Thanks, David, for sharing your great stories.
I’d love to hear more.
My first trip to Vegas was with my father for my 21st birthday in 1967, many trips since then.
I’m planning on going next May for the WSOP.
If you’re going to be there let’s have dinner (on me).
Bob
RASCH777
Thanks Bob but May is a long way away from now. I’ll get back to you, Thanks, really.
Way back when, I used to deal the World Series.
Since then, I have played in the Series, I like Omaha Hi/Low.
I stopped because I just loose interest in a 3-day (or more) poker tournament about halfway through the second day.
I still love one day 5- or 6-hour tournaments, but that is about it for me. I was working for Tom Bowling in the Bingo Palace/Palace Station casino When Tom started the first muli-every day poker tournaments in Las Vegas in the early 80s. I started working in a casino poker room by day and playing poker tournaments by night. My favorites were the couple tournaments at the IP (Imperial Palace for those not familiar with Vegas). That way I could combine poker with dating, for me, the very best of both worlds. There were a lot of good-looking young female poker dealers and players around Vegas. For a poker player, Vegas was heaven for me. I eventually married a female poker dealer/tournament player and have a son, now grown. In one way, it was kind of funny. When I branched out and started specializing in helping new Native American casinos open up, I would often meet a past girlfriend working there. I helped open up the Spotlight 29 Casino in Palm springs, a past girlfriend was working in an adjacent casino in town. After they got their act together in that casino, I moved on to the Chumash casino outside of Santa Barbara because they were expanding the number of tables in poker and blackjack and needed someone who could start managing poker tournaments with experience starting with writing the rule book and teaching their dealers how to deal poker tournaments.
One of their newly hired dealers was a past girlfriend from Las Vegas. About three years later things had become routine so my interest looked for a new casino to help open. I found one in Phoenix,AZ, the new Gila River poker room. Sure enough, that tribe had a second sister casino with poker tournaments and the first night I played there I found a past girlfriend dealing to me. The poker world is truly a small community of past and new friends.
Will you be going to the series to play or just to watch and maybe play in some side games?
Anyway, have fun, stay safe. David
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Thank you for your detailed responses.
One final question. If I’m caught cheating in a Las Vegas casino, and in the back room the casino manager asks “Are you a righty or a lefty?” and I respond with “I’m ambidextrous” will he break both my hands or neither?
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Hi David,
I have more than one ex-wife and I don’t even want to think about what it would be like to run into one of them on the poker table.
Sounds like you are a more amicable person than I am.
The plan is to play in the Super Seniors event.
Stay in touch.
Bob
Great thread, thanks for giving us a look under the hood.
What can you tell us about the time when Vegas was transitioning from mob rule to its current state?
They couldn’t have liked it, what did they do to push back?
Hahahahahaha, that’s really up to Sam 
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Hi unskilld,
As bad as the Stardust casino was made to look in “Casino”,
Two others were worse.
Circus Circus had a reputation that if security caught some one cheating and they came back into the casino a second time after being told to never come back, they were taken out back, two security guards would lift him up by arms and legs and drop him on top of a fire hydrant, breaking his tailbone. This guy wasn’t going anywhere but the hospital for a nice long stay.
As bad as that sounds, you really did not want to get the management at the Horseshoe Casino mad at you. One day one of Benny Binion’s sons was in charge of the casino. A local lost a lot of money at the craps table after drinking too much. He left the casino, went to his car in the parking lot, took his lug wrench out of the trunk and went back to the casino. The Horseshoe casino stood on a corner lot on Main Street. On the side street of the Casino were about a half dozen inset glass windows with advertisements for the casino posted inside. The drunk proceeded to start to totally bash in all of the windows and the ads inside. A customer saw what the drunk was doing, went inside and saw the security booth next to the cage and told the guard what was happening outside. Binion’s son happened to be standing right there at the time. He told the guard “Come with me” and they both walked outside to see the man still bashing in windows. The drunk saw them, turned, and started running away from them down the street. Binion’s son said, “Shoot him”.
The guard took out his gun and put two bullets into the man’s back killing him instantly. Binion and the guard went back inside the casino and went down into the basement to the security department. The guard took off his uniform and flew out that same day to the Binion’s cattle ranch up north.
The case never came to trial.
Next to that, the Stardust was just a nice day in paradise.
Stay safe, David
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Bro aceto5…Have you ever met Phil Hellmuth or Stu Unger? If so were they cool?
David, All I can say is wow. Maybe you should write a book. I’m waiting for your next installment. Thanks for sharing. Stay safe, Rick
Hi,SunPowerGuru.
The Mob went underground. Most left the city.
Some minor players stayed around; the Feds were not looking for them. The major leaguers just could not be found. Make of that what you will. Now, I certainly did not know everybody, but just about all of the Mob run casinos had poker rooms. I frequented them all, so I recognized familiar faces from before and after that famous day when it all hit the fan in Vegas.
