Monthly Archives: October 2011

I haven't written much here or anywhere about my brief interest in the game of Blackjack. A few friends have asked that I change that.

I picked the word "interest" because that's what it was. It wasn't an obsession and it certainly wasn't anything that consumed a lot of my life or had a great monetary impact on it. It was just something I thought would be fun to try and master…and once I did to some extent, I got bored with it and gave it up. In the last ten years, despite more than a dozen trips to Las Vegas, I don't think I've played a hand of 21 except on my home computer or iPhone for fun…and that doesn't even feel like Blackjack to me. For reasons I'm not sure I can fully explain, playing it on a computer ain't exactly like playing it in a casino but without the money risk. Even if the computer game has the exact same odds, there's something different about it. The reality of winning or losing makes it different.

Blackjack and I first got acquainted around 1981. It was at Harrah's in Reno and I was there because I'd written the act of a fellow performing in the showroom. He paid me a thousand dollars for my work and because I'm such a generous guy, I gave about half of it to the nice folks at Harrah's before I went home. Well, they seemed to need it more than I did. But it wasn't so bad. I may have almost gotten even with them via two trips to the buffet.

Some of my loss was due to the kind of bad luck that can strike any player at any time. No matter how well you play, if the dealer deals herself an Ace and a Ten and doesn't give you the same, you lose no matter what you do. But a lot of my loss was a matter of simply not knowing the game I was playing.

I then spent some time reading up on the topic and realized what a chowderhead I'd been to play without knowing all about things like splits and surrender…and the minor rule variations you find from casino to casino. For example, whether the dealer hits on Soft 17, as they do in some venues, can matter a lot in how you play certain hands. It's vital to learn Basic Strategy and to understand why you should trust it above things like hunches and the dangerous, occasional realization that you're just plain on a winning streak. Nothing will end one of those like the giddy notion that you're in some magical zone where the cards are predestined to go your way no matter what you do. I once saw a gambler lose a hundred thousand dollars in such a mindset…and because he couldn't believe that his "streak" was really over, he immediately bet another hundred grand and lost it, too.

So grasp that concept. There's no magic. There's no luck. There's just the way the cards come off the deck and the way you choose to play them. And sometimes, how you play them doesn't even matter.

Several of the books I consulted also clued me in to what this "card counting" thing was all about and I began to learn about that. For the sake of information, know that I used the Stanford Wong High-Low method but I do not recommend it or any method in particular. That was just the one I learned. There are (supposedly) more accurate systems out there but at least when I last surveyed the field, they all seemed to take a lot longer to master. There was a limit to how much of my life I was willing to spend on any of this and it seemed to me that once I'd fully absorbed one system, it would be very difficult to unlearn it and learn another. I might have tried if I'd even considered the life/career decision of one writer I know who gave up that profession to become a full-time player of Blackjack. There was a notion that never occurred to me. I do not know how he can do that; how he can sit on those stools in those smokey casinos for eight and ten hour stretches. I used to like it for about an hour or until I was up a thousand bucks, whichever came first. Usually, the hour would come first. In any case, I would never want to do it if the amount of money won or lost would impact my life in any way. That would take it out of category of being a game.

To play well, you need a certain amount of courage. There are times when it makes financial sense to put out a really, really large wager and if you're timid about doing that, you limit your ability to win. I'm not sure I could have done that if a loss would have meant not being able to meet my personal financial obligations…but I never put myself in that position. A lot of the time when I was in Vegas, it was to play and work: Spend a few hours a day at the 21 tables, spend the rest of the time in my hotel room, laboring at my laptop to cobble up comic book and TV scripts. When I lost at Blackjack, it would just motivate me to scurry back up to the computer to earn back what I'd dropped at the tables…but at no point did I risk dollars I could not afford to lose.

So I studied card counting at home, practicing with a little hand-held Blackjack game. Here's a quick explanation you won't need to read if you're familiar with the tactic…

Imagine you're playing two-deck Blackjack and that the "penetration" — how far down the deck they deal before shuffling — will allow for four hands before that shuffle. Then imagine that in the first two hands, six of the eight aces in the double-deck are played. You don't know what will be dealt in Hand #3 but you do know something significant. If you've been paying attention, you know that the odds of you getting a Blackjack (an ace and a ten) are way below normal.

That's good to know and that's the principle of card counting. By tracking which cards are played, you gain an awareness of which cards remain in the deck. When the composition of the remaining pack favors the player, you up your bets. When it favors the house, you lower your bet…or perhaps even move to another table or quit. And if you do play, you may play your hand a different way because you know, for example, that the deck has a higher-than-usual or lower-than-usual percentage of low or high cards. If you're interested in learning more about it, there are only about 72,000 books than can teach you. I recommend none in particular. At best, I'd suggest reading several and trusting that which appears in most of them. You'll find a lot of hype accompanying most so-called experts with grandiose claims of how much they've won and how the casinos live in terror of them walking in the door because they have the magical power to bust the bank. Believe none of that. They're selling what they know about the game because that seems like a more lucrative, dependable way to make money than applying those skills at some Blackjack table somewhere.

