I’m a fan of The Moth podcast, in which people stand up without notes and give a 10-minute autobiographical talk about something interesting. Some time ago I thought I would try to be a performer on that show. I couldn’t use notes to tell the story live, but I sure as hell could use them to help prepare for the talk. So, I wrote out what I’d say about an incident that happened almost 40 years ago.
Sometime later I decided not to try out for The Moth, although I thought the story would fit well enough into this blog. I’ve already shared parts of this story with my readers, but not all of it, and certainly not the big secret I reveal at the end. So here is what I was planning to say:
In the 1970s, I was a professional gambler. My game was backgammon. It was played in discos, at least in greater Los Angeles, which is where I lived. I even took lessons learning how to disco dance so I could hang out in these discos without looking like a gambling hustler. I also played at an underground club near Los Angeles called the Cavendish West.
It isn’t hard being a successful gambler when the competition isn’t very good. And that was the way backgammon was for me in the mid-1970s.
I had first heard of the game from an article in Playboy, which I really only picked up because of the articles. I bought every book I could find on the subject, bought a board to practice on, and soon was in business. As bad as the books were at the time, my studying was more than my competitors did. Plus, I was smarter than average and had been playing board games since I was a pre-teen. I did well.
At the Cavendish, I became a regular. In backgammon, you are not playing against the house. You are playing against other players and the house charges each player a rental fee for providing the boards and the place where other like-minded players can congregate.
No matter how good or bad you are, your success at backgammon is primarily determined by your skill relative to that of your opponents. If you are the third best player in the world but always are playing with numbers 1 and 2, you’re going to be a loser.
For those who don’t play the game, it’s a board game where there’s a special device called the doubling cube. If you’re not playing for money — or perhaps trying to win a backgammon tournament — the doubling cube is irrelevant and kept in the box. If you are competing for cash, though, learning to use the doubling cube well is important. It’s every bit as important as learning to move the checkers well.
Without going into details about the cube, it can be used to increase the stakes of the game dramatically. If your opponent is too aggressive or too passive or too timid with the cube, so much the better. Systematic mistakes were exploitable. So, similar to reading poker tells, good players kept a catalog of sorts on the doubling cube practices of every opponent. If you saw your opponent make a doubling cube error, AND THEN MAKE IT AGAIN in another game, this was called “confirmation” and you had a potential gold mine. A single game of backgammon usually lasted less than 10 minutes — and we played for 6-8 hours at a time. There were LOTS of opportunities to get confirmation on these exploitable habits of others.
In 1979, I was a much better backgammon player than I was in 1975. But I was going broke. Gone was the regular infusion of bad players that were easy to find in the disco era and not so easy to find anymore. The players still in the game had been there for as long as I had. I was a good player, but I was mostly playing REALLY good players. This was not a recipe for success.
I started contemplating getting a job. This I viewed as an admission that I was no longer able to live off my wits in the gambling world. I was no longer able to accurately assert superiority over those doofusses who actually had to find a job in order to survive. I was now going to be a doofus too.
This was very traumatic. I also didn’t know what I could do to earn money. Although I had a pretty good education and got up to the almost-PhD level in Economics, I had been fired five years earlier from a think-tank job in which I was a research associate. I hadn’t read any economic books or journal articles in five years. My skills were woefully out of date.
Since I had used some Fortran-based computer packages in my research-associate position years before, I decided to market myself as a computer programmer. The available jobs were in COBOL, a computer language I didn’t know at all. Still, I read a how-to-program-in-COBOL book one weekend and went on a job interview the following Monday. Before I did, I shaved off the beard I had worn for 10 years and got a haircut that made me look like a Republican. God! It was awful!
I was interviewed by two guys, both of whom liked to gamble. I talked backgammon with the first guy and blackjack with the second. Although my skills weren’t good enough to survive as a gambling professional, they were WAY better than these two wannabe gamblers. They were impressed with my abilities. The $25,000 a year job in programming I was applying for had been filled that morning, but there was a $35,000 a year job as a systems analyst available. It was now the week before Christmas and their budget didn’t allow another hire until after the first of the year. Was I interested in starting in two weeks?