They were still there, just a lot lower key and a lot less power.
The saddest thing I noticed was the Paddlewheel Casino that was purchased by Debbie Reynolds just off the strip between the Stardust and the Las Vegas Convention Center. It did not have a poker room, but I tried to be familiar with most everything that was happening on or near the strip. When I heard that she had bought it I decided to stop by and have a look. I did not stay long, just shook my head and left. You remember all those faces I recognized from the Mob days in Mob casinos? Just about every suit in her new casino was one of those faces. I do not know who was advising her, but it was not a real friend. Walking out the door I knew that her new casino would have a very limited life span. I was right. Within a few years she filled for bankruptcy and sold the building.
I felt so bad for her as I walked out the door. Like I said, the mob went underground.
Stay safe, David
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Hi, donkbusta444.
Sure, I knew both of them, as a poker dealer, with them playing at my table. I dealt to both of them for several years.
Phil was a pain in the ass and a whiner. And that was on a good day. The less said the better because I have nothing good to say. Ok, he was a fairly decent poker player, but as a human being, like I said, the less said the better.
Now Stuey was a real piece of work. He made Hellmuth look good. He was a friend of Chip Reese and Danny Robinson, both of whom I admired greatly. They were called the “Gold Dust Twins” and had a house over near the Palace Station. I was allowed in their home, and I would often find Chip Reese and Stu Unger in the family/TV room playing Backgammon for $5000 a game for hours at a time, I kid you not.
In the poker room at high limit games, when the players were all in, the players at the table would often make “proposition bets” on who would win the hand in question (which might have anywhere from $50,000 in it to $500,000 in that single hand that I was dealing).
This is how it worked, once the betting was over, but the river card had not come up yet ( texas hold’em), the players would turn their cards face up on the table and see if anyone wished to place a side bet with or against the cards now exposed. Now, it helped to know the odds of the chances of each hand to win or lose. Who did they all turn to for what the odds were, you guessed it, Stu Unger. The man did not have a brain, he had a computer up there instead. He would almost instantly rattle off the odds on both hands. I guess he was mostly right, because the best poker players in the world trusted him every time for the odds.
But as a human, well, let me say this. Stuey liked coke and was very thin, I mean very thin. When the dealers were on break, we would look over at him and discuss if one hand could incircle his neck and just how much pressure would it take to twist it sufficiently sideways to hear it pop.
Cool no, a pain in a dealer’s ass, yes.
Stay Safe, David
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There’s a scene in Casino where Sam explains that “Nicky started busting out high stakes poker games” at the Tangiers/Stardust using “half-asssed mechanics” as he put it. Was there any truth to this from the real world version of these events? If so what were their methods? The movie didn’t provide much detail on this and I’m curious how someone could get away with flagrant cheating at a high stakes game likely occupied by several professionals.
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Hi, unskilld.
Ok, I never heard of Tony Spilotro cheating at poker in Las Vegas.
Doesn’t mean it did not happen, it probably did.
The word "Mechanic is mentioned. In the gambling world, a mechanic is a man who manipulates cards in a manner that cannot be seen by others at the table. This is like a magician doing some of his best card tricks. The Mob in the United States employs a number of teams of cheaters and mechanics who they move around the country where needed. The mechanics get paid well, off the clock, in cash. The cheaters kick back a portion of their winnings to their employers.
Ok - story time - what you have been waiting for.
During the time that I worked at the Dunes (a mob owned and run Casino in Las Vegas) we had this one dealer, about 50 years old (I was in my late 20s at the time) who the rest of us considered a nice guy but to be honest, kind of clumsy. He worked with us for about a year, and his dealing skill never improved. Then came a day when at the end of his shift (he was getting off of graveyard and I was coming in to start the day shift) he said this is my last day here, “let me deal you guys a few hands of poker”. No problem, he sat down in the box, and we sat in the players seats. He spread a fresh deck, meaning that all of the cards were in the correct sequence straight out of the box. For some reason he was no longer clumsy. He was just as skilled as any of us, if not better. He proceeded to deal out five hands of five card draw and asked us to turn our cards face up. There were five of us. Every other hand had four of a kind. Four Aces, Four Kings, and Four queens. Now he had our attention. Before he pulled in the cards to shuffle up, he said “Which one of you wants a Royal”. One of the dealers said me. He was sitting in the number four seat. The (what we now realized was an honest to gosh mechanic) pulled the cards in and shuffled up just as we would, and we were watching closely, believe me. He cut the deck and dealt out the cards to each of us while saying don’t anyone look yet. He then pointed to each of us in turn, the number four seat last, and said ok, let’s see your cards. We turned them over one by one. Trash, trash, trash, trash. Now the number four seat. A royal straight flush in sequence. He then smiled, cleared his hands, and left.