I was still learning to card count when I got an invite to Vegas for business reasons and decided it was time to try and apply what I'd learned. I'll tell you what happened in a day or so as I serialize this topic over many posts. At some point, I'll tell you how a chance remark from a very funny man named Pete Barbutti led to me giving it up.

At one of the "Occupy Wall Street" protests, a Fox News reporter was interviewing an occupier (or whatever they call these folks) for Greta van Susternen's program and the interviewee pretty well told off Fox News. So far, no part of the interview has run.

R. Peterson read this item I posted a few days ago, then dashed off the following note to me…

I love your site, and have long been a faithful reader, so I am sorry that my first communication to you is prompted by a complaint–especially one over what may strike you as a trivial matter. (I don't think it's trivial, though, which is why I felt compelled to write.)

In your post on whether Chris Christie would be unelectable because he's "fat"–the thesis of which I entirely agree with–you say that Pres. Obama "relies more on a TelePrompter than some other presidents."

This is entirely baseless. It is one of those lies that has been repeated so often that the sheer repetition has turned it into something "everyone knows." But it's utter nonsense. It could only be considered "true" if the comparison includes presidents who served before the invention of the teleprompter–which is, of course, most of them, but is a meaningless measurement. Obama does not use the teleprompter more than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan did.

Right-wing critics started the teleprompter business because this is their method: take whatever criticisms of our guys which are somewhat legitimate, and hurl them against their guys, whether they are legitimate or not. Because the news media is predisposed to cover everything in a "he said/she said" manner, this accomplishes two things: it makes the criticism of ours look like merely another opinion, and makes the criticism of theirs appear to have some basis in fact, which everyone must "admit" to, in the interest of "fairness."

So, in this case: George W. Bush was an exceptionally inarticulate president. When he went off script (i.e., when he didn't have the benefit of a teleprompter), he sounded clueless ("Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me twice…can't get fooled again"). Obama's eloquence and command of facts stand in marked contrast to Bush. It's like night and day, and any objective observer would have to notice this, ideology aside. So it was in the interest of GOP spin doctors to minimize this obvious distinction. So, they had to get people talking about how Obama was inarticulate and unable to speak off the cuff (totally false), to "balance" the fact that Bush was.

It's ludicrous on the face of it. Again, one could support Bush's policies and abhor Obama's, but to suggest that while the former was infamous for his inability to speak off the cuff, the latter is somehow almost as bad flies in the face of observable facts. Obama speaks without a teleprompter quite often, and is always articulate. When Bush spoke without one, he was almost always inarticulate. Obama uses a teleprompter during formal speaking occasions. So did Bush — no difference.

And yet, it worked. Because it's been repeated so often, late night comics started to pick it up. And now, even people like you, who generally support Obama, and clearly know he's much more able to speak off the cuff than Bush, feel they have to "concede" this point.

This might strike you as a paranoid take on the power of the conservative media machine to control minds. But it's a simple technique, and they've done it over and over. See the case of "Al Gore takes credit for everything" for another example. (He said he "invented the internet" — except that he didn't — and through repetition, soon even his supporters had to "concede" that he was a braggart who always took credit he didn't deserve — though I defy anyone to show me using only actual facts that this is more true of Gore than of the average politician.)

Please, please don't lend credence to this lie about Obama's supposed over-reliance on teleprompters. It is utterly baseless. A lie repeated does not become truth.

I pretty much agree with all this, though I might quibble with one leap of logic. I don't think the fact that someone garbles their speech is necessarily indicative of stupidity. I know some smart people who get very tongue-tied in front of a microphone or a large audience and don't come off as intelligent. My problems with George W. Bush were mostly that he had an agenda that I thought was very bad for most of America but very good for a tiny body of already-very-wealthy cohorts, and that I think he talked to us like we were children who could and should be deceived. I never thought he was stupid.

The main thing that bothered me about Bush's verbal gaffes was that his supporters pretended that kind of thing was normal. When a Bill or Hillary Clinton or Al Gore misspoke or misphrased something, that was proof that the speaker was ignorant or a "congenital liar" (that's what William Safire called Ms. Clinton for a statement that turned out to be absolutely true). When G.W. Bush said we'd found Weapons of Mass Destruction or that he'd personally watched TV coverage of the first plane hitting on 9/11, that could be overlooked. Frankly, I think all politicians accidentally say a lot of things that aren't so or are just plain clumsy and that we should forgive a certain amount of that.

You're right. Obama is one of our more articulate politicians and I'm not sure that isn't something that a lot of his detractors especially hate about him. I don't know that he uses a TelePrompter more than any other Chief Exec. If he did, I could certainly make the case that no one else in that office has ever had quite such a mob going over his every syllable looking for ways to use it against him. But I don't think he does. I'm also led to believe that he is the actual author of much of what does appear on his TelePrompter, whereas Bush and some others almost never wrote the speeches they read off theirs.