I was, although I had no clue what a systems analyst did. I went to a bookstore, bought two books on how to be a systems analyst, and went home where I stayed in bed for two weeks. I’d come out of my room only to grab something out of the refrigerator or go to the bathroom. Otherwise, I read the books over and over again and was seemingly catatonic. I was sure I was going to be found out as a fraud and fired immediately. When that happened, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The fact that I was having to get a job in the first place wasn’t helping matters any. And I liked my hippie look WAY better than looking like a Baptist preacher. But that look was now gone. Not shaving for two weeks didn’t come close to making me feel better.
I was living with a lady named Betty at the time. I didn’t say a word to her for those two weeks. Not one word. She’d ask what she could do to help, or suggest I get out and exercise a bit, or maybe we could go see a movie or something, and I’d just lay there with my back to her, totally mute. I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything to say. I was a doofus who looked like a Republican.
She kept the refrigerator stocked with good eating options, bless her heart, and didn’t get too freaked out by my behavior.
Two weeks later, Wednesday January 2, 1980, I was 10 minutes early to work. I came up with a couple of good answers to questions I was asked in the first week and somehow lasted on that job for three years — at which time I went out and found a better one. I can’t tell you exactly how I did it. I just don’t know. I suspect being in the right place at the right time helped a lot.
One year after I had started working, I received a phone call at three in the morning from a lady friend named Margo. Not a romantic lady friend — I was still with Betty — but a good friend nonetheless. Margo was contemplating going back to work. Margo was a nurse and had written some books on pain management. She had gone around the country lecturing to nurses about treating those in pain. But her 15 minutes of fame was now up. She no longer got enough attendees to come to her lectures. It was time for her to go back to work.
Like I had been, Margo was severely traumatized. She didn’t want to go back to work. She knew I had gone through something similar the year before and needed some good advice. And she needed it now! At three in the morning. What could I tell her?
She had just returned from a nightclub where she’d probably had several beers (or something stronger). I was sound asleep when the call came. I gave her the best secret I could come up with on the spur of the moment. I told Margo that I hadn’t spoken to Betty for two weeks prior to starting my new job and recommended she not speak to Betty either. Not talking to Betty, I told Margo, was the secret to my success, and now I was going back to sleep. Good night.
Flippant though it was, Margo took my good advice to heart. For the next 10 days or so, Betty and I would get messages on our family answering machine that said things like, “Bob, I’m getting ready to start working at a hospital a week from Monday. Don’t let Betty know. I’m not talking to her.”
Margo started her job and did well at it. This, my friends, is confirmation! You now have the magic secret of getting through whatever it is that you are fearing most. And that secret is: Don’t talk to Betty.
For people in Las Vegas interested in attending a “Moth-like” story slam, there is a place that is doing them on the third Friday of each month. The next one is this Friday at 8pm. Here are the details.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1769861119999370/
This has got to be the stupidest column you have ever written.
I normally do not comment on the few times I do not enjoy a column.
This one was way too subjective to say the least. Other than an extension of a column written last December, I did not get anything out of this.
Recently, the columns have become literally unreadable on my cell phone. The articles have been cut off on the right hand margin.
At first I thought maybebthe text was enlarged, so I attempted to shrink itva little, but as I pinched it from the right hand side margin, I saw that the words were cut of, as though someone ran the article through a paper cutting machine.
Can someone fix this, and repost some of the last few weeks’ articles that were improperly formatted for this blog?
I agree that there is a distinct lack of useful information in this column, but that’s not a new phenomenon. Anecdotes always have limited relevance. The only takeaway is that you can successfully fake having a skill if the person hiring you doesn’t know much more about that skill than you do. Bullshit is this country’s second major currency, or maybe the first, based on the recent election results. But maybe that’s why we sociopathic introverts like video poker–we don’t have to interact with/bullshit anybody.
Hmmm, I’m surprised by the negative comments. I liked this column a lot. It was funny and well-written.
it was weirdly reminiscent of a similar experience of my own, only a year after Bob’s and also in the L.A. area. Given the previous comments I should issue the following WARNING: THERE IS NO VIDEO POKER OR BLACKJACK KNOWLEDGE TO GAINED FROM READING THE REMAINDER OF THIS COMMENT. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
In 1980 my blackjack bankroll needed a boost so I applied for a job I saw in the Classifieds as a programmer. My resume’ listed “Professional blackjack player”, 1977-1980, as my most recent job. I wasn’t sure how that would fly, but luckily my first interview was with an Israeli who was impressed by my education credentials and amused by the blackjack years. I got hired at $26K/year.
