466: Blackjack

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To hear what he found, plus dozens of other exclusive bonus episodes, and most importantly, to help us keep making the show, subscribe at thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. Okay, I really am stunned. That link is also in the show notes of this episode. Thanks. First floor. From WBEZ Chicago, this is This American Life. Okay, here we go. Blackjack $10 tables, $10 high limit room, which no one is in. Monday, late morning. This American Life producer Robin Semien and I are in a casino that will remain unnamed here on the radio because we did not have permission to record. I did not ask for permission due to the nature of our visit. Come on, let's just see over here. We stand by one of the blackjack tables, and Robin does a quick scan of the cards. What's the count on this table? Negative six. We were there to count cards, to play blackjack and count cards while we did it, which gives a player such a big advantage against the house that most casinos ask you to leave the table if they catch you doing it. And how did we end up here? Well, we've gotten a lesson the day before in how to count cards. We used to say that you could teach a piece of wood to play blackjack. You just have to be able to keep your wits about you when you're at the table and not make too many mistakes. We got our lesson from Andy Block, who played blackjack for what is possibly the most famous group of blackjack card counters, the so-called MIT blackjack team. The winnings inspired a bestselling book and a terrible Hollywood film called 21. These were real MIT students. Andy studied electrical engineering. There is no reliable way to know how much they won. They claim over $8 million between 1994 and 2000. After he quit the team, Andy put out an instructional DVD about how to count cards. He doesn't play much blackjack himself anymore. Once I got known as a part of the MIT blackjack team, it became hard to play and I would get kicked out of just about anywhere I tried to play. And sometimes I would take friends there. They just want to see me get kicked out of someplace. Play for a little bit. After, you know, 15 minutes, an hour, they'd come over and ask me to leave. Now, I don't know if I should assume that you've played blackjack or you know the rules, but if you haven't played or you don't know, here are the rules. Everybody at the table gets cards. You can ask for more cards if you want. The way that you do that is that you tell the dealer, hit me. You want your cards to add up as close to 21 as possible without going over. It's very simple. So simple that when you play, it feels winnable. And it seems like everybody you meet who plays blackjack has a system. Everyone thinks they can beat it. Yeah, I've heard a lot of crazy systems about blackjack. You know, the best myths are the ones that are based in fact. And it is a fact that you can beat blackjack. You can actually beat the casinos. And the idea that that it's possible to beat the casino is what made blackjack so popular. I think this is what makes blackjack so special, is that you think you can beat it. But, of course, as soon as you start to think you can beat it, it gets you into trouble. Here's how diabolical blackjack is. Unlike most casino games, if you play blackjack correctly, the casino barely has an edge. The odds are very close to 50-50. You win almost half the time. So the dream of winning is right there in front of you, just out of reach. And if you did have a system that could beat blackjack, imagine what that would mean. It's like the money is just sitting there in casinos everywhere, all over the world, huge stacks of chips and hundred-dollar bills waiting for you to take them home. No job, bad economy. If blackjack is beatable, your problems are solved. Today on our program, we watch people run after that dream, including some fine, upright, God-fearing people, including Robin and me. Stay with us and good luck with that ace. Okay, so when Andy Block says that you can beat the casinos, he is talking specifically about counting cards to change the odds. The mathematics of counting cards was nailed down in the 1950s and 60s. There is a way to count cards that definitively gives you an edge over the house. And you don't need to be a rain man or have a photographic memory to pull this off. A normal person can do it. So Robin and I decided that we wanted to learn. And I could pretend right now that there was a high-minded journalistic reason for this. You know, we wouldn't really understand what blackjack is all about if we didn't dive in ourselves. That would be a lie. We'd both heard of card counting. We wanted to try for the same reasons that anybody does. We thought it would be so awesome to beat blackjack. And the thought that we would be doing it during our jobs, that we would be in a casino when the rest of the staff was back at the office editing and writing. Amazing. So I can tell you what we learned in like two minutes. Here is how card counting works. Please remember this public radio station if it makes you rich. The basic idea is, for lots of reasons that we don't need to get into