date and time of Pope John XXIII’s death, I don’t think I’ve placed another bet for 30 years, but my wife’s folks in Western Germany have long been avid lottery players.

In 1950, Otto, my father-in-law, fresh from a French POW camp and desperate to get back on his financial feet, invested 5.10 DM in the national lottery. He didn’t win the grand prize but, by playing that extra dime, he won 15,000 DM, an award the state stipulated had to be spent on a new or remodeled house. (Why more lottery pay-outs aren’t divvied up this way, I understand but do not approve.) Over the next 40 years, Otto played Lotto every week, effectively returning 10,000 DM to the state. He died in the house his wager had financed with a lottery form clutched in his hand.

My German sister-in-law’s family likewise played the lottery every week for 20 years. Unimpressed by the “action” and sensing that they were betting against the sunrise, the family quit making donations to what they said was “a charity with too few benefactors.” If horse sense keeps horses from betting on humans, Sigrid said, why should humans with common sense bet on horses? Instead, her father and later she herself invested the money they would have gambled in a savings account. Every summer, they withdraw their nest egg and take a vacation to commemorate “how we beat the system.”

I’m a big fan of beating any crooked system—any system in which year after year the house profits by hook or crooked means. How crooked is it? Consider the poker variation called “Bonus 6”: without pre-paid “insurance,” the house edge is 10 percent; with “insurance,” the house edge jumps to 24 percent.

There’s a good reason long-haul truckers call Las Vegas “Lost Wages,” and sociologists know it as the nation’s suicide and divorce capital.

Though gamblers will deny it, many are careless with their money. In 2007, when the Sands Casino in Atlantic City removed all the machines prior to demolishing the place, workers found over $17,000 scattered about on the floor. Gamblers may guardedly study the odds but, meanwhile, they have forgotten the baby in the parking lot. One mother played video poker so long on a hot day in South Carolina that she returned to her car to find her ten-day-old daughter dead in her car seat. Carelessly, the jury gave the woman five years’ probation.

Several years ago, Clemson decided to recognize its 100,000^th graduate with a check for $1,000. As the “mace bearer” for the College of Arts, Architecture, and Humanities, I was sitting on the podium with the president for a change instead of 30 rows up. I have no recollection of the person who won, but I’ll never forget the face of graduate number 100,001. His face was etched with the injustice of a system that arbitrarily selects winners by chance, not merit. We can’t say we weren’t warned—the sum of the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666.

Note: The illustration for this column was taken via Flickr from “Jay Baharin’s Photostream (183),” and may be found at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jay_baharin/3276818501/.

*Editor’s Note: here’s a link to an existing “jockey lot” located in the vicinity of Clemson University, where both Dr. Eisiminger and Ms. Boleman-Herring once taught, Humanities and Journalism, respectively, in the English Department: http://www.jockeylot.com/contents/jockeylothome.aspx. It should be noted that Southerners will get just a bit more out of this excellent column than other residents of the US. Your Editor’s grand-uncle was a horse-and-mule trader out of Seneca, SC; both Skip and I have consumed many a Nehi soda on a hot summer’s night in Upstate South Carolina; and we both know well what may be found (the offerings of the mercantile world, entire; a lot of it burgled from our neighbors’ houses, too) at a SC jockey lot.