The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  In spite of all the books sold on the subject, there is no mathematical system—be it a progression, a betting pattern, martingale, d’Alembert, doubling up, or doubling down—capable of predicting the outcome in roulette or improving the bettor’s odds. It is also true that system players, especially those who think they have cracked the missing code, tend to lose money faster than the ordinary stiff who relies on luck. This explains why the casinos are so generous with their free pencils and scratchpads.

  It is not by mathematical but by physical prediction that one beats the game of roulette. You need to know the exact forces acting on ball and rotor at each play of the game. This requires a computer programmed with an algorithm—a general equation describing the physics of roulette—into which you can plug the variables governing the wheel. If the wheel is tilted, you locate the high side and shadow on the track. You calculate the average velocity at which the ball tends to fall off. You compute the rate at which the central rotor decelerates. Given these general parameters—which differ significantly from wheel to wheel—the computer and its algorithm become predictive.

  But for this they need more information gathered while the game is in play. This is supplied by a data taker clicking two passes of the rotor in front of a fixed reference point on the frame of the wheel, and two or more passes of the ball in front of the same point. It is now an easy matter for a computer to calculate relative velocities and position, the projected time of fall for the ball, its trajectory over the sloping sides of the wheel, and its final collapse onto the spinning disk of numbers.

  As I walk into the Sundance, Clem from New Mexico is engaged in the process of setting parameters. To fit the computer’s program to a particular wheel, Doyne carries on a kind of dialogue between his big toes. The microswitch in his left shoe steers the computer into subroutines in its program, while the microswitch in the right shoe clocks the ball and rotor data. A tap routine combining left toe and right toe alters the parameters themselves. To get the algorithm tweaked around to the conditions at hand requires a good eye and split-second reflexes. The process takes anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour.

  With five years’ practice, Doyne is an ace at driving the computer around its program. He adjusts variables by sight, or from a sixth sense developed by now in his big toes. The remaining variables are fine-tuned by trial and error. Does the ball travel farther than or not as far as predicted? Are there unusual circumstances, such as atmospheric pressure, affecting its behavior? From one play of the game to the next, Doyne notes what the computer predicts against what the ball actually does, until, ideally, the two sets of data could be plotted on top of each other in a bell curve neatly symmetrical about the mean. This laminar hump of data points soaring clear over the x axis translates into our 44 percent advantage, and lots of money. A hundred thousand dollars a month, at our latest estimate.

  Once the parameters are adjusted and the computer is clicked into its playing mode, Doyne’s left toe takes a break. The right foot can handle the rest, which involves the simple clocking of ball and rotor past a reference point. Doyne at this stage can play the game out of the corner of his eye. With his right toe becoming an autonomous unit, bouncing over its microswitch like a frog’s leg pithed for a demonstration of galvanic electricity, Clem from New Mexico brightens up to chat about the weather and flirt with the hostesses.

  I walk to the roulette table and stand behind the players. I see from the croupier’s marker that Doyne’s green chips are valued at twenty-five cents, the house minimum. Seated on stools along the layout are three other players. In the middle is a large blond woman with a gull-wing hairdo. Her red chips are pegged at fifty cents. Next to her, wearing a Stetson and a string tie, is a gentleman playing with black, one-dollar chips. At the far end of the table is a Filipino in a sharkskin suit. His face obscured in a cloud of cigar smoke, he stands behind a pile of blue chips valued at five dollars apiece.

  The croupier gives the rotor a nudge and sets the numbered pockets spinning counterclockwise. He launches the ball in the opposite direction and announces in a flat voice, “Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.” Like a Ouija board player hoping for spiritual intercession, the blonde slides her chips over the baize with her fingertips. She leans back and titters to no one in particular, “Oh, my. I sure could use some luck.”

  Mr. String Tie hedges his bets on corners and columns and then flips a couple of extra chips onto his lucky number 9. The Filipino, betting late and fast, scatters dozens of chips over the layout in stacks three and four deep. He finishes by mounding a pile of chips over the five-corner bet between 00, 0, 1, 2, and 3 that pays the worst odds on the table.