here, 10s and aces are to your advantage as a blackjack player. So as the cards are dealt, what you want to know is, are there lots of 10s and aces left in the deck for you to get? And by 10s, I should say I just don't mean like the 10 of hearts and the 10 of spades and all that. But I mean like the face cards that add 10 to your hand when you play blackjack. Okay, so stay with me. You want 10s and aces, and you count. And this is important. You're not going to keep track of the position of every single card. You're not memorizing the deck. That would be insane. They invented something that is way, way easier than that. You just keep a running tally, a very rough one, of 10s and aces. You start your tally at zero. When a 10 or an ace is dealt, you subtract one from the tally. When a low card comes out, you add one. That's it. That's the whole thing. The running tally, that one number, that's all you need to know. Again, here's Andy Block. It's not a complicated thing. You don't need a great memory. You don't need to know how many Queens are left in the deck. You just need to know that one number. And when that one number, when you're running tally, gets up to seven or eight or nine, it means that there are lots of aces and 10s left in the deck. So it's good for you, right? It's really, really good for you. And that is the time that you want to start to bet big. Like, your bet should jump up to five times what it was, Andy says. All you have to do is keep your running tally. And Andy demonstrated here. He dealt cards into a pile to demonstrate how that works. So minus one, zero, plus one, plus two, plus one, plus two, plus three, plus two. Then it was time for Robin and I to try this. Note that the pace changes just a little. Plus two. Plus two, it was a three. Plus one. Plus one. Zero. Minus one. Plus one. Plus one. You know, I'm getting confused over which one gets the plus and which gets the minus. You're sad when 10s and aces come out, especially when you don't get them. You're sad when 10s and aces come out, which is why they get subtracted. There we go. That helps. We tried a few more times. Andy would deal. Robin and I would keep the count in our heads. At the end, he would ask us the count. OK, what you got? Minus five. Negative two. Minus three. Finally, on our fourth try, Andy dealt the cards. We kept the count in our heads. And at the end, Negative eight. That's what I have, too. All right, you guys both win. Negative eight. Shut up. Well done. My heart's racing a little bit. You're ready to hit the tables. And so the next day, we headed to Atlantic City. We headed to the casino to hit the tables and try our techniques at the lowest stakes tables possible. We basically went to the kiddie pool. We skied the bunny hill. Did we win? Did the casino notice and send swarms of security guards with walkie-talkies to kind of ask us to They'd come home with amazing stories of winning thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, on the perfectly laid bet, bragging rights all around. In order to convince the casinos that they were reckless high-rollers and not card counters, they'd often wear costumes and take on personas, everything from golf pro to what one team member called gay art collector. In this scene from the documentary, you see Colin dressed as a mechanic in a jumpsuit and baseball cap. Ben, meanwhile, has gone full-on goth, white face paint, black lipstick, with black outfit and even black fingernails. But they never forgot this was a business, and business was good. To give you a sense of just how good, at the height of their team in 2007, Ben and Colin were rotating as many as 30 trained blackjack players through their transcontinental circuit. And remember, they would hand each member of the flock tens of thousands, sometimes as much as $80,000, and because you can't transfer money like that through, say, an ATM, the players carried this cash in envelopes, stuffed in their pockets. At the end of each trip, the members would return to Ben and Colin and report back their hours and winnings or losses. This was all done on the honor system. You can see why finding trustworthy, church-going collaborators was so important. When the whole team achieved a certain goal, $100,000 in winnings, they'd split the profits. And every quarter, Ben and Colin would host a team meeting at one of their houses in Seattle. Here's Colin at the big meeting in 2008. You know, it's been another good quarter. Any guesses on how much we took from casinos in 2007? $900,000? $1.2, $1 million, something like that. $1.5. Boom! Oh, you got it. $1.58 million taken out of casinos this year. I'm excited to take more money from casinos next year. So for those of you that hate casinos, we're doing our part. Did you catch that last part? If you hate casinos. Even after all the talk of it being a business and not gambling, there was still this nagging sense that what they were doing was somehow not part of the Christian mission. They were bleeding the casinos of evil money, doing their part. But occasionally, some players began to feel there was something wrong with what they were doing. Take Mike. He had joined the team with the most