Hit by the sudden urge to completely rewrite the fanfiction I never finished in 2020 as a way to grasp at something certain in uncertain times

A character can still be a great character without being a good person.

In fact, some of the best characters are terrible people.

Because a character’s worth should be based on how complex and interesting they are, not their morality if they were real.

Yes. A thousand times, yes.

Commonly Confused Words [That I Keep Seeing Online]

When it comes to writing anything online, words that don’t look like they sound can trip people up. Even when spellcheck doesn’t stop you from spelling a word the way it sounds, sometimes that spelling does not mean what you intended.

Before you go over this list of problem words I see most often, you might want to read this article to help you understand why these kind of mistakes happen so often within the English language.

Are You Making These Mistakes in Your Writing?

Allowed vs. Aloud - The first one means permission has been granted, the second one means it was spoken to be heard: “The teacher allowed them to read magazines during quiet hour, but they could not read them aloud to their friends.”

Definitely vs. Defiantly - The first one is an absolute certainty, the second one is to act rebelliously: “She was definitely acting defiantly when she refused to take out the trash.” 

Board vs. Bored - The first one can be a hard, flat surface used to write on, play with, or build with. It can also be a group of people that have meeting to discuss things: “The school board decided some new whiteboards and board games were needed in the classrooms.”

The second one is when someone has nothing amusing to do, and is also when you make a small hole in something: “He got bored, so he bored a hole into his notebook with a pen.”

Hanger vs. Hangar - The first one holds your clothes, the second one houses your airplane: “I left my shirt on a wooden hanger inside the airport hangar.” 

Bear vs. Bare

The first one is an animal, but also a verb: “The bear could not bear being hungry any longer.” 

The second one can be used three ways: 

- When something is uncovered or empty: ”Bare-footed, he opened the cupboard to find it was bare.“ 

- As a verb to uncover or expose something: “She bared her heart to him, but he broke up with her anyway.”

- Or to show how little of something there is: “There was barely any battery life left on the phone.”

Peeked vs. Peaked vs. Piqued: 

One can take a quick "peek” at something to look at it.

- “He peeked out from behind the curtain.”  

When referring to someone who looks sick, peaked is pronounced “peak-ed” or “peakéd” emphasizing the "ed.”

- "She looked peaked and sickly.” [pronounced peek-ed]

It is a mountain “peak”, like the television show Twin Peaks.

- “The hat was peaked like a dunce cap.”

If something is intriguing or offends you then the spelled is “pique.”

- “The noise piqued my interest, but then I was piqued when it was just my siblings calling me names.”

There are dozens of other confusing words and spellings that will get in your way when you write. 

It may not be a big deal to miuse or misspell a word when texting or commenting in a thread. However, when you’re posting fiction, an informative post, or even writing to a potential employer it can be hard for others to take your work seriously. Using the wrong word with the wrong meaning is like linking people to the wrong website, it’s distracting and confusing.  Always look up a word if you aren’t sure you’re using correctly. Either search for definitions online, or keep a dictionary handy. It will defiantly definitely help you out in the end!

So Nanowrimo is actually dead.

After 25 years of operation, Nanowrimo is shutting down.

An email came out in the hours approaching April Fools

A video was attached to the email, which can be viewed here:

The video is on Kilby’s channel and not the long dead Nanowrimo channel. The video is full of…

Kilby logic, but there is some relevant information contained within.

If have anything on Nanowrimo you need to get off the site, take it now. The site will likely not be around for too much longer.

Despite everything that the organisation has been through, the closure of a 25 year old nonprofit is still a tragedy, and my heart goes out to everyone that’s grieving from this. Nano has hurt a lot of people, but it meant a lot to so many, and I will be sorry to see that go.

Even if I don’t agree with many things in the recent video, I can agree with the sentiment of one slide.

I will update you all if and when relevant information comes out. Despite everything, I now doubt that this will be my last post.

Seeing as I was never an expert on Nanowrimo I haven't much to say other than "AI killed them" rings untrue. The reason they promoted AI would be the same reason Tumblr and other sites did: they were bleeding funds and AI companies are offering bundles of free money.

