Postscript: Is the game completely honest? I can only answer that in regard to an episode during my Marathon Monday sixteen-hour session at the Sahara. Counting the spots on one of my tickets, I found I had a 6-out-of-8, an $1,100 winner. When I handed in my ticket, the manager of the Keno table came over to me and informed me that my ticket was mismarked and incorrect, and that they only pay on the original ticket, which was locked away during the game. Of course I was ready for a fight, but before I could say anything he pointed to my original ticket, which had 7-out-of-8, a $2,200 winner.

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• Play Keno At Casinos Part2 (0)
• Play Keno At Casinos (0)

How could I have been so blind as to ignore Keno all these years? A Keno regular tipped me off that the 8-spot was the best bet for the money. So I went over to the Keno counter, where games go on every fifteen minutes or so, and bet twenty-five 8-spot games at a buck each. When the game was over, to my delight 1 found that I had won $260 on my investment of twenty-five bucks.
I pocketed the windfall and decided then and there that on my next Vegas visit I would play Keno exclusively.

Ten days later I returned to Las Vegas, and the Sahara.
Once in my room, I unpacked my working tools: an accountant's yellow pad, a ruler, and a fine-line accountant's pen that I had purchased especially for the trip. Off to the Keno Lounge, where I zeroed in on the trash cans toward the back, and fished out all the discarded cover sheets from the previously played games. I sorted them out, amassing a complete set of the past 26 games.
Now 1 was ready.

I set to work on the tedious job of tracking the winning numbers of all 26 games on my yellow-lined accountant's pad. Thirty minutes later I had it all down. I went back to the trash can to retrieve and tally the games played since.
Now I had all the information I needed. It was time to play Keno for keeps. If I was serious in my endeavor, it meant that I should play Keno on steady a basis. I couldn't just play a couple cards at a time.

I played one hundred 8-spot games at a buck a game, every game. I played and I tallied. And I played and I tallied. And I played and I tallied. For sixteen straight hours, nonstop, I played the game and then tallied it onto my sheet. To keep my wits about me, I eschewed alcohol and lived solely on coffee frosteds and tomato juice, which, from time-to-time necessitated rapid, punctuated trips to the nearest men's room to run some water through my lingam.

When the smoke cleared sixteen hours and thousands of games later, did I ever get an eight-out-of-eight and make that $25,000 windfall?
The answer is no.
Did I win or did I lose during my Keno marathon? Again, the answer is no to both questions. Okay, let me explain.

Keno is like a greased pig—you almost have it, but, dammit, the oily porker always slips out of your clutches. There were times during the sixteen-hour marathon when I was two or three thousand ahead, only to hit a dry spell where everything evened out, and even dipped into the minus column. During my 16-hour marathon I had a 7-out-of-8 in the first ten numbers picked, only to be zeroed out in the next ten numbers. All I needed was one number out of the second ten, just one more goddam number, but it never did show up.
The Keno writers worked on six-hour shifts, six hours on and twelve off. As I was on a sixteen-hour marathon, just before I was ready to call it a day, the first shift returned. "Oh, I see you're back," commented a Keno writer as he marked up my tickets.
"I never left," I told him.

He peered at me intently for a moment, then muttered, "Buddy, you're bulletproof."
When, bowing to sheer exhaustion, I packed it in at the end of the sixteen-hour marathon session, I was about $600 ahead—a $600 profit for playing almost 15,000 games! Without a doubt, it was the hardest $600 I ever made, gambling or otherwise. I blindly stumbled out of the Keno Lounge down the hall to my hotel room. Once in my room, I was afraid to take a bath in my zombie-like condition,- I feared I'd drown in the tub! Instead I staggered into the shower. Once under the soothing warm water I closed my eyes—just for a second—and fell asleep standing up! I only know this because as I slumped against the shower wall I was jarred awake by my own snoring! Needless to add, I was forever cured from playing Keno.

• Play Keno At Casinos (0)
• Play Keno At Casinos Part3 (0)

In most casinos today Keno is an electronic, computer-fed game. Twenty numbers out of a pool of eighty are zapped with machine-gun rapidity onto huge electronic screens on the sides of the casino.