I’d spent the previous 4 years living on the beach in San Diego, surfing, playing volleyball, and making monthly trips to Nevada or New Jersey to play blackjack. When I got the programming job in downtown LA, I was worried about my new sit-at-a-desk lifestyle so much that I decided I need to do something healthy to offset it. I became a runner for the first time. I woke up 30 minutes early every day to make sure I could run on the beach for a couple of miles. My girlfriend at the time was not a runner either, but she joined me on those runs. She was a recent law school grad who was amused at having to pamper me because I was so stressed about actually working a regular job. I didn’t take on the monkish silence that Bob described, but I was definitely a vastly more uptight version of the bearded beach guy she’d fallen for several years earlier. Bob captured my own fear-of-a-regular-job feelings at the time perfectly in that article.
I, too, only knew high level languages like Fortran and ALGOL. But I learned the assembler-level language they were using in a few weeks on the job, and was soon given a big project to direct as well as the title of systems analyst and a raise to $32K/year. I’d only intended to work for a year, after which I was planning to travel around the world with my girlfriend on a flat-fee airline pass that cost $1800 at the time. I was sort of getting into the working routine, though. There was the “big fish in a small pond” factor. I knew I could be a star in that company if I stayed around. Nevertheless, after 12 months I told them I’d be leaving after 5 more months. (I wanted to give them plenty of time to hire a new project director.) I claimed I needed to spend more time with my girlfriend, who was by then clerking for a Federal judge in Oregon. They raised my salary to $37K/year and offered to let me work 4-day weeks so I could spend 3-day weekends in Oregon! But I left as I’d originally planned, and had a fantastic 3-month trip through Asia and the Middle East before returning to work as a blackjack player. And that was the last (and only) “real job” I ever had.
Anyway, I thought it was pretty interesting that Bob and I went through a similar experience so close in time and location. And apologies to anyone who feels robbed of precious reading time yet again. But I did warn you. ;>)
It seems like a WordPress template is used for this website structure; the best part of using a WordPress template is that it supposed to handle all sorts of screen sizes and device types that the user is on. I get different layouts from a smartphone and a desktop monitor. But both are clearly readable to me.
You Write, We read.
Nuff said.
I thought this column was worth the time to read it. I find that sometimes you have to look outside the box to enjoy something new. There are a few stories unrelated to advantage gambling in the Million Dollar poker autobiography (like the social aspects and love life parts) that provides color commentary to enhance the rest.
Keep up the good work.
Glad I took the time to read this article and Dunbar’s reply. If you can’t relate to this article, you’ve probably never been a full-time professional gambler. Unless you are remarkably blessed, every pro reaches a point where contemplating getting a mainstream job keeps them staring at the ceiling all night while lying in bed.
Thanks to you and Dunbar I know that I’m not alone in the fear and it’s very possible to come back from a mainstream job if forced down that path.
Jenny, can you possibly be less vague?
A young boy for his school science project decides to teach his pet hamster to go on and get off the wheel in his cage on command. After successfully accomplishing the task, the boy decides to vary the experiment and one day ties all the hamsters legs together. He then commands the animal to jump on the wheel and the hamster doesn’t move. He yells the command once more and again the hamster just lies there. He concludes that when a hamster’s legs are tied together, it becomes deaf.
While the article has merit and, as someone mentions, is well written, it is not well written in the sense of being a well-crafted story. Too much superfluous information and It takes way too long to get to the point, which seems to be that the secret to success is that there is no secret but you can get some really smart people to believe anything if they are desperate enough.
By the way, someone mentions technical problems and I would like to add that three times I subscribed above to be notified of new posts and two of those times I confirmed from the followup email I was sent and I still do not receive notifications. They are not going into my spam folder because I always scroll through them to make sure nothing in it I want.
Good article, keep them coming. It takes balls to go from a full time job to professional gambler.
Bob, thank you for the article, I for one, thought it was funny as hell and yes there is a point to be taken. Some people just like to complain and complain about anything, I hope you can let the bad comments roll off like water off a ducks back. Please keep up the good work!
I read about a man who put his Fit Bit on his Hamsters wheel. He ran up 50,000 plus steps and won the office pool.
