Game Over

Chapter 1-

Typical cacophony. The casino bar is my front row seat for this nightly theater of the absurd. A football rerun is blaring on the overhead screen; no one is watching. A couple of Vegas first timers are well on their way to morning prayers at the porcelain alter and making sure everyone hears about it. Me, I am thinking about whether or not to drink tonight, maybe just a beer or two. This casino here at Paris is one of my favorites but tonight I’m bored. Most of the guys I know from NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters convention, are married and retired in spirit but still working. They hit the rack hours ago. Who comes to Vegas and calls it a night at nine? At least bored is better than dead.

A Mega-Jackpot alarm goes off and everyone in the casino stops mid-button push and stares in disbelief. Then they all become accountants. How much is it? Thirteen million! There is no love in the room. Some fucking old lady from Hicksville hits and everyone feels their chance of winning tonight has been diminished. Some weirdoes try to rub up against the bewildered hausfrau whose life has been changed forever by a thunderbolt of dumb luck.

I’ve seen it a few times; I practically live in these places. Well, I don’t play golf so casinos are like my clubhouse and the players are a hell of a lot more fun to hang around than a bunch of Republican Dan Quayle types. These people know they are fucked up.

Hey Doll, I signal the far too perky for the hour barkeep. Isn’t this a school night?

I’m legal, she says smiling.

Yeah, but I’m not sure my thoughts are even in Nevada.

She plays along. OK, you just gonna flirt or do something about it?

Got me...I was just keeping in practice and figured she was working me for tips, but this flirtation is a pleasant fiction. Give me the worst cognac you got. She shoots me a quizzical look. Keeps me from drinking too much.

Her casino badge reads Brandy; not a real name unless the girl was born in a small town in the Midwest where they name kids after bad pop rock from the seventies. Still, better than one of those poor black kids whose name sounds like an adjective. Odious, how does a mother name a kid Odious?

Brandy? as she levels the snifter of antifreeze on the bar, what’s your real name?

Florence, she says sheepishly.

That’s a pretty name, ever been there? I’m making small talk.

It‘s near where I was born, Florence, Kentucky.

Yeah, I heard of it.

She was my kinda lady these days…pretty small town girls with big dreams who end up as bar girls in Vegas or LA, if they’re lucky, or as strippers and prostitutes if they hook up with the wrong crowd. Florence, Brandy, whatever, seems like a hell of a nice girl; smart, funny, probably a former high school cheerleader and maybe even a homecoming queen. This is not exactly the fantasy she had in mind, but it’s still a better deal than had her world remained the ten miles around small town Kentucky.

You look Greek, but sound American, showing off her cosmopolitan acumen.

Well, I have heard that before. On Santorini a young bartender told me I look exactly like his uncle. I guess the mustache and Mediterranean skin. Actually, my family was last in Russia before running away to America to escape the pogroms and the czar’s army.

So you’re Russian? She affects a pretty fair Russian accent.

We were Jews from Odessa on the Black Sea, Russians when the army needed conscripts.

Brandy? yells the head bartender. You doing anything?

Yeah, I’m busy, she yells back in mock anger. The bar was light, so we had some more time to gab.

So what was your name before you changed it? She’s looking me right in the eyes, close up.

Tomkinov, I admit with a smile, delighted with her cleverness. Four generation later, I am Alexander Timken, Alec to my friends. I extend my hand and she takes it. So we‘re both name frauds, I teased, touching her long blonde hair.

I guess so. She changes her grip from shaking hands to holding hands.

OK, time to look like a schmuck. Look, are you busy tonight after work? Expecting a playful rebuke I get to my feet.

I get off at one. Leave me a key and your room number and I’ll see you then. She bats her eyes, a deliberately over the top mini-vamp.

Room twenty-five ten, handing her the plastic card and trying not to look surprised.

O-o-o, a suite; see you later Tomkinov.

I gulp the last of the cogn-yuck and leave her a twenty. A wave and I’m off to kill a couple of hours in the casino.

