Jesse May - The Gamblers Guide to the World: The Inside Scoop from a Professional Player on Finding the Action, Beating the Odds, and Living It Up Around the Globe

THE GAMBLER S GUIDE TO THE WORLD . Copyright 2000 by Jesse May. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
May, Jesse.
The gamblers guide to the world: the inside scoop from a professional player on finding the action, beating the odds, and living it up around the globe / Jesse May.
p. cm.
1. CasinosGuidebooks. 2. GamblingAnecdotes. I. Title.
GV1301.M275 2000
795dc21

00-031188

Maps by Folio Graphics.

eISBN: 978-0-307-83008-1

v3.1

The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge assistance from the following people, without whom he would still be standing at one hot and dusty bus stop. Tina Pohlman, Heather Schroder, the Mays, the Kjaersides, the May-Weinsteins, Jon Tare, Mike Luber, John Hennigan, Gerry Jordan, and Lothar Landauer.

The question. Are you a gambler. That taboo word associated with bread lines and threadbare clothes. And I say, what is the definition of gambling? What makes a gamble?

I have my definition. Gambling is when you have a vested stake in the outcome of an occurrence, an outcome that has not yet been resolved. You may know the likelihood of that outcome, and you may know the stake you have vested and the reward and loss for the possible outcomes, but that outcome has not happened yet. In my mind, this is a gamble.

Taken like this, almost everything in life is a gamble, and I prefer to think in terms of whether or not something is a good bet. Its a bad bet to go for a suntan in Chernobyl. Its a bad bet to play poker in Panama. In Atlantic City, while craps may not be a good bet, it is a fair bet, or almost an even gamble.

I may go through life as a gambler. And though I may have made plenty of bad bets in my time, I do not go through life looking for bad bets. What I am on the lookout for is good bets.

This book is written first for people who want to gamble for fun, and second, for people who want to gamble for profit. But the thing is, in order to gamble for profit, you must have two things. You must have skill, and you must have knowledge. And there is no way to acquire these two things without study and practice. No way at all.

Who the hell cares if youre a gambler.

This book took a lot out of me. For this book I was hugging a toilet, racking with heaves. For this book I was twenty hours in a blackjack seat, stuck to the gills. For this book I have been insulted by floormen, laughed at by dealers, and hustled by pimps. My pledge was that I would not recommend or criticize something without firsthand experience, and I held that ideal alight, if at times letting other components of the books construction skip to the wayside. Sometimes notes are my memory. Details are my brain. If the accuracy of any of my claims suffered, know it is not a lapse in honesty. Put it down to logistics, to checking your bag in Moscow and finding it returned drenched in vodka and broken glass. To arriving in Buenos Aires in the pouring rain with no map and no hotel reservation on a Sunday. To walking into a Panama City pool hall too late at night. And to deciding to play just one more hundred at the craps table. At least I been there.

People want to know what its like to be in action every day. What its like? Its a different way of looking at life. Because you see, then life becomes the poker game, one series of hands coming right after another, even when youre outside the casino.

When I first proposed the idea to a publishing company about a no-nonsense guide for gamblers the world over, I said I would never consider writing about or reviewing a casino without actually gambling in it, real gambling being necessary to properly evaluate each locale. Toward that end, I proposed that in addition to an advance, the publisher would provide me with full traveling and hotel expenses, and a modest gambling stipend for every casino. They came back and said, in essence, are you drunk?

While the book sounds interesting, were not paying for the research. Well give you half of the advance you asked for, you have to pay for all your travel expenses, and you have to fund all of your own gambling experiences. Now, no sane person would accept that deal, but I was unemployed, broke, and I figured I could count on a little ace up my sleeve that I hadnt told the publisher about, a little piece of information that every gambler knows. Simply put, its this: If you gamble all night long, then you dont have to spend money on a hotel room.

But with a very limited budget and so many casinos to experience, I realized that good money management was going to be essential. What I did was, I divided all my money up into different envelopes, a big white envelope for each country. Then in each of those white envelopes I divided the money up into smaller colored envelopes. A different sealed envelope for each gambling game or traveling expense. Red envelopes for blackjack, green envelopes for craps, orange envelopes for food and hotel money. By adhering strictly to my expense system and using the envelopes only for what they were intended in the country they were intended for, I thought that I could modestly gamble on every game, have a place to stay and food to eat, and return safe again with the travel information for the guide.

My first destination was Las Vegas. I arrived in Las Vegas at approximately 11:35 P.M. on the Wednesday evening before Super Bowl Sunday and hit the town running. By Saturday morning I had been up fifty-nine hours in a row, played golf, been to fifteen or sixteen casinos, and gone through the envelopes. And I spent the next eight weeks traveling through Central and South America with one small light blue envelope that was to have been for laundry money.

And the point of this story is that a gambler needs to be flexible.

Flexibility is a key ingredient in the makeup of a gambler. One card, one word, or one bet can change an entire night, and small decisions can affect an entire vacation. I really never know what to do next. When traveling, my general rule of thumb is adapt on the fly and dont ignore your first instincts. Consider how I came to leave Mar del Plata, for example. I am a blackjack player, new to the game but full of gusto. I put in the time before my trip with the books and the simulators, memorizing the charts and practicing the strategies, and even though I had managed to lose $20,000 to my computer in the month before I left, I felt ready. After all, my only realistic goal was to break even. I mean, given that I had to visit twelve countries Id never seen before and gamble every night in every one with no expectation of finding more than a few poker games, breaking even was quite a mountain to climb in the first place.