Twenty years ago, I spent Easter locked down in a concrete holding cell at CCDC\u2014Clark County Detention Center\u2014after being jailed on trumped-up charges by Caesars Palace, who couldn\u2019t handle that my teammate and I had won a few thousand bucks playing Three Card Poker. From the jailhouse phone, I called Arnold Snyder, my publisher, to tell him to hold the presses to give my lawyer time to look over the manuscript for Beyond Counting<\/em><\/strong>, published a few months later. Like Jesus, I consider Easter something of a professional anniversary, typically celebrated by whacking a casino game while contemplating my career goals. This weekend there won\u2019t be any game-whacking for me (can\u2019t say about Jesus).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today I\u2019m spending my Easter locked down by the CDC\u2014Center for\nDisease Control and Prevention\u2014after a supposedly trumped-up coronavirus,\nwithout the flashy gore of Ebola and smallpox, caused a real pandemic after\nall. For me, it was real from the beginning. Ever since my own deadly bout with\na pathogen years ago, Google has been feeding me every<\/em> article on Ebola,\nMERS, E. coli, and brain-eating amoebas. I click on them all. I needed a ventilator\nfor over a week, and had to re-learn to walk, so the medical implications of\nthe coronavirus are quite real to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For others, there are different stages of realness. Did it become more real when the virus attacked a celebrity (Tom Hanks)? An athlete (Rudy Gobert)? When the NBA shut down, and then all sports, and hence sports betting, it started to feel real to some APs. Did it get real when Ireland shut down pubs? Maybe when Canada shut down hockey? Or when China shut down casinos?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the ides of March brought casino closures worldwide.\nThat\u2019s when it got real for APs. For some, the financial impact is palpable,\nbut they don\u2019t realize how lucky they got, medically. I am very confident that\nif casinos had remained open one more week, many APs I know\u2014or you\u2014would have\ngotten infected. No big deal, you say? A virus with a roughly 1% death risk,\nmaybe a bit less for someone under 50 years of age\u2014ha! I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve\nlooked at a calendar lately, but most of us aren\u2019t young anymore! On top of\nthat, most APs are male, possibly boosting the death risk twofold. Now we\u2019re talking\nabout something comparable to a one-outer in poker. Have you ever been in a \u201c1n1\u201d\ngame of Ultimate Texas Holdem, on the river with the dealer down to a single\nout to beat you? Put your life against that last card the dealer is about to\nflip over. If everyone at the Blackjack Ball is put up against that, one or two\npeople die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019ll become more real when someone you personally know\ndies. I\u2019m there. A hobbyist card counter who often played a double-deck game\nthat I sometimes played got COVID19 and died. He was such a fixture that my\ncrew had a nickname for him. We called him \u201cThe Futurist\u201d due to his\nresemblance to Dr. Michio Kaku, a scientist who is popular for his conjectures\nabout the future. I suppose I didn\u2019t personally know The Futurist. If you had asked\nhim if he knew me, he would surely have said no, or he would have just said\nthat I\u2019m a local gambler he recognizes. I knew his name and his game, though,\nso that\u2019s pretty close in my world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Futurist would always sit at third base on DD, playing\none or two spots, always enjoying himself, especially when betting the Lucky\nLadies in unison with other counters at the table. He probably enjoyed the camaraderie\nof it all more than whatever money could be made off that game. He was a\nfriendly fellow, and he so consistently anchored that band of counters that it became\na bit unnerving to occasionally see that table deadspread on a weekend\nafternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now, when the casino eventually re-opens, The Futurist\nwon\u2019t be sitting anchor. This isn\u2019t real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the coronavirus forced casinos to close last month, the smart APs I know were not in the casinos at all, or they were bouncing around the country liquidating chip inventories, making sure they had enough cash on hand to survive a protracted lockdown. The fake APs? Well, they were, I imagine, just panicking. Panicking about possible death from a relentless virus? No!! Rather, some are panicking about not being able to pay for basic expenses for a few months. APs are not peculiar in this regard. A recent survey estimates that over half of Americans do not have enough savings to survive three months of expenses: https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/news\/nearly-half-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-bank-survey<\/a>. It should be embarrassing for any AP to be living game-to-game after winning six or seven figures in the last few years. Fiscal responsibility is especially important for an AP, whose income can be highly variable and unpredictable. Who knows when the next big score will come?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even a squirrel is smarter than most Americans. A typical squirrel works hard all year long, and builds up a bankroll of 10,000 units, er, nuts. And no, the squirrel doesn\u2019t forget where they all are. Studies show that squirrels have organized storage systems: https:\/\/www.mentalfloss.com\/article\/504458\/squirrels-are-probably-more-organized-you-study-finds<\/a>. So the typical squirrel is<\/em><\/strong> smarter than Johnny Chang, the MIT counter of Bringing-Down-the-House<\/em><\/strong> fame, notorious for discovering caches of chips previously hidden and forgotten in his house. (I have no doubt Johnny Chang will comment below with a link to a squirrel trying to hide a nut in the fur of a Bernese Mountain Dog, and say, \u201cI\u2019m definitely smarter than that<\/em><\/strong> squirrel!\u201d I\u2019ll beat him to it: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HTPOSdyA7Uo<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n So while half the world is whining about what a nightmare this lockdown is, and comparing it to the UIGEA Black Friday in 2011, the competent people I know are all seizing this unique opportunity to be productive, to get caught up on projects and start new ones. We\u2019re running around like Quicksilver while the rest of the world is on Pause: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=PMp_5HtO-aE<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On top of my standard workload writing code daily and working on my next book for Anthony Curtis, my publisher, I\u2019ve added several activities to fill the extra time the lockdown has gifted me. As Kevin Garnett famously said: \u201cI take a lot of pride in my craft. I work really hard on my craft every day, and I\u2019m a true professional.\u201d Here are some specific recommendations on what to do:<\/p>\n\n\n\n RIP, Futurist Twenty years ago, I spent Easter locked down in a concrete holding cell at CCDC\u2014Clark County Detention Center\u2014after being jailed on trumped-up charges by Caesars Palace, who couldn\u2019t handle that my teammate and I had won a few thousand bucks playing Three Card Poker. From the jailhouse phone, I called Arnold Snyder, my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[558,643],"tags":[1330,1235,1331,1332,1018,1333,1229,1099,1334,1335,1336,1337],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What is To Be Done?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n