  Doyne places a chip on red. The bail spins with the sound of a marble rolling over a hardwood floor. It drops from the track, arcs neatly between two diamonds, gives a little bounce on hitting the rotor, and then falls into the green cup numbered 00.

  “Double zero,” calls the croupier, as he covers the winning number on the layout with a glass pyramid.

  “Oh, my,” says the blonde. “Some people have all the luck.”

  “Nice play,” says Mr. String Tie to the Filipino, who is sucking hard on his cigar.

  Using a wooden rake, the croupier clears a pile of losing bets. He sorts and restacks them into a bank of chips stored on the apron behind the wheel. He claps his hands and the pit boss comes over to watch the payout. A square man wearing a crew cut and brown suit, he looks unhappy about the crystal marker and blue chips remaining on the table. The croupier pays out thirty-five to one for bets straight up on 00, and six to one for the corner bets. Using his rake, he slides a pile of chips down the baize to the Filipino.

  “Is it my turn next?” asks the blonde, again of no one in particular.

  Onlookers pile up behind the winner. They stand as voyeurs witnessing a visitation from Lady Luck.

  Doyne places an early bet on red: my signal to take a five-minute walk. I stroll the floor, studying the action. Three craps players dressed in seersucker suits and button-down collars must be in town for a convention. A dealer out of play at a twenty-one table catches my eye and fans her deck face up on the baize.

  I walk to the back of the casino and sit in front of the keno board. The machine that blows around the Ping-Pong balls starts up. A pneumatic tube sucks them one at a time out of a glass jar. A houseman reads the winning numbers into a microphone, while another houseman lights up the keno board. A woman chain-smoking Kools, her daughter, and I are the only ones watching.

  I flex my toes and take a deep breath before walking back to the roulette wheel. I find the blonde cleaned out. She snaps her purse shut and heaves off her stool. Mr. String Tie, down to his last dozen chips, will soon follow her to the bar. It is a terrible thing to be abandoned by Lady Luck. You go listless. You start apologizing for yourself. You finger your chips without love until, in disgust and resignation, you toss out the last of them without even looking. The Filipino, lighting his second cigar, is holding his own. But the spectators have wandered elsewhere.

  Doyne places a bet on even: my signal to play. I sit in the chair vacated by the blonde and hand the croupier three hundred dollars. He claps his hands and the pit boss watches as my bills get stuffed into the cash box with what looks like a wooden meat cleaver. The croupier again claps his hands and shoves across the felt three stacks of red chips valued now, according to the copper disk in front of the bank, at five dollars apiece. The pit boss gives me a good stare.

  This is it. The knockover. My debut into the big time. I have the layout in front of me memorized backwards and forwards. I know the arrangement of all the corresponding numbers on the wheel. I have them divided around the circle into octants, eight groups of four or five numbers apiece, that correspond in turn to one of eight different buzzes tattooed by computer onto the bottoms of my feet. I’ve spent days fielding buzzes and throwing bets onto the layout. I’ve trained for hours to get my fingers supple around the chips. I’ve mastered the art of sta
cking them in my palm and dropping them face up on the baize with no movement in the wrist. I can play by reflex, thoughtlessly, without even glancing at the wheel, cool and fast, while otherwise looking like your everyday mark about to burn up a little discretionary income.

  My hair is cut short and styled. I’m dressed in twill pants, nicely tailored, with a sports coat, cravat, and shirt opened two buttons down the chest. For small talk, in case anyone asks, I own a restaurant in Capitola, California. Part owner, actually. French. Entrées around fifteen dollars. Specialties of the house ranging from moules marinières to boeuf bourguignon. I’m in town for a toot. A couple days off before the holiday season picks up.

  The cocktail waitress taps my shoulder. “A drink on the house?” she asks.

  The croupier flips the ball up on the track. “Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen,” he says, without any ladies present.

  Mr. String Tie pushes his last chip onto number 9 and stands up for a stretch. The Filipino extends his pinky ring over the layout and covers the green felt with a rash of chips scattered on corner bets, column bets, and numbers split twelve, six, and three ways. It looks as if he has more money on the table than any win could recoup. Doyne places a twenty-five-cent bet on black.

