Back in those halcyon
days of my youth, Lenny -- who lived next door -- got a chemistry set
for his birthday. The box prominently proclaimed it to be "harmless."
Lenny told us this meant if you don't know what you're doing, "it'll
go boom!" In awe, I believed him. Until I looked-up "harmless"
in my own prized birthday gift, a dictionary. (Who says the child isn't
the father of the man?)
Many of us in the
geezer class remember "Rinso." This laundry soap contained
"Solium, the sunshine ingredient." Simply touting the sunshine
ingredient wouldn't have done. Too superficial. It had to have an authoritative
tone, regardless of any conceivable meaning. "Solium-free"
would probably have been as effective.
Once, while I still
worked for a living, I decided to test a new space-age adhesive, "epoxy,"
on an apparatus I was building. Ken, the shop technician, asked what
the stuff was. When I explained, he fetched a bottle of yellow glue,
insisting it was better. I pooh-poohed it as obsolete, so he "proved"
his point by showing me that the label said it was based on "aliphatic
resin." Unlike Solium, aliphatics are real (a type of hydrocarbon
molecule) and afford superior bonding for many woodworking jobs. But
Ken had no idea whether, why, or for what this compound might be relevant.
The roads into Atlantic
City are billboard bliss. My favorites have been those advertising things
like "5X" or "10X" craps, "single-zero"
roulette, and "9/6" video poker. Favorites, in a cynical sense,
because the vast majority of solid citizens have no more clue what the
code-word jargon means than did Lenny of "harmless," soap
buyers of "Solium," or Ken of "aliphatic resin."
And, for those who do understand gambling gobbledygook, only a small
fraction would or could take advantage of what was offered.
A new series of
billboards, though, has to win the all-time prize for huftymagufty.
When I first saw these signs, their claim seemed impressive for today's
casinos: "single-deck blackjack." Sounds great -- even though
not many patrons, including seasoned blackjack buffs, could say why.
It's that single-deck blackjack, spread with the rules standard nowadays
around the country, gives a slight edge to players who follow Basic
Strategy. Not just, as might be surmised, to card counters. But to anyone
who knows things like always split aces and eights, hit 12s into a dealer's
two- or three- up, and double on 11 against anything but an ace.
So, unless the casino in question was planning to lose money on every
table but make it up in volume, there had to be something vital the
ad omitted. There was. And this past week, whatever the reason, the
billboards changed. They now boast "single-deck 6/5 blackjack."
Somehow, the pitch it still has an appealing air. Why else would they
be vaunting this game? Why, indeed?
The "6/5"
means that instead of a 3-to-2 payoff, $7.50 on a winning blackjack
for every $5.00 bet, players get $6.00. No big thing? A lousy buck and
a half? Sorry, with this change alone, a Basic Strategy player goes
from being slightly favored to giving the casino roughly 1.5 percent
edge. This is triple what the bosses bag from the same bettors in banal
eight-deck games. So "single deck 6/5 blackjack" is nothing
a joint would want to announce to an informed public. It'd be like a
restaurant saying "our food is the cheapest and most execrable
in town."
This doesn't mean
there's a rigid correlation between single-deck 6/5 blackjack and a
person's having a winning or losing session. Lenny's chemistry set didn't
"go boom!" but he became an accountant who was instrumental
in starting up what's now the world's largest donut chain. Rinso is
no longer on the shelves (except, oddly, in Turkey). And you can use
glue with aliphatic resin for some tasks and various epoxies for others
without comprehending or caring about the molecular structure of either.
Abraham Lincoln
said "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of
the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all
of the time." Of course, you don't have to con all of the people
to make a dollar. Maybe that's what the minstrel, the immortal Sumner
A Ingmark, meant when he mused:
To sucker the
public with come-ons terrific,
Try couching your message in terms scientific.