Damon Runyon

Leader-Tribune/February 5, 1937

It seems that those boys in Miami are getting away with their slot-machine roulette wheels and crap tables, all right, but a strange calamity has befallen.

The house just can’t win. The customers are beating the games like breaking sticks. The last time the operators peered at their ledgers was midnight Wednesday night, and such reddish glow suffused the pages that they thought it was sun-up, and ordered their breakfast.

Now here, of course, is something utterly unexpected, and unforeseen by the operators. They don’t know what to make of it. They anticipated little quibbling from the law about their apparatus. They realized that it might rain. They understood that an earthquake, while improbable, wasn’t entirely beyond the bounds of possibility.

But never did they look for any resistance against the law of averages on the part of the customers. The law of averages is that the customers must lose. It really isn’t in nature that a customer should consistently beat a roulette wheel, or a crap game. If he does he isn’t a customer. The operators are wondering if a lot of wolves in sports clothing have sneaked into Florida this winter.

We told you about these Florida slot-machine wheels and crap tables some time ago.

The slot machine is legal in Florida. Roulette wheels and craps and similar diversions are illegal. So a man invented a device loaded with roulette balls, and attached this device to a roulette layout.

When you signify a desire to have a little roulette, the croupier, or dealer, inserts a half-dollar in a slot, pushes a plunger, and out comes a roulette ball, which is spun in the wheel. A new ball is used for each spin. At the crap table, the coin produces a pair of dice, and a new pair is brought out for each dice hurler.

The operation of the slot machine, you understand, has no relation whatever to the mechanics of the wheel, or the dice. It is just something that the man thought up to give the pastimes a somewhat vague semblance of slot machines, and the Florida law issued licenses to them as such at $1,000 per copy.

There was some poking and prying about, and some hemming and hawing by other limbs o’ the law after the slot machines were placed in operation, but they all finally came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything they could do about them, and the operators began figuring out how much they ought to make if the sum was anything at all.

One operator thought half a million would be about right. Another was more conservative, or maybe less greedy. He thought a couple of hundred G’s would be fine. This was before the dealers began reporting that the customers were acting in the most uncustomerly manner.

Of course, science has no record of any gaming house operator admitting he is a winner under any circumstances, so perhaps slot machine operators in Miami may be exaggerating to some extent when they say they are far in the rear. It is the custom of a gaming house operator to complain of hunger when he may have a ham under his arm.

But wholly unprejudiced and dispassionate observers are confirming the reports, so there must be some element of truth in them. It is another indication that 1937 may be the most unusual year. The customers haven’t been winners since the year Barbara Fritchie told the Johnny Rebs to shoot if they must at her old gray head.

The more superstitious of the old dealers of the games in Florida are said to attribute this untoward flouting of the ordinarily immutable law of averages to the new-fangled devices of the lay-outs.

The old dealers say that while it is true the slots have no connection with the mechanical operation of the games, they are an offense in the sight of the goddess of fortune, as well as a lot of additional work for the dealers.

The dealers, it is said, are much put out by the way the house is losing, as is the house itself. That’s a funny thing about a dealer. He gets his wages, win, lose, or draw, from the house, yet he takes a positively sadistic pleasure in seeing the customer knocked out.

You would think a dealer would have some sympathy for a fellow human struggling on the other side of the table, but no. The dealer seems to thoroughly enjoy raking checks over to his side. We used to know a dealer who got such keen enjoyment out of his proceeding that he would laugh out loud. He had a real mean streak in him.

We must warn our readers not to put too much faith in these early returns on the customers down Miami way, and to withhold the cheering until the season is over.

The law of averages has been known to start out a trifle gimp-legged before, and to give the customers a big lead. But the law of averages has a lot of endurance, and if the customers stick around long enough, the old L. of A. is bound to catch up with them. The grind, as the boys say, must grind you in.

Nonetheless, our information is that the operators are worrying. One of them, we are told, privately took a whirl against a wheel the other night to see if he could determine just what was wrong. He hit four numbers one after the other and decided to become a customer himself until the law of averages starts showing a little of its stuff.