Free Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage

sweatshirt; the retired dealer was in a business suit.
    â€œBe consistent,” he said. “Play consistently, decide what your strategy is, and stick to it. People get sixteen and don’t hit, and the dealer wins the hand, the next time they get sixteen, they think, ‘I didn’t hit the last time I had sixteen, and the dealer won. So I’ll take a card this time.’ And the dealer wins that hand, too. Now if you’d been playing consistently—always sticking on sixteen, or always staying on sixteen—you would’ve broken even on those two hands. But if you’re always changing the way you play, if you’re always playing the last hand you lost, you’re going to lose and lose.”
    Anything else I need to know?
    The bartender took his foot off the beer cooler and leaned on the bar.
    â€œOkay, eighteen-point-six is the average winning hand,” he said. “If you’ve got sixteen, on average, you’re going to lose. And one third of the cards in the deck are ones, twos, threes, fours, and fives. That means, with sixteen, taking a hit gives you a thirty-three percent chance of getting a hand that’s close to eighteen-point-six or better. That’s a good chance. If you’ve got nineteen, don’t take a hit—ever. Even if the dealer has a ten card up. Statistically speaking, nineteen is a winning hand.”
    The bartender had been a dealer once, and the other men deferred to him, even though he was at least twenty years younger. It was something of an honor to get pointers from the bartender, apparently, as the old smoker pointed at my notebook and made a little scribbling motion with his cigarette, letting me know that I needed to get this down. The bartender was once a dealer and a gambler; he would work an eight-hour shift in a riverboat casino in Davenport, Iowa, and then cross the Mississippi River to the Illinois side and play for twelve hours. He made piles of money, lost piles of money, and wound up getting fired when his gambling problem spun out of control. He made up his mind to stop gambling one day, got in his car, and drove to Dubuque where his uncle owned a bar. The bartender works days and does inventory, his uncle works nights. In a few years, the old smoker told me, the bartender’s uncle is going to give him the bar.
    â€œYou need a strategy for your money as much as you need one for the game,” the bartender said. “More. A lot of people come in, and they’ve thought about their strategy for the game, but not for their money. And the money is what you’re there for, right? So think about the money. Say you put a five-dollar chip on the table. You win that hand. Now you’ve got ten dollars on the table, two five-dollar chips. Leave the ten on the table. You win another hand. Now you’ve got twenty dollars, four chips. Take five dollars off the table, and leave the fifteen dollars. How much have you got invested in that fifteen dollar bet? Nothing. Now you’re playing with the casino’s money. If you win another hand, you’ll have thirty dollars, six chips. Leave twenty dollars on the table, take the rest, and you’ve got fifteen dollars in your hand. You’ve made ten dollars. You’ve tripled your money. You’re not risking anything on the next hand. You’re playing the casino’s money. Even if you lose the next hand, you didn’t lose twenty dollars, you made ten dollars. And then start over again, with a new five-dollar bet—and you’re still playing with the casino’s money.”
    â€œThat’s right,” said the man with the voice synthesizer, “take risks with the casino’s money.”
    So you can do something stupid, so long as it’s the casino’s money.
    â€œYeah, you can do something stupid,” said the ancient smoker. “But when you’re playing your own money, you want to be smart, you want to be