Medical Specialties: AKA Not All Fictional Doctors Are Surgeons

Hey folks!  Your friendly neighborhood medical student here.  Aunt Scripty was nice enough to post my spiel on medical school, and given the awesome response, I’m doing a follow-up to explain the different specialties and their capabilities.

First of all, before we get started, I’ll refer you to this awesome cartoon to get a brief glimpse of the personalities you run into in each:

http://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2011/03/12-medical-specialty-stereotypes-2011.html 

Are they stereotypes?  Yes.  Your doctor character doesn’t have to follow the personalities you see there at all.  But a lot of doctors who go into those specialties have those traits; it makes sense if you remember that medical students rotate through, or at least see, most of these specialties, and we gravitate towards the specialty where we see similar personalities to our own.  Sort of creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Without further ado, these are the major specialties:

Internal Medicine:

Internists are the work horses of the hospital; if you get admitted for something relatively common, like pneumonia or heart failure, odds are the internist will take care of you. (Aunt Scripty’s Note: for an insight into the world of an internist, see A Day in the Life of Pocket-Anon) Heck, even if what you have isn’t common, and they’re calling in specialists to help, it’s often an internist who basically oversees the whole thing, while the specialist drops in to alter this or that detail.  Occasionally, you will see an internist who decides to work in clinics instead, but that job tends to fall to your…

Family Practitioner:

The classic ‘town doctor’ is a family practitioner.  They work in clinics mostly (some do work in hospital like an internist, though, or go to the hospital if one of their patients has to be admitted), and see every kind of patient, including kids and ob/gyn visits if the town is small/their practice is comprehensive enough.  These are the doctors who form the closest relationships with their patients—seeing them for years, delivering their babies, taking care of the rest of the family—and tend to treat either chronic conditions (high blood pressure, diabetes, that kind of thing) or not-too-serious acute issues like mild infection or muscle sprains.  There are some who are also trained for basic surgeries such as appendectomies and C-sections, but those are becoming increasingly rare.  Still, if I had to choose a doctor for the zombie apocalypse, one of those old-school surgery-trained family docs would be among my top choices.

Pediatrics:  Take care of children, from the newborn babies up to the 17 years and 11 month kids.  Can work in either hospitals or clinics and, like family practitioners, often form the longest/closest relationships with their patients.  I try not to go into too much of the personalities of practitioners here, but I will say that pediatricians have among the lowest salaries, but the highest job satisfaction; whether that’s the kind of people the specialty attracts, the patients, or just the fact that even big bad bureaucracies tend to be a little better when there’s a sick kid on the line, I’m not sure.  My guess is a healthy combination of the three.

(Aunt Scripty’s Addition: Neonatologists are a subset of pediatricians, who primarily look after newborns, especially premies, and typically work in NICUs. The distinction isn’t actually splitting hairs; humans have exited the womb weighing as little as 1lb (500g), and neonatologists are the ones keeping them going.)

Surgeon:

Surgery is easy on the one hand—everyone knows they’re the ones who operate on patients—but it’s also difficult because there are so many subspecialties.  Your general surgeon is mostly in charge of basic surgeries, which almost all seem to involve the gut or skin—gallbladders, complex abscess drainage, appendectomies, small bowel obstruction, etc.  I should point out: if your character’s specialty is not ‘surgeon’ (or a few others I’ve listed), and they have to do an emergency surgery for story purposes, they are going to be WAY in over their head.  Which can be a good plot point, and it is possible your doctor can pull it off if there’s a life-or-death situation happening, but it’s going to scare the bejeebers out of them.

Major subspecialties:

—Orthopedics.  Bones and joints and muscles.  Think of them like Thor: they think they can solve all problems with a mighty hammer blow.

—Plastics.  The closest I’ve seen medicine come to art; I’ve seen patients who have just had half their face taken off to remove a cancer, and then plastics comes along and gives them a teeny tiny scar instead.  Basically, if it’s anything to do with making a patient look better, it’s in their scope.

—Trauma.  There’s sometimes confusion between a trauma surgeon and an ER doctor.  Both are trained to help stabilize/evaluate a trauma patient, perform basic procedures, and decide if they need surgery.  If a full-blown surgery is needed, though, the trauma surgeon has to take over and head to the operating room.  The parts in Doctor Strange where the ER doctor’s assisting in/performing operations as a routine thing?  No.  Not in her wheelhouse.