  The ball whirls smoothly around the track and slows for its final revolutions. The cups below spin successively red, black, and green. I wait for Doyne to enter data and transmit a prediction from his computer to mine. Like time machines speeding up the present, our computers are going to peer into the future and chart the trajectory of the game a crucial few seconds in advance of its being played. I get a high-frequency buzz on the front solenoid. A three. The third octant. Including numbers 1, 13, 24 and 36. I stretch over the baize and cover the first three numbers with chips. I skip the 36 at the bottom of the layout and substitute instead the 00, which lies near it on the wheel and closer to my seat.

  Like a basketball player watching a free throw sail up and into the basket, I lean back on my heels and wait. I turn to the cocktail waitress and order a Tequila Sunrise. I watch the Filipino puff his cigar. I smile at the pit boss. I’m not even looking as the croupier calls out the number 13 and places his pyramid on top of my bet. Why would anyone play roulette, I think to myself, without wearing a computer in his shoe?

  1

  Silver City

  Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.

  Niels Bohr

  Down in the red desert country of southwestern New Mexico, Silver City is famous, or at least notorious, on several counts. Geronimo lay low in the nearby mountains while Billy the Kid shot his first of many men. Herbert Hoover, fresh out of Stanford, got his start in Silver City as a mining engineer. Fifty years later, the struggle of workers and their families at Empire Zinc was featured in Herbert Biberman’s classic film Salt of the Earth. Violence of a different sort, abstracted from cowboys and Indians, confounded local residents on the morning of July 16, 1945. They woke to the blast and peered through rattling windows to see the glow of the world’s first atomic bomb, exploded two hundred miles to the north on the lava beds of the Jornada del Muerto.

  On the southern edge of the Gila Wilderness, Silver City straddles the threshold, at six thousand feet, between forest and desert. The Continental Divide, after wandering through the Black Range of the Mogollon Mountains (pronounced muggy-OWN), zips through town on its way headed due south into the Sonoran Desert. A city of twelve thousand souls, the seat of Grant County and biggest way station for a hundred miles in any direction. Silver—as the residents call it—is pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

  A thousand years ago the Mimbreño Indians wandered into this pleasant stretch of upland desert and called it home. The land had much to recommend it. Forested with Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, the ten-thousand-foot peaks of the Mogollons gave rise to the three forks of the Gila River, along which the Mimbreño built cave-side dwellings and painted frescoes of a landscape rich in arable fields and wild game. The Indians farmed the valleys and chased the game south into countryside that tipped from xeric woodland—filled with scrub oak, mountain mahogany, juniper, and piñon—into bushier terrain of creosote, jumping cholla, and yucca, before dropping finally into a howling desert of dry playas and alkali flats. At the base of the mountains lay a favorite camp for these hunting parties, a stretch of springs and native prairie that the Spanish, on their belated arrival, named La Cienaga de San Vicente, the Marsh of St. Vincent.

  The affixing of saintly place names accompanied more serious incursions by the Spanish into the Gila Wilderness. They sold the Mimbreño into slavery and ordered all resisters killed in a war of extermination. A Spanish officer engaged in this civilizing mission discovered what the Indians had long known about the area’s mineral wealth—that copper could be harvested here from underground veins as thick as ferns. He returned in 1804 to open the Santa Rita copper mine, an original act imitated by successive waves of hard-rock miners up from Mexico, forty-niners out from Boston, gold rushers down from Leadville, and a later band of enthusiasts whose metallic fever ran so high that in 1870 they rechristened St. Vincent’s marsh with the more promising name of Silver City.

  The town has faded and got a bit ragged around the edges with shopping plazas and subdivisions, but much of it still appears as it did in its heyday a hundred years ago. Built higgledy-piggledy on hilltops and along elm-lined streets are the brick homes of old miners who hit a vein and subsequently called themselves bankers. Imposing structures, with Victorian porches, mansard roofs, Gothic turrets, and widow’s walks, these houses command vistas across the desert scrub to the flanks of Geronimo Mountain.