I play all the games, but I like the new ‘carnival’ table games best. A classic like Blackjack has better odds, but it requires all my attention. Baccarat is a fair game, but demands none of my attention. It was introduced to the Court of Charles VIII to entertain the dumbest king to ever sit on the throne of France. It looks sexy and smart in the Bond films, but that’s European Chemin de fer, a slightly different game that requires a modicum of skill and is not played in Vegas. So I play Let it Ride and Three Card Poker which are easy games with low stakes, but one good hand can pay for a trip. I also own a nice hunk of ShuffleMaster stock; they own the rights to these games and a few more the purists sneer at playing.

I spot a dealer I liked earlier dealing a five-dollar table. Maria is a Hispanic young lady, smartly dressed in a dealer tux shirt, bow tie and vest. She looks like good luck. With a big smile and a penchant for dealing winners, she was cleaning up on tips when I played with her a few hours ago. Hi Maria, as I sit down to play. Her eyes get wide and her smile broader, but she doesn’t miss a beat in the timing of her deal.

Some guys pick dealers they think they can beat, rev their motor mouths and play like a dragster on fire until they get shut down. Besides being no fun, these guys are bad luck. Aggression is an expensive personality trait at the tables. I pick a table where the players are smiling and having a good time, like Maria’s table.

Maria changes my hundred and says, Hello again, Mr. Alec. I told her to call me by my first name after I asked for hers. She’s decided Mr. Alec is friendly without being too familiar. I kinda like it….in the casino; on the street it would sound ridiculously gay.

First base was open, my position of preference on the Let it Ride table.

In blackjack, third base is the power position with the best look at the sequence of cards and the final say on those tough calls like holding twelve when the dealer has a two up. I know what the book says, but I have always had this autonomic computer in my head that tells me when to vary from the calculated odds. Or maybe I’m just dumb lucky, at least in cards.

Anyway, first base gets the first hand dealt in this game; no one can sit in half way through the shoe and get the hand I was supposed to get. Yeah, stupid superstition, but the first hand is my hand or I won’t play the table.

A couple other guys are at table dressed in the garish leisure threads sold only in Vegas hotel men’s stores; obviously in town for the convention. I give a nod to both. They are juiced, playing dumb, but only betting nickels. Mr. Alec, jou here for the convention too? Maria asks in her accented but agreeable English.

Uh huh, looking at my first hand of two tens and a queen. Guess I’ll stay." I place my cards under my three ten dollar bets. The other guys take back their first bets and she turns up the first dealer card, which is a ten. Now I’m happy. I had a sure winner with the tens, but this could be a big hand right out of the gate. The other guys decide to stick, no need for a poker face in this game; we all play against the house. I need one more ten for four of a kind or a queen for a full house.

Ready? Maria turns over a ten! High fives all around; her tens make everyone a winner. The guy closest to me asks, What you got man?

Two pair, still catching my breath. Tens and tens!

Oh man, says the third baseman with that Why was it you and not me, fucker? sound in his voice.

Thanks Maria, I said without moving as the pit bosses come over to confirm the hand and watch the pay out.

Mr. Alec, I am very happy for jou, I think I hear Maria say, but now I’m watching the pay out. Five hundred on each bet plus the bonus four hundred made it a nineteen hundred dollar hit. Crazy luck; this really is my night. I put a black chip on the table for Maria. You have been a lovely, lovely dealer.

Thank you. Good night, Mr. Alec. She clicks the hundred-dollar chip on the table for the cameras and drops it in with the dealer tips. It hardly seems fair that the other dealers get the same share of total tips as Maria, but that’s the system. It’s the only exception to the unbridled dog-eat-dog capitalism everywhere else in Vegas.

Have a good show, guys, and good luck with Maria, I say as I walk away from a sweet moment to savor it. I might see those guys tomorrow, but not at the show. A hundred thousand attendees is a blur of humanity, all walking, talking and sweating to excess in those airplane hangers they call the Las Vegas Convention Center.