Christian of all intentions. He used to be a youth pastor. His crisis of faith began with the ninth commandment, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Weren't all these costumes and fake biographies bearing false witness? The high rollers are never mid-20 white kids. Never. And they're going to say, so what's your story, man? What do you do? Well, what do I say at that point? Well, in the beginning of the team, I lied. I used to create crazy stories because I thought it was fun. I would, I told at Hard Rock, I remember, they said, so hey, what's your deal? I was like, oh, I work for Fox. I'm a, I'm a, I'm an animal agent. I actually, I, I do agent stuff for animals and movies. Maybe you've seen Bart the Bear in Legend of the Falls. I do stuff like that. So I'm telling them this story and the kid next to me playing, he says, no way. I work for Fox too. And he starts describing the, the offices and asking which building I work out of. And I thought, are you kidding me? The one time I say something off the top of my head, the guy sitting next to me works for Fox. Do you think that was some divine intervention there? It probably was. Maybe God saying, shut up. Just tell them the truth. I felt guilty right after I said that it was wrong. And, and it was a sin to lie to them. And there were other deceptions too. One involved playing in pairs. One person would count cards at the table. Then they'd signal another teammate across the room to join the game and start betting big when the count favored the players. So you had to have a signal that looked like it wasn't a signal at all. Oh, crossing of the arms. Yeah. It's really subtle. So we would cross our arms if it was a good count and we would leave our arms open if, if it wasn't a high enough count. This is Shirley, not her real name, by the way. Shirley used this tactic a lot. Among card counters, stepping up to the table right when it's hot is so well known that it has a name. Wonging, from a famous counter who's Stanford Wong. There was this one time for Shirley, the most nerve wracking bet of her life, that involved this exact tactic. I was at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I was playing at a table and I had just finished. And there was actually another guy on the team who was playing at the same pit across from me. And he gave me the sign to, to what we call Wong in. It means you go over and you go to the table because the count is good. The table's hot. So Shirley walked up to the table and put down her bet. A massive bet. And then another. And another. It was phenomenal because we kept winning and winning. There is layers of people behind us. We've got security around us. It's so intense. So I get two hands of 20. I got four tens, basically, which you think would be a great hand. The dealer pulls up a six. That means I have to split my tens. Okay, a quick explanation for those of you who don't play. In blackjack, you're trying to get close to 21. Two tens add up to 20, so that's a really good hand. Splitting tens is crazy. What they call a deviation. And Shirley has just done it. Twice. But it's not crazy if you happen to know that the deck is momentarily packed with high cards and that the dealer probably would bust. So I split my tens and then I put another two grand on the other ten. And people are just like, what's she doing? Whoa. I mean, there's like comments from the crowd. I mean, people. It's so much adrenaline when you're doing something that is completely against the blackjack book, but it's exactly what you're supposed to be doing. It's the right deviation and you know you're going to kill it and win. Oh, my goodness. It was crazy. I ended up with twenty two thousand dollars on that one hand by the time it was over. It was insane because I kept getting tens and I kept splitting them. And I'm super excited, but nervous at the same time, hoping that this dealer busts out, which he's supposed to do. And the dealer didn't bust. Even though the dealer didn't bust as he was supposed to, it didn't matter. Splitting those tens and making such massive bets gave her away to security. It's a red flag when you've got 20 and you're splitting it. They know that something's going on and they can't catch on to it while you're doing your hand that quickly and make it all stop. But no. And I never played at the Venetian after that. For some of the other card counters, they faced a different crisis of faith. The commandment about stealing. Remember, you're carrying around tens of thousands of dollars in your pocket and winning tens of thousands more, and nobody knows how much you've won or lost except you. Here's another team member named Dusty. After my very first trip, I had gone with this guy and in California, we're like doing our results after we got home and like totaling up our cash. I'm like, man, I'm off by exactly ten thousand dollars. That's weird. I must be missing 10 grand. And he's like, no, what's the likelihood that you just dropped ten thousand dollars somewhere? You probably just miscounted one of your results. So turn one of your losses, you know, into just correct the miscalculation, which you're like is horrible. That's