The toilets in Vegas are imploding this week with no need for help from the card counters.
At Planet Hollywood, upstanding valley blogger VegasRex photographed Microsoft’s blue screen of death on a piece of non-trivial signage.
Meanwhile, downtown at Binion’s, a landmark casino slipped into a coma.
In Brooklyn we would like to die but [...]

Via VegasTripping.com we get a long-awaited glance at the layout of the main floor at CityCenter’s Aria, opening December 16 in Las Vegas:

The Wizard of Odds, not ordinarily the sort to pony up a blog post in which he stares death in the face, stares death in the face.

A tribal casino in Kansas is excusing itself from the business of keeping gambling addicts off its premises, the Topeka Capital-Journal reports:
The three tribal-owned casinos in the area had maintained a list of people who, in an effort to control their addiction, banned themselves from the gaming floors. If someone on the list [...]

Gambling is fun either as a lark or as a test of wits or as a dalliance with forces bigger and more brutal than you are, or sometimes as all three. Now and again the dallying gets to be hardcore. A chord gets struck; a patsy falls into a rut. And suddenly the limits are [...]

This nice image is the cover art from the Criterion Collection’s 20th-anniversary edition of David Mamet’s House of Games:

They’ve finally coughed up a slot machine I may have no choice but to delight in the enjoyment of:
MASHANTUCKET, Conn. – (BUSINESS WIRE) – In what’s sure to be happy news for word aficionados and slot fans alike, Foxwoods Resort Casino today announced that it has teamed up with Lightning Gaming, Inc. … to [...]

Sucker/(former?) rich person Terry Watanabe lost $112 million at Caesars Palace and the Rio during a months-long alcohol-and-prescription-pain-killer-fueled bender in which he lived in comped suites at the two Harrah’s properties, seldom left Vegas or saw the outdoors, gambled in near-solitude in private salons considerably more exclusive than your run-of-the-mill high-limit room, often gambling hour [...]

Some Canadian paper (doesn’t matter) has a bizarre profile today of self-described “world’s best limit hold ‘em player,” John Turmel:
He’s a professional gambler, former casino owner and operator, card-counter [sic], accordion player and poet.
I’m smitten. Of course! Turmel is a complicated hombre who also happens to hold the Guinness records for most elections contested and [...]

Author: Josh Axelrad
Pub date: March 18, 2010
Publisher: Penguin Press (Penguin, US), Ebury Press (Random House, UK)
Edition: Hardcover, 288 pages
Weight: Exactly one pounds, this says
Word Count: Did you know the word counts generated by word-processing software can vary by as much as 2 percent from one application to another? They can. Determining factors include the [...]

The newswires are duking it out:
– Slot-Machine Makers Could Be In For Winning Streak (Dow Jones, Nov 18)
– Slot makers face tough sell convincing casinos with less cash to keep replacing slot machines (Associated Press, Nov 18)
Is the future bright, or not, for the slot set? It depends on who you trust. The AP comes [...]

Do you ever publish surveillance photographs of yourself if you happen to obtain them semi-legally from casino insiders with access to Griffin or SIN materials?
No. Publishing stolen intellectual property is semi-legal at best, even if that property was itself created unlawfully or designed to be used in an illegal way.
Let’s say I’m in possession of [...]

your fearless blogger is on a fact-finding mission in the american midwest. so it is going to be quiet around here until wednesday. you might take this opportunity to investigate my google reader feed. the feed offers bite-sized summaries and succulent links to the hottest breaking news on gambling and gamblers.

for thomas donovan it’s victory. the indiana court of appeals ruled last week that grand victoria casino in rising sun, in. had no legal grounds for barring the admitted card counter from its premises or its blackjack games on the basis of his skill. but a victory for donovan may represent a loss for counters [...]