Keno wasn't always played this way. Up until the 1990s it was a manually operated game, with the eighty numbered ping-pong balls in a transparent fishbowl-shaped container. Two rabbit-ear-shaped transparent tubes stuck out on top, and ten balls were air-blown into each. The whole operation was up front and visible to all the players in the Keno Lounge. No mysterious numbers shooting out of the blue onto electronic wall boards.

It was during the late 70s that I got a bug up my ass to investigate this oddball casino game that offered a $25,000 payoff for a buck investment. At the tail-end of a flying weekend, I had lots of time to spare before my flight home. Plunking myself down in the Sahara's Keno Lounge, mostly as a time-killer, I reached over to the nearest trash can and fished out the cover sheets of the last dozen or so games. (See illustration.)
I tallied all the winning numbers, game-by-game, curious to see if there was any pattern to the drawn numbers. As soon as I finished the tally, I ordered a bottle of beer and examined what I had.

What I saw before me really got my attention. Some Keno numbers repeated regularly, while other numbers never came up at all! Now I was interested. I went back to the trash can and tallied in the four games that were played while I was doing my paperwork, which brought me up-to-date.

Actually I had some advance knowledge of the potential of Keno. Once, years ago, when a friend's son was too young to enter a Las Vegas casino, he sat in the lobby, spending his time keeping track of the Keno board above the hotel registration desk. When his father came by, the son mentioned to him that certain numbers were repeating. The father invested $22.50 in variations of the numbers. Not one came up on the next game. Not discouraged he repeated the bets. The second time around, the 12-year-old won $2,500.

• Play Keno At Casinos Part2 (0)
• Play Keno At Casinos Part3 (0)

Before the proliferation of casinos, except for the occasional church "Las Vegas Night," Bingo was the only game in town where you could legally gamble for money. Today, Bingo in the casinos is small potatoes compared to the slot machines and table games, yet years ago in some locales, Bingo was a very lucrative enterprise. Even Steve Wynn had his beginnings running Bingo games in Maryland.

Today, outside of casinos, the game is still a small-time operation, run by church and civic organizations. But not so when "The Boys" decide to put their collective beefy toes inside the church's Bingo Hall door.
Such was the case, according to the May 14, 1998 Catholic News, when the Staten Island, New York Vice Squad stormed into St. Christopher parochial school and arrested five people for book-making. The bookies had already arranged a staggering $16,000 in illegal side bets from just one hundred or so players!

"I'm so glad it happened," the Catholic weekly quoted Monsignor Kenneth A. Gerathy, the pastor of the parochial school. "We've been trying to stop this for some time."
Maybe the Monsignor was glad it happened but, according to Gersh Kuntzman in his following Sunday's column in the New York Post, almost nobody else in the Bingo Hall was.
"Tell the bookies we miss them," said Mary Owens, a regular at the Sunday and Monday games at St. Christopher's. "It's boring without them."

According to the columnist, Ms. Owen's sentiments were echoed by most of the senior citizens at the first post-bust Bingo session. It was, in fact, the parish that had tipped off the cops in the first place—that precipitated the Vice Squad raid at the parochial school.
Why?

The good Fathers had good reasons why. As the New York Post put it, "There was just too much money being made by the bookies, and too little taken in by the church." But all that will be rectified. "The church is now planning to be its own bookie, hoping to accept 'line' bets if the state and city give it a permit."
Bingo is far from the best bang for your buck in the casino, but it can be a relaxing way to pass an occasional lazy afternoon playing the game, so go to it, pal, and I hope you have a bonanza of Bingos.

• Lotto – Powerball-oney Part2 (0)
• Lotto – Powerball-oney (0)
• Lotto – One Man (0)

My no-cost Lotto windfalls were all thanks to my sharp eye. I've always made it a point to pick up any lottery tickets (without heel marks) that I spot on the sidewalks of Manhattan. You'd be amazed by how many "live" tickets I've found through the years-they number in the dozens. Sadly, most of the "live" tickets I've found have been as good as dead-losers. Once I found a batch of ten tickets, neatly tacked together with a paper clip. Not a winner in the lot! Through the years, seven of the winning tickets I've found have been the instant kind, the scratch-offs. The games were so complicated and instructions so unclear that the buyers had discarded the winning tickets, not realizing they had won.