like falsifying what happened. But this guy's been on the team longer than me. He knows better than me. I'm like, uh, OK, I guess that makes sense. Lo and behold, months later, my niece pulls a couch cushion off of this couch and there it is, ten thousand dollars. Which means he was faced with a choice. Keep the money or confess the mistake. Dusty confessed, but you can see how easy it would be to steal. And they all knew it. In time, their trust in each other began to fray and suspicions that some of the members were stealing grew. One player lost big one night and phoned a lot of the other players. He was hysterical that he had cost the team so much. But their reaction? That he'd probably hadn't lost, but was stealing. Ben, the founder of the group, told me about one time when a team member claimed that he'd never even contemplated stealing. That struck Ben as unusual. And he immediately began suspecting that player of stealing. Do you think some of the members of your team did steal money? Yeah. I know people on this team stole money. In fact, to be really honest, one of the decisions I made very recently was to go back to the founding members of the team before our team took off. And I admitted to them that I stole money from them. Oh, wow. Whoops. Yeah. Ben, how much did you steal? $8,000, I think. And did you pay it back? Yeah, I paid it back. The money was stolen from me for my car and I had the choice of whether to report it or not. And at the time, I made a very quick decision and I decided that our family couldn't afford it and I just, I fudged Watch out. It's weird, like, I'm looking at these two cards, and I'm like, seven plus five, that's my hand. What's seven plus five? What does that mean? Like, I can't remember what the basic... Yeah, I just can't remember. And then as soon as that happens, everybody at the table starts telling you, Oh, you have a 12. Here's what you're supposed to do. Like, I love how everybody's just jumping in. Oh, yeah, they're all there for me. It was a whole team of guys ready to tell me how to play. My hand's totally comfortable. Yeah. We made mistakes. Our biggest mistake, I think, was that the count at the table we were at was mostly negative. It was mostly against us for most of the time that we sat there. I realized later that Andy would have gotten up and found a different table. The real pros switch tables a lot. But we held our own. And at the end of two hours, we were in a great situation. The count was seven, and there were two decks left to deal. And if you're not totally following this, all you need to know is that was good. That was good for us. It meant lots of good cards were coming. So we boosted our bets, just like you're supposed to, from the minimum bet at this casino, which was $10 a bet. I bet $50. Robin bet $30. Cards were dealt. I got a pair of 10s. She got a pair of 10s. These are, by the way, great hands. You're trying to make 21, and we each had 20. The dealer had one card down, and the card that was showing was a five, one of the worst possible hands for the dealer. Robin and I talked about what happened next on the bus ride home. And then the dealer ended up dealing herself 21. Yeah. She flipped her whole card. It was also a five. So then she had 10. And then she dealt herself another card, and it was an ace. 21. We should have split our 10s. You would have gotten that ace. Okay, non-blackjack people, splitting 10s is something that nobody would ever do except a card counter. It's what gets the woman kicked out of the casino in Jack Hitz story. At Atlantic City, they don't kick you out. But if they spot you counting cards, they start shuffling the deck after every hand, or they come over and tell you that you can only bet the minimum bet at the table, which is basically telling you, go away. But once Robin brought up this idea that we should have split our 10s, it was hard to let it go. I would have gotten the ace. Yeah. It would have stopped her from getting the ace. We would have made all sorts of extra money. And then they would have kicked us out for being so good. That's all I wanted. To get kicked out for being good. Yeah. Instead, we walked out in shame. Instead, we just sucked. We bet high when the count was good, just like you're supposed to, and dumb luck made us lose anyway. Which is part of the game. The dealer got 21, which beat our 20. We made big bets and then lost one more hand after that and walked away down. Total losses. This is my money, by the way. And it's a lot. $348 in two hours. First time out. I just, I feel like we could have done better. I think we should come back next week. Yeah, me too. We've both been practicing. Back to, here is today, gone tomorrow. Now we have this story of somebody who thought that she knew how to play blackjack. She played for years. She didn't count cards, but she says that she knew the basic strategy cold. We've changed her name to protect her privacy. Sarah Koenig tells what happened. One day in 2006, a woman I'm going to call Angie Bachman went to the Caesars Indiana casino and began to lose. She played blackjack. That was always her game. But on this night, when she ran out of her own money, the