Some wanted to know how many winning players there are, and I had to say that any number I came up with would be a wild-assed guess.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how much any other player nets, let alone how many of the tens of thousands of players (most of whom I have never met) had net scores greater than zero.<\/p>\n
One question from the Associated Press was one that I didn\u2019t want to address. The reporter argued that this attack exhibited a great deal of planning and would a successful video poker player have the ability to do such planning? I didn\u2019t want to answer this question because the answer is \u201cYes!\u201d<\/p>\n
What I said was that a successful lawyer would have those planning skills, as would a successful architect, as would a successful chef, as would a successful political advisor, as would a successful reporter, as would basically a successful anything. So yes, you can add successful gambler of any stripe onto that list, but the list is very long.<\/p>\n
One reporter told me that CNN reported Paddock was ahead more than $5 million in a recent year. Was this possible? I told them it was very possible that a high-stakes player had more than $5 million in W2G jackpots, but that\u2019s an entirely different matter than being ahead that much. Or even ahead at all! Getting the total of W2Gs from the IRS might be obtainable by the police. But knowing whether he was ahead or behind was a totally different matter.<\/p>\n
Four days after the shooting, Bonnie and I left for a long-scheduled two-week cruise from Boston to Quebec City and back again. While in Boston the night before the cruise, I checked my email and found one from Ryan Growney, the general manager of the South Point. He said that an FBI agent wanted to talk with me about the shooting and I should call him back right away to get that FBI agent\u2019s phone numbers. Since I teach classes at the South Point and that casino sponsors the podcast, that casino was a reasonable place for the FBI to start looking for contact information.<\/p>\n
Shit!<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve heard Bob Nersesian and other attorneys say you NEVER should talk to a police officer without having an attorney present. I figured that went double for talking to the FBI. Still, I was a couple thousand miles away from home and about to sail northwards soon. The $3.99 a minute charge for talking when the ship is actually at sea is relatively small change, of course, but I still didn\u2019t want to pay it. I figured I could handle this, so I found out the number of the FBI special agent and called him.<\/p>\n
The agent told me that my name was mentioned by several people when they asked, \u201cTell us the name of the most likely person you know who might have known Stephen Paddock.\u201d Due to our \u201cvideo poker connection\u201d and the fact that I play what many would consider high stakes, it didn\u2019t surprise me that my name had come up. When I said I had never heard of him, basically the interview was over.<\/p>\n
Except, the agent wanted to fill out the form in front of him and he asked me if my name was Bob, or perhaps Robert? Another question I didn\u2019t want to answer, but I told him that Bob Dancer was a pseudonym used for teaching and writing purposes.<\/p>\n
This led to the next question of, \u201cWould you mind telling me your real name?\u201d The truthful (unspoken) answer was of course I minded, but I told him anyway, along with my address and phone number. That information could be easily obtained by the FBI anyway if they really wanted it, but I would prefer I wasn\u2019t in their databases.<\/p>\n
Oh well. I wasn\u2019t going to lie to the FBI and making a big stand about something that wouldn\u2019t be difficult for them to find out anyway would just make me look suspicious.<\/p>\n
I said at the beginning of this article that I had my doubts that Stephen Paddock was a winning player. Why did I say that? Because articles said he\u2019d been playing for high stakes for more than a decade and he was still allowed to play at a number of the biggest Las Vegas Strip casinos. From both personal experience and talking to many other successful players, I know that these places tend to restrict and\/or remove players over whom they do not believe they have an advantage.<\/p>\n
So, if he did have an actual advantage, he would have needed to fool several different casinos for more than a decade. And this, I believe, is unlikely. Even more unlikely is that the casinos would have allowed him to be $5 million ahead in one year.<\/p>\n Many of us are sick and tired of discussing the terrible events of October 1 and the speculation afterwards of what made this unhinged man do what he did. If that\u2019s where you are and you want to skip this article, I won\u2019t blame you. Once it was discovered that Stephen Paddock played video poker, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[428,196],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Facebook\"](\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/wp-content\/plugins\/social-media-feather\/synved-social\/image\/social\/regular\/96x96\/facebook.png\" "\\"Follow")
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