Delta pool hall not unlike our slot palaces
Respectable young men didn't hang out in Fab's Domino Parlor. I did.
Most evenings, sooner or later, probably later, I'd make my obligatory visit to a weary Mississippi Delta gambling den out on Highway 61, about a mile north of the storied intersection where bluesman Robert Johnson supposedly swapped his soul for a little guitar proficiency. I have it on good authority that the devil, at the time, was actually in Fab's hustling nine ball.
The Delta was disproportionately populated with gambling devils and Fab's afforded them the luxuries of air conditioning, cold beer and pickled eggs floating in a jar of something as vile as your 10th-grade science experiment gone bad.
MISSPENT YOUTH
That was me, barely visible through the miasma of Fab's cigar smoke, a slouching no-account, a living monument to misspent youth, holding a dirty wad of bills and managing the bets for my highly skilled pool shooting buddy Alan Brown. We ran an almost legendary hustle, except we never quite mastered out the art of quitting while ahead.
Fab's served as a dingy, storefront contradiction to the official local attitude to gambling. Legislators could pass laws saying gamblers went to jail and ministers could preach that gamblers went to hell. Yet Fab's, and scores of places just like it, thrived. You just couldn't live in the Mississippi Delta and not conclude that human DNA comes hopelessly entangled with gambling genes.
Fab ran a sports book, rented time on his pool tables, took a house cut from poker. Schoolboys loved his pinball machines, which devoured an infinite number of coins, upping the odds on a single game, adding winning combinations, until one play could yield a hundred bucks.
DELAYING THE INEVITABLE
The phone would ring. Fab answered and yelled, ''Is Lance Hughes in the house?'' Lance, sitting six feet away, would roll his eyes. ``Lance ain't here, Mrs. Hughes. Hadn't seen him.''
The system Alan and I ran only enabled us to prolong the night, up the tension, delay the inevitable. Some nights, the potential of violence hung in the air. But we'd get caught up in something. I don't know -- it wasn't about winning -- until we were broke. All I ever profited from Fab's was access to enough twisted Mississippi characters to populate a Faulkner novel.
It was a grand place to misspend my earnings. But no one ever suggested that Fab's was an economic engine. No one called Fab's an industry.
Fab employed a rack boy (definition of boy being about 70 years old), paid off a few city cops, ordered takeout fried chicken, bought a new Caddy every year and circulated our lost wages in the local community. Take away the pickled eggs and in microcosm, Fab's was not much different than the slot palaces that voters are considering in Miami-Dade County.
Except Fab, unburdened by taxes, kept our losings in the local economy. The parimutuel casinos take money from locals and send half of it to Tallahassee. Otherwise, it's the same exercise on a grand scale. That's what I can't quite wrap my mind around in the South Florida slot debate. The notion that a zero-sum game equates new jobs. That taking money from one business and giving it to another grows the economy.
I lost money at Fab's that I might have otherwise spent at Abe's Barbeque. Fab got it. Abe didn't. If someone asked Abe if that pool hall down on Highway 61 qualified as a job-creating industry, Abe would say, ``Only if you think his pickled eggs beat my barbeque.''
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When the Tony G Poker News let me write an article on the online poker strategy and analyze it and the traditional face-to-face games of the different articles, I think some humor.
Do they not see me in the near future. Ladbrokes Poker diary in 1500 word article? Which compare the relative advantages and disadvantages - of the reality of poker games with more obvious bias?
It is strange that I before the end of the article in the diary of that omission. It stated: Finally, I used to use my favorite example, American pool tables and the difference between the British Billiards - different forms, different tactics, and a deep pocket, a big ball. Articles are sent to tens of thousands of online customers, and the rest of the actual article also published for all to see.
Of course, since then everything has changed, become easy poker network as a whole era of the great creative. Now, Ladbrokespoker.com manager did not care in a number of small, but with the fastest speed and I lifted the contract.
As you know, I really like to spend each night in online games. This unlike win a game and $ 50,000 in cash from Omaha
Faced with probability
In the analysis, my views on: bad games and bad players, like amateurs, like they can rely on luck to win Licensing Board. They will never figure out their own.
This, of course, is that when you and them to one-on-one contest get the idea. However, in any form of gambling, all the good are also likely to be defeated. If you can stand up well against the success of the adoption of the whole game, you should be the most fortunate people.