Ob/Gyn:

Basically, anything that deals with the female anatomy is in their scope of practice—Pap smears, STD exams, pregnancy, C-sections, fertility issues, and a lot more.  They’re one of the few specialties that really mixes both surgical and medical work; most others pick one or the other and stick to it religiously, but ob/gyn can flip between surgery (c-section, removing the uterus, tying tubes, and so on) and non-surgical work, so long as it pertains to the same anatomical system.

Emergency Medicine: The most badass of all specialties, which only the exceptionally intelligent, charming, and good-looking can aspire to.*  No, in all seriousness, this is kind of the ‘jack of all trades’ specialty—if someone’s having a crisis that involves any specialty (psychiatric, ob/gyn, infectious, neurologic, etc.)—they come to the ER, and the doctors have to be able to treat them.  Their job basically involves the most exciting fifteen minutes out of any specialty.  That said, I should point out that a good half (at least) of what ER doctors see is not really an ‘emergency.’ (Aunt Scripty’s Note: This is actually closer to 90+%. There’s a developing subspecialty of ER/ICU combinations for docs who want to JUST deal with CRITICALLY ILL PEOPLE until they go upstairs.)  It’s either something that’s serious, but can be managed outpatient with the right medications and follow-up, or it’s simply not serious at all (often because a patient can’t tell the difference; PSA that if you’re not sure if it’s serious or not, please do come and have us check it out!)

*Note that this description may be biased by the author’s experience. (Aunt Scripty’s note: don’t worry, paramedics are all like this too. The plural of anecdotes is data, right?)

Intensive Care: (Note: this section in Aunt Scripty’s addition.) Intensive care is where hospitals store the really, really sick patients. Intensivists are sort of a combination of internal medicine, emergency medicine, and anesthesiology. They’re very, very good with tweaking esoteric machines, but they’re also very, very good at talking about dying–because a lot of their patients will  die, and they do a lot of resuscitating, intubating, and other “emergency” and anesthetic procedures. There are various different ICUs out there: medical, cardiothoracic, pediatric, neonatal, coronary, neuro, neurosurgical, etc.

Neurology:  Treat any disorders of the brain, spine, or peripheral nervous system.  These doctors can work in clinics, treating patients with chronic neurological disorders, or in the hospital, treating more severe/acute problems (mostly strokes, but also including other problems like MS, spinal cord issues, etc.).

Psychiatry: Ok, just to be clear here, psychiatry =/= neurology.  Those are very different things, even though there are sometimes occasions when people will incorrectly send a psych patient to a neurologist or vice versa.  Psychiatrists treat things like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and so on—diseases that primarily affect behavior, and where we can’t quite see what the cause and pathology are.  Like a neurologist, though, psychiatrists can either work with hospital patients or in a clinic, or in a nice mix of the two.

Lightning Round:

Hematology/Oncology: Treat blood disorders and cancer.  Note: broken up into surgical and non-surgical groups.

Dermatology: Treat skin disorders

PM&R: (Aunt Scripty’s Note: Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation; I had to look it up.) Help patients with physical rehab and recovery-oriented problems (wound care, chronic spinal cord damage, that kind of thing).

Anesthesiology: Manage anesthesia during surgery; responsible for monitoring/managing surgical patients’ vital signs and keeping them under during the procedure.  Can also be involved in pain management.

Radiology: Interpret imaging of patients (X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, etc.)

Cardiology: Treat the heart

Pulmonology: Treat the lungs

Nephrology: Treat the kidneys

Gastroenterology: Treat the digestive system

Infectious disease: please tell me this is obvious

Urology: Treat urinary tract issues and male reproductive system

Endocrinologist: Treat hormone disorders

Immunologist: Treat immune disorders

Rheumatologist: Treat autoimmune disorders

Pathologists: Interpret tissue samples for disease/disorders.  Usually that’s cells, but also includes autopsies; if you’re doing a crime/mystery story, a forensic pathologist is your best choice for a doctor.

Side Notes:

—This isn’t an exhaustive list, just the most common ones I can think of off the top of my head.  If anyone wants more details on a specialty or thinks something’s missing, let me know!

