More than Six and a Half Little Words

I recently read a blog by James Grosjean titled Six and a Half Little Words. It reminded me of an incident in my own life. I was debating whether to respond to his blog or to post it as a separate column several weeks later. It turned out to be quite a bit different from Grosjean’s original post so I’m publishing it separately. If you read the original, you’ll see where my title comes from.

I moved to Vegas in 1993 to be blackjack player. In addition to playing a lot of promotions (such as “Play 4 hours for $10 a hand and receive a free buffet, one free hotel night, and $60 in some kind of promotional chips”), I would obtain and cash numerous coupons — lots and lots of coupons — for a number of games.

I had a girlfriend (I called her Ginnie in my Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography and there’s no need to invent a new name now) and between us we’d earn more than $500 weekly from these coupons — in addition to whatever we could make with the blackjack and other promotions. It was subsistence living, but as far as I was concerned, I was “making it in Las Vegas.”

One of the myriad of tricks I learned doing this was that in a single deck game, if a dealer shows an ace on the first hand and you’re playing two hands (either by yourself or one each with a partner), and if all four cards you see in your hands are non-tens, then it’s correct to take insurance.

Eventually Ginnie left and I started seeing Shirley — to whom I would end up being married from 1997 until 2014. In 1996 I had a couple of $10-for-$5 match play coupons at a “one coupon per person per day” single deck place. Shirley didn’t know the first thing about playing blackjack intelligently, so I told her to sit next to me and I would tell her what to do. She picked up her cards with two hands, of course, and bristled a bit when the dealer told her one hand only.

The dealer dealt himself an ace. In my hand I saw a four and a five and looked over at Shirley’s hand. If she had no face cards, I would have asked about insurance.

(The rule I cite is correct when there are no match play coupons in effect. I used the same rule, right or wrong, when I had a coupon. Should they wish, others can address how the variations of rules on match play coupons affects this insurance bet.)

But Shirley was holding her cards close to her chest, preventing me from obtaining the information I needed to make the correct decision.

“Show me your cards! Now!” I whispered urgently.

“No! It’s against the rules to show anybody your cards,” she whispered back. It didn’t seem to matter to her that we were the only players at the table and while the money being wagered wasn’t officially “community property” bankroll yet, clearly it was the next best thing.

“SHOW ME YOUR CARDS!”

Intimidated, she did — showing me a jack nine. We didn’t take insurance and the dealer flipped over a queen, sweeping our nickels and coupons off the table. No big deal to me. You lose hands all the time at blackjack (or at video poker, for that matter). She was upset that I lost my money and I had raised my voice to her.

We had a discussion very shortly afterwards about what it means to be partners…at the gaming table and in life. First of all, whatever rules she learned about card playing with her sisters as a child had no bearing now. And second, for better or worse, when it came to figuring out the strategies to beat the casinos, I was going to be the boss. I was no table games expert by any means, but when the choice was between the two of us, I was light years ahead of her. I was the best we had.

We got through that moment — and it was a good partnership for a long time. But it didn’t have to be that way. That moment could have ended up being a show stopper had she not been willing to accept a “my way or the highway” inflexibility when it came to gambling decisions — including sometimes giving her an order that had to be executed IMMEDIATELY, without discussion until afterwards. She had to be able to accept that losing one hand was just a very minor bump in the road. If she was going to mourn and grieve over every losing session, I wanted no part of that. Finally, she had to believe that I could really win against the house — and I had to prove that again and again.

Clearly I’m not the best guy to be giving marital and relationship advice. Whatever things I think I know in that area have worked well some of the time, but other times not so much. Most of us prefer our experts to have a better batting average than I can boast. I know I do

At the same time, after Shirley and I split and I began seeing Bonnie, I had essentially the same discussion with Bonnie — albeit it “out of the blue” and not triggered by a specific incident. Had Bonnie not been able to agree that in this area of life I was going to be the boss, we would never have gone forward.

For many of my readers, it’s WAY too late to have this discussion before you’ve become serious romantically — because you’re already connected. Some of you have been married for 20 years or more. For others, it’s not so clear which one of you is the gambling expert. Many of you can’t present a convincing argument that you’ve been a winning player over time. And for most, success at gambling is a smaller part of your life than it is mine. All I can do is to share what works for me — and let you decide if there are lessons that you can apply to your life. Clearly, different readers will come to different conclusions and nobody is arguing that one size fits all here.