Humm I wonder if a dealer would let me put a Fit Bit on his Roulette wheel¿
Much appreciated for taking the time to share your story. From reading what you and others wrote about the life of a professional gambler and with Mr. Munchkin bringing up what the Moth-like story slam is all about; it has helped me understand the purpose/context of the column. I take back the “too subjective” opinion I stated earlier, but there is no ability to do that. I understand Mr. Dancer has to vary up the column to keep things interesting, for the most part I look forward to reading columns on every Tuesday coffee breaks.
I also enjoy your Risk Analyzer product I bought here at LVA. Thank you again for being involved.
Having worked since I was 12 years of age (I am now 69), I have a hard time grasping anyone being traumatized when having to get a job. Apparently they grow them up differently in Texas (where I live) than in California…
It’s not a Texas vs California distinction. It’s not a red state blue state distinction.. It’s about coming to believe you can live by your wits or not.
You accepted early that you needed a job to support yourself. Fine. You have that in common with many people everywhere — from all sorts of backgrounds.
But some people come to believe that they are smart enough and knowledgeable enough to be able to not have to do that. When you honestly believe that — and then learn you aren’t good enough to do that — it’s traumatic.
Thanks for the kind words, alpax and Capt Jack!
David, I can certainly see how the “traumatic” part would seem strange to someone who has worked regular jobs all his life. It’s all about what you’re used to, what your self-image is, and how great your fear of failure is.
Coincidentally, this same trauma theme was treated in a different genre today:
http://www.gocomics.com/overboard/2017/04/22
(If you’re unfamiliar with Overboard, the guy in the red shirt in the last panel is supposed to be the cartoonist himself.)
What do you have against Republicans? Are you saying Democrats are slobs? Do you think all Republicans are clean shaven, hard working people and all Democrats are slobs looking for people to take advantage of? i do enjoy your columns but I think that you are too full of yourself.
@ Bob and Dunbar, I find it more traumatic not having a job. I don’t care what people think, but with social norming of friends, family, and losing positioning in a professional job…it’s difficult quitting a career no matter how good I am in gambling. In the movie Revolutionary Road, to make a decision of losing a lucrative job for a beautiful dream job that might not work out. I understand working a job in the service industry it might not be a big jump to leave and be a professional gambler (I understand you both did have a career job before). In gambling nothing good last forever from figuring out certain progressive slot machines to blackjack, things change. I’ve done well in gambling, but not as good as you. Fear of not having medical, dental, or fully funding 401K. Say your 7 years as a professional gambler, difficult finding a new job with that career gap and getting a job that is not service industry. Does becoming a full time professional gambler change your lifestyle…not having kids, not having a lot of credit, having bad years with no income, and dating. You talk about the good things about becoming a professional gambler. What are your past negative stories in becoming a professional gambler? Is getting another low paying job the worst thing in becoming a professional gambler? I believe the worst thing in the world for a man is running out of money. Having a gf or wife, there is a constant expense that slowly drains the bankroll.
I certainly do not think Democrats are slobs? (You said that twice: is that what you believe?) Nor do I think all Republicans are . . . anything. They vary.
At the time we’re talking about (around 1980), I had worn long hair and a beard for more than a decade. I was more a-political than anything else. Most people didn’t consider me a slob. (Perhaps Republicans like you did!)
From the perspective of where I was at the time, looking like a Republican was a sellout. Today, I suppose I do look like a Republican.
I was trying to explain where I was 37 years ago. I was not making a statement on my social and political beliefs today.
You need to be able to handle risk if you’re going to be a gambler.
If you need the guarantees you’re talking about in this post, becoming a full time gambler would be a mistake for you. You just wouldn’t be happy. If you’re confident enough in your abilities, and willing to “bet on yourself,” professional gambling can be a decent enough profession.
Many entrepreneurs who would not consider themselves gamblers at all (say somebody who was going to start up a small restaurant — knowing full well that a significant percentage of small restaurants fail) are willing to go through life without the kind of guarantees you seem to need. That doesn’t make them better or worse than you. Just different in how much risk they can handle.
In investing, the more risk you’re willing to take, the higher the expected returns. Neither Dunbar nor I are suggesting that everybody has the ability and the personality to become professional gamblers. We’re just saying that for those that do, it’s the lifestyle we want.