casino offered her what are called counter checks, like a loan from the casino that you're supposed to pay back. She signed a paper for $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, six checks for a total of $125,000. This is not a happy gambling story, so you know what happens next. She can't pay back the money, any of it. So the casino takes her to court, says Angie Bachman owes us $125,000, and not only that, we're suing her for damages, tripling that amount, half a million dollars in all. This isn't unusual that casinos go after debtors like Bachman in court. What is somewhat unusual is what happened next. Bachman hired a lawyer named Terry Knofziger who argued that not only did she not owe the casino money, but they owed her money. I put to Knofziger the question you might be having at this very moment. Wait, what? Why is she not liable? It seems like if you go to a casino, that's like, you know what you're doing. What's your best one-sentence argument for why it is that you believe she shouldn't be held responsible? Because at the time of those losses, she has passed the point of no return to where she has no control over what she's doing, comma, and the casinos know it and take advantage of it. They knew she was a compulsive gambler. They knew she didn't have control. Now, here's the difficult thing. A lot of people wouldn't believe me, you know. I've even had friends of mine who, it took a while to convince them that I was really telling the truth, that this was really what was happening. I heard about this case from New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg. It's in his new book called The Power of Habit, which is about how habits form in our brains and also about how companies tap into those habits to get us to spend money. In Bachman's case, money she didn't have. Duhigg also calls her Angie Bachman in his book, by the way. Bachman's lawsuit made news, and some of the reaction was backlash. Nasty online comments lamented the ever-increasing abrogation of personal responsibility. One person wrote, What's next, suing supermarkets because you eat too much? And another, not unless Lamborghini pays my speeding tickets. And another, can I sue Budweiser for getting me drunk? I have to say, the case initially struck me as flimsy too. And when Knopfziger first heard about gambling addiction, he didn't buy it either. Years earlier, he'd gotten a call from a guy named David Williams. Williams had lost everything, including his house, playing slots on a local riverboat casino. He'd told Knopfziger he'd run red lights driving to the riverboat so he could be there the second the casino opened, that he'd sat at the same slot machine for 20 hours straight. With regard to David Williams, when he came in, he told me the story, and I was incredulous. So I went down to the office that Saturday, I told you, and I read about compulsive gambling, and I read DSM-4, and I read some of the other scientific literature that was online, and I thought, This guy, I think he's telling the truth. And everything I learned from there on confirmed to me that David Williams was telling the truth. It seemed clear to me that the casino had to know that he was a compulsive gambler and that he was one of their favorites, and they would put him up at night in the fancy suites and give him drinks and meals and all these things. So I felt like they were taking advantage of him, and I thought the evidence supported that, and we filed a lawsuit. The lawsuit didn't work. It was rejected in federal court. But afterwards, Nofsinger started to get phone calls from Arizona, Southern California, Seattle, Mississippi, Massachusetts, all gamblers with similar stories. After a while, he started keeping track. He's got a list now with about 40 names on it. He told every one of these callers the same thing. I believe you, but I can't help you. Until Bachman. Since she was already being sued by the casino, he thought maybe his counter-argument could get traction in the courts this time. He hoped to make visible the very thing he believes the rest of us don't see or understand. The lengths to which casinos go to keep gamblers playing, including addicted gamblers. His argument boiled down to this. Caesars had a duty not to protect Mrs. Bachman from herself, from her own gambling habits, but to protect Mrs. Bachman from itself, from Caesars. When her gambling started, Bachman was a housewife in Iowa, the mother of three girls. She started playing blackjack, first pretty small amounts, just once a week or so. Soon enough, she was hooked, doing all the typical things addicted gamblers do. Chasing losses, borrowing money from her mother to pay her debts. Then at the very end of 2001, she filed for bankruptcy. She says she'd written $20,000 worth of checks to the Harrah's casino in Council Bluffs, and the checks had bounced. Bachman says Harrah's knew about the bankruptcy, that even the dealers there knew about the bankruptcy. She remembers having conversations with them about her bankruptcy. Nevertheless, the casino welcomed her back. What they told me at that point was, it's fine that you continue to come in. It's fine that you play. You know that