Beware of Smart People Bearing Propositions

I started gambling quite early in life, encouraged not merely by (of all people) my mother, but also from information I gleaned from what was then a new (but ultimately short-running) television show called Alias Smith and Jones.

ASAJ starred Pete Duel and Ben Murphy, although when Duel committed suicide after two years, announcer Roger Davis stepped in and played his character for the third and final season.

The show offered not merely a highly entertaining Western/comedy format, but also provided, almost like clockwork, at least one very useful gambling tip.

I first learned about blackjack card counting there. Did you know, for example, that when playing one-deck blackjack, if the deck is dealt all the way to the bottom and the player knows that the final six cards are four eights and two sevens, he cannot lose? The dealer and player must each start with a total of 14, 15, or 16, and when the player sticks, the dealer must bust.

I also learned about a card game called Montana Red Dog that wound up paying for my first stereo system when I introduced it into my high school poker game. Good poker players or gamblers won't waste their time with Red Dog, but it ate up high school kids and would, I suspect, eat up many amateur players. One friend, Ron Sail, decided to rename the game "Vanessa Redgraves" (sic), and the change stuck.

One of the more memorable little proposition bets I learned was also poker-related. What would you say the fair odds are of my succeeding on this one: You take an honest deck, shuffle it thoroughly, and deal me 25 cards. I must use each and every one of those 25 cards once and only once to make five pat poker hands (a straight, flush, full house, quads, or straight flush), which I will lay out one right after another (meaning all five hands will be viewable and separate simultaneously).

There is absolutely no funny business here about reusing cards, or laying out the hands so that they intersect each other or anything like that. I will give you five distinct pat poker hands, and you can pick up and remove any of them or separate them in any way you want.

Most people first estimate that the odds against me are high, something like 20-1 or more, although because I raise it as a proposition, they figure I have enough practice or know something that makes the odds lower, and therefore won't offer more than 5-1 or 10-1.

Believe me, I'm eager to grab all the action I can when getting 5-1 (or for that matter, even money or worse), because I am actually about a 20-1 favorite to be able to pull this off! (I haven't bothered to figure the exact odds, because once I knew I was easily better than 10-1, and knowing I could get odds rather than laying them, I wasn't worried about fine points.)

It's that easy because with that many cards, I'm going to get lots of flushes, and it's quite rare for the distribution to include the worst possible scenario: six, six, six, and seven of each of the four suits. Usually there are seven or eight of at least two suits, and often more, which gives me a lot of leeway in using surplus flush cards to make straights (the next easiest hand) or other pat hands.

From this trick (and many, many others offered in the show), I learned quite early in my gambling life to "beware of smart people bearing propositions." That was my own version of a line I later heard put another way:

"'Son,' my father told me, 'there will come a time when you are out in the world and you will meet a man who says he can make a jack of hearts spit cider into your ear. Son, even if this man has a brand-new deck of cards wrapped in cellophane, do not bet that man, because if you do, you will have a mighty wet ear.'"

- Damon Runyon

As an aside, I've been fond of Runyon ever since I went into the New York bar that bears his name, "Runyon's," and stumbled into a TV show taping where they solicited audience questions for the guest, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

Specter was at the time introducing legislation that would have made it illegal for professional sports franchises to shift cities unless they were losing money. He said teams that are only marginally profitable should be forced to negotiate with their host city for more favorable terms on stadiums and such.

Annoying random visitor Glazer, who didn't even live in Manhattan but was just visiting on business and had dropped in to Runyon's because it was close to his hotel and he figured there might be sports on TV that he could watch during a solitary dinner, saw lots of people heading upstairs, asked about it, and was told about the program. He followed the action upstairs to watch the show, and somehow his hand was selected out of the 20 or so who volunteered to ask a question. He took the mike and the following discussion ensued on the TV show:

Glazer: "Senator, my experience with negotiation is that no one negotiates unless the alternative is worse … if your bill passes, why would a city whose team was profitable ever agree to negotiate for better terms? Only the threat or possibility of a move would lead a city to, in essence, give money away to a sports franchise … unless the team intentionally made moves to make itself unprofitable so it could leave. Isn't that right?"

Sen. Specter: "Umm, grumble, grumble, grumble, umm, no." (There was a hidden signal for a commercial break, during which the senator sent me a look that could kill and, I think, started making a list of people he planned to fire.)

I'm not making this up. It really aired on New York television and in some other Northeastern markets. Sadly, my video copy of the show has disappeared. Maybe Card Player's own Bald Eagle, Steve Zolotow, saw the show and can confirm … surely someone in the poker world saw it and can remember it (not me specifically, of course, but that someone ambushed Specter), even though it aired about 15 years ago.

Shortly thereafter, Specter dropped his plans for the legislation. Even as a youth, I was a troublemaker. I'm sure Specter was thrilled to run into a questioner who was a former sportswriter and criminal defense/contracts attorney whose family had been heavily involved in politics when he was young. Where was the expected, "Yo, senata, whadya think about da Knicks dis year?" Talk about a stacked deck …

Getting back to the notion of wet ears and smart people bearing propositions, you quite often will find poker players who offer bets about matters other than poker. As Alias Smith and Jones first taught me and a lifetime of experience then confirmed, when someone comes to you and offers a bet with which he is obviously familiar and you aren't, you're likely to be taking on a "heads I win, tails you lose" bet if you accept his proposition, no matter how favorable it seems on the surface.

Put another way, whenever someone offers you a bet about which he might be sure, or which he might have already figured out the odds to four decimal places, and about which you can only quickly guess or estimate, you're in a lot of trouble unless you are sure. One of the few times I can remember something like that happening is when my then bookie offered to bet me about how old pitcher Greg Maddux was.

That's clearly a piece of information my bookie could have just known, but it came up in the context of another discussion (while that helps, it's no guaranteed safety net; many of the best proposition bets are designed to arise in the ordinary course of conversation, so that they don't smell fishy), and much more important, it was something about which I didn't have to guess. I knew how old Maddux was (26, back when we bet); owning a fantasy baseball team requires one to store a lot of mostly useless information in one's head.

Yes, you may have to endure a certain amount of macho teasing and/or taunting, but that's part of the game: Many men (much more so than women) don't want to be perceived as gun-shy when it comes to a bet. While the dumb people watching/listening may think you don't have any "guts," the smart observers will recognize you for what you are: someone smart enough not to play the other guy's game, someone smart enough not to fall into a reasonably obvious trap.

I don't know about you, but assuming I care at all about what anyone else thinks, I'd certainly rather get the respect of the smart observers than the dumb ones.

Next time I'll tell you about a proposition bet that appears in the recently finished movie Stuey. I had a small role in the film, and also served as the technical advisor for the Las Vegas scenes. Stuey is based on the life of three-time World Series of Poker Champion Stu Ungar, and it came out quite nicely for a relatively low-budget movie.

This particular proposition teaches quite a few lessons about poker and proposition bets – as well as the liberties that dramatic filmmaking can require a writer or director to take with the plausible!