We…were…speechless. And for the last year we thought he was clumsy.
All of the professional poker players in Vegas knew who the cheater teams were by sight. There is no way that any of them would sit at a table and play poker with any of them. If the story you said happened, and it probably did, I would say that Tony sat down with a mechanic or a team that he had brought into town. Now casinos spend lots of money to get rich players, or whales, to stay at their hotel and play in their casino. The whales have fun and usually leave behind a large pile of cash in the casino drop boxes. Sam was probably mad because Tony was cheating the rich tourists and making them unhappy and leave early and maybe never come back to that extremely unlucky casino.
Yeah, I would think that would get Sam a little angry.
Next story. When I was working at the Dunes, several dealers were approached and asked if they wanted to be trained to be a mechanic. I was one of them. They said, “Think about it, we will get back to you. No hard feelings if you say no”. I thought about it, long and hard. My decision was that I now intended to make the casino industry my life’s profession, and if people had even a suspicion that I knew how to manipulate cards, I could kiss that profession good buy. I politely said no thank you and that was the end of it. They never asked again. Several of the dealers said yes. Two at the Dunes, and three from the MGM poker room. It went well for a while until one day two of them were playing at the MGM being dealt to by a third when Nevada Control agents came in and put them all in hand cuffs and perp walked them out of the casino. They did the same to a fourth dealer who was actually dealing a live game of poker at the Dunes at the time and got the fifth dealer on his day off at home. All arrests being made at the same time around town. I must say, I was feeling a little smug at hearing the news. Bad for them, good for me. They all knew the risks going in. What’s that old saying.
“Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time”.
OK, last story. By the end of dealing two years at the Dunes, I was Duel Rated. That meant that on any given day I might be used as a dealer or a Floor person. At this time, I was working swing shift - Six pm until two am. Halfway through the shift, one of the players playing in a low limit game walked up to me and said, “I think one of the players at my table is cheating”.
I asked which table, which player. He told me and I smiled and told him thank you and that I would take care of it.
He walked back to his table and then I came over. When the hand in play was over, I said to the whole table, Hank, would you stand up for a minute, which he did. Hank was wearing a tux. I said, “Hank, one of your cards is sticking out from under your lapel” He looked down, smiled, and tucked the offending card back into hiding. I then introduced Hank to the table. “Players, meet Hank, he works here in the Dome of the Sea restaurant as a Magician. During the evening Hank walks around and asks various tables if they would like to see some card tricks. Hank, would you care to distract and amaze our players please.” He then showed the players about a half dozen really good card tricks. I then asked Hank to turn his cards face down to show that his cards were not the same as the dealers were using at the table. Without being asked, Hank collected his small pile of chips and left the table while the players clapped.
Problem solved.
Ok, all done. Stay Safe, David
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Thanks Rick. Happy Holidays! David
David wow…Thank you for the response! I never got to see Stu play but my Uncle use to tell me stories about him and said he was one of if not the best! My fav. player is Phil.Cool story thank you again …Bodie
Bodie, please try to take what I am about to say in a good way.
There are good players and good people.
The two do not always go together
You need to decide if looking up to, and admire, assholes is a good thing. I think you need to decide what kind of a person you want to be in life.
I played poker for a living in Vegas for almost 3 years.
During that time, I paid my bills, bought a Corvette and took Scuba lessons to go Scuba diving off the western Mexico coast.
I finally quit playing for a living because I could no longer be around players with this type of mentality every day of the week. I went back to working in casinos and playing poker for fun with players who were also having fun.
People like Stu and Phil just suck the life right out of you, and they enjoy it. What does that say about them? What does that say about you, if you wish to emulate their way of life and how they regard other people? Be like them if you want, I just hope that I never have to play at the same table with you if you do.
By the way, I am sure you never got to see Stu Unger as he really was. The movie they made about him was a travesty.
And Phil is now a good card player who is a great actor playing himself on TV.
Phil is sunshine and playful on tv compared to how he is in real life.
Sincerely, David
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Woah, that’s a bit harsh right there Ace!
Bodie is good people and in his post i didn’t read that he “ looks up to or admires anyone “ he simply said Phil was his favorite player.
Stick to the story telling.
I think you owe him an apology.
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I don’t see an apology needed … Sometimes the truth hurts but in this instance I do not see why it would
p.s I have really enjoyed this tread it is very interesting and refreshing
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There is no truth in the statement made by the author about Bodie. Yes it’s entertaining but to belittle someone is not called for. The author asked everyone for questions and then persecuted like judge and jury.
Happy Thanksgiving 
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Hey bro ace I did not ask for a life lesson here 
all I said was that Phil is my fav poker player ,Not like i’m gonna be eating Thanksgiving dinner with him or anything …Sincerely, Bodie
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