you can't write a check here. We won't allow you to write checks, but go ahead and continue to come back. Just bring cash. Just bring cash. So she did. Then in 2004 Wait, what? Yeah. Yeah. If you get that money and then you pay us, then you can go to the Kentucky Derby. If this level of cheerful relentlessness sounds far-fetched, well, here's a voicemail from Caesars Indiana, the same casino she owed $125,000 to. It's from Bachman's answering machine. This is Indiana. Just wanted to reach out, give you a quick call. We're a few weeks away from from Derby and just want to confirm that you guys are still going to be joining us up here and just set up any type of golf arrangements or anything like that. The Kentucky Derby was in May. Bachmann had been wiped out, remember, back in March. Looking back at it all, she knows she did this to herself, that she's responsible. But Bachmann also thinks the casinos knew what she was doing better than she did, that they sat back and watched it happen. That's why she sued. Because of the terms of the settlement Bachmann and Caesars eventually worked out, the company wasn't at liberty to talk about the details of her case. In a statement, a spokesperson from Caesars Entertainment wrote, quote, there are many specific points we would contest, but we are unable to do so at this point. The spokesperson pointed out that the conversations Bachmann says she had with casino employees, her dealings with staff, they're all unverified, which is true. But I did talk to several other people, former casino employees and one veteran gambler, who all said that most of the interactions Bachmann says she had with the casino are plausible and pretty typical. The Caesars statement went on to say that their marketing isn't predatory. They're just doing what any smart company does. Quote, we look for ways to attract customers and we make efforts to maintain them as loyal customers. When our customers change their established patterns, we try to understand why and encourage them to return. That's no different than a hotel chain, an airline or a dry cleaner, unquote. Gary Loveman is the CEO and president of Caesars Entertainment. Loveman was a Harvard professor who came to the company to design and implement the marketing strategies targeting customers through the total rewards cards I mentioned earlier, which changed the industry. Last fall, Loveman talked to our colleagues at Planet Money for a different story about marketing. But he also addressed this problem of addicted gamblers. He was categorical. He said the company does not want them as customers. We do not wish to be in the business of serving addicted gamblers. I have 75,000 people that work with me who go home to their families and kids like I do. None of them want to go home thinking that they've just helped an addicted gambler do further harm to themselves or their families. So our objective is to try to identify addicted gamblers as best we can and encourage them to seek treatment and help. And to the degree they're willing to identify themselves as addicted or troubled gamblers, not serve them in any fashion, not market to them, not lend them money, and where the law allows, not permit them in the casino. Well, maybe. This is Christian Kunder. For about six years, he worked at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, both before and after it was taken over by Harris. Did you ever serve gamblers that you knew personally, like you knew or suspected that they were addicted? Yes. You did? Yes. There's a lot of people that come through that are obvious, obvious. I've seen players gambling and I go home, come to work the next night. They're still there in their same clothes. They're in the same seat. And no one's saying anything to them? Absolutely not. Kunder's title was assistant casino manager, what's more commonly known in casinos as a pit boss. At Caesars, he typically worked the high limit room. Depending on the night, he was in charge of anywhere from 30 to 100 dealers. I asked him about Loveman's quote. So when he says we do everything we can to identify our objective is to try to identify addicted gamblers as best we can and encourage them to seek treatment and help. That's not true? Not one bit. Not the slightest part. In no way. The only time they'll approach a player is if they're suicidal or something like that. Kunder says the way it was supposed to work was that a designated person called a casino ambassador would respond to any gamblers showing a potential sign of addiction. So if a dealer or a floor person heard someone say, how am I going to feed my kids? Or I just lost my house. They were supposed to call over the ambassador who would then give the player some addiction literature. Kunder remembers a pamphlet called When the Fun Stops and a phone number to call. But in practice, Kunder says, it didn't happen. The only exception, he said, was if someone was suicidal. Until they come to us. You can come in every day and there's really, I could go to my VP and say, listen, this guy's a degenerate. I know he's got a problem. It's not for us to get involved in. What if the guy doesn't have a problem and you're assuming and he