I always wish that the debates these folks engage in didn't rely so much on short answers to questions for which they usually have anticipated, rote replies. Wouldn't it be nice to hear all our candidates and politicians talk at length in a format for which they can't cram or rehearse? One of the reasons I like Jon Stewart's interviews is that he usually asks his guests valid questions but not ones that they could have expected and prepped for.

Thanks for the message, Mr. Peterson. I think you're right.

If you are interested in the cartoon series Super Friends — or many other non-print appearances of DC Comics characters in the seventies and eighties — you should be reading the blog of Marc Tyler Nobleman. Marc is digging up info that no one else has ever had the savvy to dig up and I highly suggest a visit.

Turner Classic Movies is running Buster Keaton films every Sunday evening this month. By the time you read this, you'll have missed The General, which I think is his best movie. At this moment, The Navigator is on and then comes The Boat and The Goat and The Playhouse and so on. Here's the full schedule for the entire month. There are plenty of other treasures to come including some of Buster's talkies.

Starting tomorrow, TV Land is running The Dick Van Dyke Show — a marathon for a week, then one a day thereafter, I think. I'm not really sure how they're airing them because I won't be watching. I think it's great that the show is getting this exposure and I'd love it to do well so there will be more older shows telecast, including those in black-and-white. But TV Land speeds up the shows they run, they edit them for time and add in mid-show ads and squish the credits down until they're unreadable…and the shows don't start or end on the hour or when your TiVo thinks they start or end. This is why God invented complete runs of a show on DVD sets.

We are still waiting for the release of Richard Nixon's 1975 Grand Jury testimony. We don't expect to see him confessing to any crimes in it but he talked for eleven hours about Watergate with a lot of time reportedly spent on the infamous 18.5 minute gap on a key tape…the gap analysts said was a deliberate erasure. There's gotta be something interesting in those eleven hours.

We are also still waiting for the Souplantation (and Sweet Tomatoes) chain to bring back my favorite soup, their Classic Creamy Tomato…but it won't be this month. Traditionally, they feature it in the month of March and then it makes a one-week return in October, which is usually Request Month. Only this October isn't Request Month. It's Potato Month. The Souplantation folks have moved Request Month to February.

Will my fave soup turn up in February? Would they feature it for one week in February if it's going to be available for the entire month of March? Or are they going to really break with tradition and not feature it next March?

I called contacts over at Souplantation HQ and they weren't able to tell me anything. In fact, as of last Wednesday, they wouldn't even tell me that this was going to be Potato Month and that there'd be no Classic Creamy Tomato Soup. I had to find out from other, outside sources.

This is very annoying. Nixon managed to keep his Grand Jury Testimony secret for 36 years. I hope the Souplantation isn't going to stonewall the same way…especially because good tomato soup is so important.

I'm not sure if in this article Michael Kinsley is really saying that Chris Christie is too fat to be president…or if Kinsley thinks that enough people will think that to doom any candidacy. Either way, I don't think it'll matter much. Yeah, we don't elect fat people to high office in this country…except that we do. Christie is governor of New Jersey, remember? And there are plenty of senators and congressfolks and other governors. Why should it matter for the highest office if it doesn't matter for those jobs?

And I keep hearing folks on my teevee say this nation hasn't elected an overweight president since Taft. Well, how many have run? It wasn't that long ago, you could have argued against Obama by pointing out we'd never elected a black guy. And what if you substituted "female" for "fat" in the sentence, "This country doesn't put [fat] people in the Oval Office"? We haven't elected a woman president but no one would suggest that we'll never do that.

If Christie runs, will his weight be an issue? Sure. These days, everything about the guy you want to see lose is an issue. There are folks who condemn Obama because he smokes, relies more on a TelePrompter than some other presidents, has a wife who likes ribs. I remember some guy on the old CNN Crossfire program who tried to argue that Al Gore was unfit for the presidency because "you can tell a lot about a man by the kinds of ties he picks out."

Gore's ties didn't cost him any votes. They were just an insult that one detractor hurled at him because he didn't know what else to say against him. It might even help Christie as a presidential candidate if all his opponents could find to criticize about him was his weight. No one will vote against him because of that.

Why they might is that he isn't the ideolgically pure, Tea Party perfect candidate that the movers 'n' shakers of the Republican party seem to want. He isn't a spotless enemy of immigration or gun control, for example. I'm going to guess that as we get closer to the day when they have to pick someone, a lot of Republicans are going to decide that they want to oust Obama more than they want to install a guy who'll dismantle government, deport all Hispanics and do away with the Capital Gains tax. But I don't think they're prepared to compromise on their perfect candidate…yet. Right now, I think the attitude will be that if they want to settle for a flawed candidate, they have plenty of them who have momentum, existing campaign organizations and in some cases, financial war chests. And none of them are fat.