Bringing Down the House
When he was finished with the physical signals, Kevin was asked to repeat the oral count signals, to be used when calling in a Big Player. These were all simple words that could be used in a sentence, right under the nose of a dealer, or pit boss. They seemed arbitrary at first, but they were also mnemonics.
Tree: the signal for a count of +1, because a tree looked like a one.
Switch: +2, because a switch was binary, on or off
Stool: +3, because it has three legs
Car: +4, four wheels
Glove: +5, fingers
Gun: +6, bullets
Craps: +7, lucky seven
Pool: +8, eight ball
Cat: +9, lives
Bowling: +10, strike
Football: +11, because "11" looks like goalposts
Eggs: +12, a dozen
Witch: +13, witchy number
Ring: +14, fourteen-carat gold
Paycheck: +15, because you got paid on the fifteenth
Sweet: +16, sweet sixteen
Magazine: +17, the name of a teen magazine
Voting booth: +18, the age you could vote
Sometimes Kevin found it hard to think of a sentence under pressure, but Martinez assured him that even nosense worked in a casion, because nobody was really listening. "This stool is killing my ass" meant the count was three, and "I'd rather by bowling" meant the count was ten. "My room upstairs is the size of a fucking voting booth" meant it was time to bet the mortgage.
The beginning of this story about a group of MIT students who made a huge amount of money in Las Vegas pulled me right it. The story was interesting, the writing was not distracting and certainly not as dull as many non-fiction books I read. A hundred pages into the story, it stopped moving. My interest waned but I kept reading. In the end, I do think it was an interesting, fun and worthwhile book to read but I think it would have done much better as a long article. (a fact true for most non fiction in my opinion) |