just has a ton of money? You're not going to go and insult somebody like that. Those are people who, a lot of those guys, can have you fired that next morning. So, I mean, nobody's going to take that chance. And anyway, there's no guarantee that a word of concern would make any difference. The former host at the Isle of Capri in Iowa told me things work differently at his casino. A handful of times, he did try, gently, to help addicts, to talk to them about it. Each time, he said, it was received very badly. Imagine, he said, going up to a drunk in a bar and suggesting he ought to get himself to an AA meeting. It's not going to go over well. Still, in Christian Kunder's mind, there's one case that shows how flagrantly the casino ignores the policy that Loveman claims to live by. In 2007, Kunder witnessed the most spectacular losing streak on record, the case of Omaha businessman Terrence Watanabe. Watanabe lost about $200 million in a year-long binge. Until he collapsed into debt, he was the company's most valuable player. Kunder says a picture of Watanabe hung in the serving area of the bar to make sure every employee knew who he was. Kunder was one of Watanabe's handlers at Caesars. Nevada gaming states that you have to be sober to gamble. You can't be intoxicated. It's the casino's responsibility to escort you out if you're impaired in any way. Well, I mean, we would, the guy would fall asleep in the middle of a blackjack hand and we would just leave him sit there and wait for him to wake up. The fact that we let him play while he was completely intoxicated and obviously on drugs, I mean, that, that's just, I mean, that was just, that's just plain taking advantage of people. And, you know, I'm one of the guilty parties, but, you know, my hands were tied as well as far as, you know, you're not going to tell the most valuable, the biggest player in the company, say, hey, listen, you know, why don't you call it a night? I ran all this by Caesars Entertainment, the supposed difference between their policy on paper and what actually happens on the casino floor, the Watanabe case. In response, a spokesman wrote to me that diagnosing problem gambling is extremely difficult, even for trained clinicians, and that, quote, we take responsible gaming seriously and train our customer-facing employees to listen to things that customers say that raise concerns about their ability to gamble responsibly. Unquote. The company also noted that Caesars was the first to have a national self-exclusion program that allows customers to ban themselves from Caesars casinos. And it's true, Bachmann did not ban herself from any casino. If you're not sold by now on the idea that the casino is partly to blame for Bachmann's losses, that Caesars wronged Bachmann, in the lawsuit's words, quote, by enticing her to gamble, even though it knew that she did not have the capabilities to resist such enticements, unquote. Maybe two researchers at Southern Illinois University, Reza Habib and Mark Dixon, can at least persuade you that Bachmann made irrational choices about gambling, not because she's an idiot, but because neurons in the reward-seeking part of her brain were overriding her rational decision-making. Reza Habib is a neuroscientist, and so, of course, does not like to anthropomorphize the brain. But I don't mind saying it. Her wiring had turned against her. Habib's colleague, Mark Dixon, is a behavioral psychologist. His lab at Southern Illinois is set up like a casino. He's got slots, a roulette table, a blackjack table, craps table. It looks like a casino. Really? Maybe not a five-star casino, but maybe a two-star casino on the interstate somewhere. Habib and especially Dixon have spent a long time studying what's called the near-miss effect. In slot machines, a near-miss is just what it sounds like. It's when, say, two cherries line up on the payoff line and then the third is about to come but stops just short or just past the payoff line. It's like you almost won, which, of course, in a game of chance like slots is impossible. The results are random. Despite that, gamblers in Dixon's lab will inevitably say that the near-misses are closer to a win than a loss, that they like them more than a loss. That reaction is what Dixon calls maladaptive. Because a loss is a loss is a loss. In 2006, Dixon teamed up with Habib to see if they could figure out what was happening to people neurologically when they saw near-misses. They scanned the brains of 22 gamblers, 11 addicted or what they called pathological gamblers, The country has been under an internet blackout. We hear from 12 people who managed to get messages out. A guy running a pizza shop, a bodybuilder making self-help videos in the park, a woman whose boyfriend loves the Iranian regime and she does not. Living through war and a blackout. Next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station. Support for This American Life comes from Charles Schwab, with their original podcast Choiceology, hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes, and more about why people do the things they do. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash podcast, or wherever you listen.