NAB has every network, broadcast group and old media suit in the business on hand to look at and sometimes buy the latest hardware from the Japanese. At the same show are the legions of techno-geeks who are wrecking the oligopoly the big boys had for so long. Video uploading has been drawing more and more eyeballs, especially the young ones, away from traditional media. The old guard is losing their small minds trying to stop the erosion.

High-speed connections and cheap digital camcorders have rocked the television world. This is war and both armies are decked out in full dress uniform at NAB, the broadcasting brontosaurs in their new Bernini suits and the Internet insurgents in their short pants and torn t-shirts. It must kill the corporate grunts that they have to dress to depress, wearing coat and tie in hundred degree heat for fuck’s sake, while a techno-nerd wearing maybe ten dollars worth of clothes on his back has enough equity in stock to buy the jockhead’s entire neighborhood. The whole thing makes me laugh.

I have a foot in each camp and both hands in some others. I’ve chosen freedom at the price of security, the bargain every maverick makes. Or maybe I just never grew up or gave up.

I design and install the high-end equipment broadcasters buy, but unlike their chief engineers who have been keeping their ancient BetaSP machines going with electrical tape and hot spit, I take them where no broadcaster has wanted to go, into the brave semi-new world of HD and digital storage. Behind the gee-whiz news sets at most local broadcast stations there is an archaic technology discontinued by all the Japanese manufacturers a decade ago, a shiny wrapper over analog equipment as out of date as the cars on the streets of Havana.

I’m wandering around the casino still jazzed about winning. Do I want a drink? No. How about checking out the new slots to kill some time before I retire to my suite for the inevitable disappointment of Brandy’s no-show. Although with tonight’s streak, my getting lucky in love might be more like an even money bet.

Chapter 2-

Since everyone knows slots are a sucker bet, why are they so popular? Well, it’s fun in a hamster hitting a feed bar kind of way and because they’re not as dumb a bet as a lot of smart guys think. The best odds in the casino are not to be found at the craps table or at baccarat; the best chance to win, and I mean earn a win with skillful play, is at video poker. That’s right; those frail old ladies in their robo-chairs, chain smoking while taking oxygen know more about winning in the casino than those rich today, broke tomorrow rap idiots at the craps table throwing away millions of their ill-gotten gain. A good player, over time, can consistently beat video poker, at the right casino offering the right machine settings and pay out rates.

But winning isn’t why I play the slots. I play them because they intrigue and amuse me. Slot machines are a marriage of mechanism and magic. They are an art form.

I’m old enough to remember playing with silver dollars, real Morgan, eighteen nineties silver dollars. They were so heavy and beautiful; walking liberty as a dreamy, idealized woman. The silver had a feel and smell about it and before they went back on the floor, the wise guys had them polished so when they came spilling out of a winning machine, they refracted rainbows of casino light.

Not all new technology can be called an improvement.

Now the sound of dollars filling a slot bin is a digitally recorded facsimile. All the new slot machines spit out paper receipts with the fanfare of a self-service gas pump. It saves the casinos a fortune in coin counting and floor labor, but at a real cost of the total experience.

My sister’s ex-father in law, who looked like Mr. Clean, the bald guy on the detergent bottles, was the luckiest S.O.B. (and was he ever a real S.O.B.) I ever met. I once saw him carry his jackpot winnings across the casino to the cashier cage in his stocking feet, balancing two buckets and both of his shoes brimming full of silver dollars. That was fun to watch. Tell me a guy with a slip of paper is having as much fun or is as good a show. The accountants are fucking up the gaming business just like everything else they touch. They have no soul or, more accurately, no functioning neurons in the right side hemispheres of their brains.

I’m thinking about this as I navigate the slot aisles looking for the right machine. I’m a silver surfer passing on the lesser waves looking for the right sit. The choice of a machine is important. It’s like forming a relationship with any intelligent calculating device like a computer or a woman. There’s a pleasant courtship before it takes your money and breaks your heart.

An important feature of the old mechanical