  Looking from the second-story windows of these houses, one spies on every horizon the presence of minerals. Due east, under a monolith known as the Kneeling Nun, stretches the mile- long pit of the Santa Rita copper mine. Its ore—exploited multinationally right from the start—was originally transported four hundred miles by mule train into Chihuahua. Now, mined by Kennecott and Mitsubishi, the shipment goes to Japan. The twin stacks of the mine’s smelter rise over the nearby town of Hurley, and to the north squat the equally dusty houses of Hanover. In Silver City itself the hills are littered with mine shafts and tailings from abandoned veins, while directly behind the County Courthouse a still-active manganese mine chews away at the face of Bear Mountain.

  Out beyond the scraping and digging on which its fortunes were founded, the view from the high ground in Silver City gives way to unpeopled prairie. This is welcome ground to big dreams. Out of it spring self-reliant souls. An old part of the country, discovered and settled long before the Pilgrims disembarked from the May-flower, it is also among the newest, with the feeling of being a frontier, a border territory, unsettled and wide open to chance. Here one finds the last avatars of the American mythos—cowboys and Indians, hard-rock miners and barroom confidantes—with room enough still for them to stretch out and dream the old dreams of freedom and independence.

  Born in Houston, Texas, in 1952, James Doyne Farmer, who goes by the second of his two given names, which is pronounced like a variant tone row, D?-an, was six years old when he and his family moved to Silver City. They settled into a mild neighborhood spiced with Mexicans and college students while James Doyne Farmer, Sr., who goes by the first of his two given names, reported to work as an engineer at the Santa Rita mine. Doyne by then had already read his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, and over the next few years Mrs. Lynch, the town librarian, would lead him in an attack on the rest of world literature. During her summer reading contests, the number of stars he acquired for the consumption of texts—from Dostoyevsky through Hemingway and Huxley to Tolstoy—was second only to Kitty Kelley’s.

  “Then in sixth grade,” Doyne told me one day as we were driving down Las Vegas Boulevard on our way to play roulette, “I pooped out. As a kid I was plump, had a fierce temper, and didn’t get along well with other people. I decided I had to work on my personality.”

  The turning poin
t had arrived earlier that summer. Suffering as much from the cure as the disease, Doyne was confined to bed with rheumatic fever for months of total inactivity.

  “I became very depressed. When no one came to visit, I decided there must be something wrong with me. I went through a complete self-reappraisal and made certain vows. When the teacher asked a question, I would no longer raise my hand. I would do whatever I needed to become popular. From being loud and boisterous I became quiet and shy. I spent sixth grade learning the technique, and seventh and eighth grades perfecting it. By ninth grade I was back to some kind of balance, but in the meantime I had made a lot of friends.”

  In sixth grade Doyne also committed himself to pacifism, although this project fared less well. It met insurmountable obstacles down at the paper shack, where he reported every morning at five o’clock to fold the day’s delivery of El Paso Timeses. At that hour the only people awake in Silver City are the paper boys, Mr. Shadel the baker, the police (who are actually fast asleep in their patrol car), and the female boarders over at Millie’s, a Victorian structure on Hudson Street that was reputed, until its recent closing, to be the best whorehouse in New Mexico.

  Since Route 180, the main road through Silver City, runs from nowhere in the north to pretty much nowhere in the south, anyone stopping at 5:00 A.M. to ask directions from a paper boy was most likely looking for Millie’s. It was only two blocks from the paper shack, but a quirk of local geography made the town confusing to visitors at that hour of the morning. The marsh on which Silver City had been built provided an oasis on the edge of the desert. But every summer when it rained, flash floods would rush out of the Mogollon Mountains and rip down the middle of Main Street.

  Forced to abandon this misplaced thoroughfare, the town watched it metamorphose into something called the Big Ditch. The Ditch today is a canyon scraped down to bedrock sixty feet below those buildings that have yet to collapse into it. “For many years,” reported the local newspaper, “the Ditch has been the literal ‘jumping off place’ for petty thieves and miscreants who were running from the law, and many a wretched ‘wino’ has sought the privacy of its dark green shadows.” Millie presided over the eastern, less savory side of the chasm. In that direction lay Madame Brewer the witch’s house, the barrio, the dump, and the desert. Not that it was much better on the other side of the Ditch. Here too were Mexican adobes and desert scrub, although perched above them on a hill was the campus of Western New Mexico University. The only “good” part of town lay to the north in Silver Heights. But none of the characters in this story comes from that part of town.