I found my big winner, the $1300 ticket, on Fifth Avenue in front of the New York Public Library. It was Sunday and my wife was displaying her artwork near the corner of 40th Street. Needing a pick-me-up, she asked me to please go get her a Coke from the hot dog vendor on 42nd Street. Halfway down the block I spied a lone Lotto ticket and picked it up. It was for Lotto Forty, a game that has since been discontinued in New York, and it was to be run the next day. The next morning, sitting in the back of a bus, I suddenly remembered that I had that Lotto Forty ticket in my pocket. I opened my copy of the Daily News.
Incredulously, I looked at the numbers and I looked at the ticket. Whoever had bought it had correctly picked five out of six of the winning numbers! The purchaser had only missed the sixth–the jackpot number–by one digit (the sixth number picked was 23, it should have been 24).

The next day I went to the lottery headquarters in the World Trade Center and picked up a check from them for $1 300. While I was there, a most happy feller with a smile from ear to ear bounced in with a winning ticket worth $5000 from New York's daily numbers game. His smile disappeared when they ran his name through the computer and found that he was a tax delinquent to the tune of $3600, which they promptly deducted from his winnings. Having witnessed this, I was able to alert one of the warehouse packers who had hit for a nice few thousand. He prudently sent his cousin to collect the winnings.

• Lotto – Powerball-oney Part2 (0)
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One store owner in New Castle, Delaware, chose to close rather than deal with the endless line that stretched out the door of his little shop. He had to call the police to handle the mob of customers who were furious at having to leave empty-handed after waiting four hours to put down their bets.

When the drawing finally took place on Wednesday, May 20, 1998, there was just one 195 million dollar winner, a ticket sold at the Lakeside Country Store in Walworth County, Wisconsin. Interestingly, the previous Powerball record jackpot was $111.2 million, it was also sold in Wisconsin.

The ballyhooed $195-million jackpot figure is a deception. The $195 million is paid out to the tune of about $8 million a year for twenty-five years. The slick operators deposit just enough money in a bank to throw off $8 million yearly in interest. At the end of twenty-five years they withdraw the whole amount, so the $ 195-million jackpot didn't cost them a penny!
If the winner opts for a cash payment—which the winner did— the loudly touted $195 million suddenly shrinks to $104 million. After taxes, the winner netted $68 million. Not an inconsequential sum, to be sure, but a long distance from the heralded $195 million.
As for the tens of thousands from New York and New Jersey who stampeded into Connecticut and waited on long lines for hours on end, eager to pump their many millions of dollars into the Powerball machines, all they got for their money was the shaft.
Will this discourage them? Not likely.

• Lotto – Powerball-oney (0)
• Lotto – One Man (0)
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As piss-poor a bet as Lotto is, Powerball—played in twenty states and the District of Columbia—makes Lotto look good. Both are rip-offs, stealing money from the people who can least afford to lose it. With Lotto you have at least a wisp of a fighting chance with "only" 13 million-to-1 odds against you.

Powerball can well afford to dangle a $195-million jackpot in front of foolish players (the jackpot in one instance). Why not? The citizens have enriched the Powerball operators by buying more than a billion dollars in losing tickets prior to the drawing!
What makes Powerball a classic con game is the way it's set up. First, the player has to pick the correct five numbers from a pool of forty-nine numbers. Even if he nails the five, he still doesn't win the jackpot.

To win the multi-million-dollar jackpot he also has to pick the Powerball number—a sixth number from a separate set of forty-two numbers—which brings the odds of winning up to an astronomical 80,100,000-to-l.

The evil genius who thought up this game is a prime candidate for being roasted in the eternal fires of Hell alongside of Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and the Boston Strangler. The Pearly Gates of Heaven are forever closed to the inventor of Powerball.
The mind-boggling multi-million dollar jackpots ignited Powerball fever in the Northeastern states. Tiny Rhode Island once sold more than a million tickets for a single drawing—one ticket for every man, woman, and child in the state! Washington, DG. even outdid Rhode Island,- there they sold 1,700,000 tickets for a single drawing—two tickets for every resident of the District of Columbia!

New York and New Jersey players really went wild. With Connecticut being the closest Powerball state, they stampeded across the border. Traffic jams headed north were crippling, with all roads tied up for hours, day and night. The tiny hamlet of Byrum, Connecticut, which happens to be the closest town to the New York State line, got hit like a ton of bricks. Powerball just about paralyzed the little town. The local barber was forced to close shop early because his regular customers couldn't park anywhere within ten blocks of his shop.

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