—So, the age old question: in a post-apocalyptic setting, what kind of doctor do I want?  (Ok, ok, no one asks this question but me.  Whatever.)  Still, in answer: I’d most want an old school family medicine doctor with experience in global health.  Second choice would be an emergency medicine doctor, and if I couldn’t have global health, I’d at least ask for a military background.  A nurse practitioner with EM experience would also be pretty awesome.  Why?  Versatility.  These practitioners treat all patients, with all diseases.  The family medicine doc is better with chronic complaints (asthma, and a. fib won’t disappear with the apocalypse) and may have surgical experience, while the EM doc will be better with acute issues like heart attack, trauma, or infection, but they’ll both be able to cross over.  But the kicker for me is global health.  That means the doctor’s been trained to work in a resource limited setting, and so instead of panicking that they can’t get a lab result or imaging, they’ll be able to figure out a workaround.

—I’ve left out a lot of the surgical subspecialties (neurosurgery, hand surgery, etc.) for space.  Just know that there are a lot, and google for a list if you need a specific one.  Same for pediatrics; you can pretty much add ‘pediatric’ in front of anything in the lightning round—pediatric cardiologist, for instance—and it’s its own specialty. 

—Gender dynamics: there are now an equal number of men and women entering medical school, and have been for the past few years.  That said, the genders often go into different specialties: women are more common in ob/gyn and pediatrics, while men are more common in surgery (particularly orthopedics), urology, and to a lesser extent, ER.  Other specialties tend to be more even, but the older a physician is, the more likely they are to be male, simply because fewer women entered medicine as little as a decade ago.  That also means more men in leadership positions, still.

So that’s it for this post! Thanks again to Brittany, who will surely make an excellent EM doc some day.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

The Script Medic is supported by generous donations on Patreon. Have you considered donating?

1. Freedom vs Safety

ex: Minority Report 

2. Success vs Selflessness

ex: Mad Max: Fury Road

3. Progress vs Preservation

ex: Toy Story 3

4. Individuality vs Community

ex: Snowpiercer

5. Privacy vs Transparency

ex: The 100

Excellent tensions to consider when plotting your story

responsiveness vs accountability – captain america civil war, and also all the cop shows where one partner’s a rulebreaker and the other is by-the-book.

no but disturbing realistic superheroes

Vision has no hair anywhere on his body–no armpit hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. No fingernails. His skin tastes like metal. Sometimes, he forgets to breathe for minutes or hours at a time.

Captain Marvel smells like burning. When you touch her, your hand comes away cold because she’s absorbed your body heat. If she gets cut, she bleeds light. She can tell you what the inside of an explosion feels like.

Bruce Banner vomits after de-hulking. His skin is always red and peeling. He looks sick, like he has a fever, and he ingests more medication than actual food. There are blisters on his lips.

Tony Stark has a huge, sunken scar on his sternum where the arc reactor was removed and his chest aches each time he takes a breath. He has callouses in odd places–so does the whole team, really–and there is a permanent bald spot on the back of his head where it has been cut open every time he gets thrown around in his suit.

Spider-Man sometimes forgets which way is up–if you put him in a room with identical walls, floor, and ceiling, he couldn’t tell you which is which. His hands and feet are prickly to the touch, even through his costume. He is very nearsighted.

The Scarlet Witch has no sense of boundaries; if you can’t tell she’s spying on your thoughts, why should she stop? She doesn’t do it out of any malicious intent, just out of curiosity and convenience. She never loses arguments.

Thor speaks about events that happened thousands of years ago as if they were last week. Cats arch their backs and stare at him. Something about him–his eyes, or his skin, or the way he moves–seems slightly off, like he doesn’t belong on Earth at all.

stuff like that.

Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 5 Exercise 1 – Take the above photo. Describe it with your own style and your own literary flair. Bring the scene to life. Give it its own characterization. Capture a moment. Exercise 2 – Now, describe the scene from the eyes of one of your characters. Don’t be afraid to borrow those moments of gold you write in exercise 1, but make sure to stay absolutely true and honest to the voice of the character. Bonus – Describe the scene from the eyes of the protagonist. Goal – A big part of what makes a story stand out is character voice. Your own personal style changes as you do, and a character’s voice changes as the character does. When the two come together, there’s potential for literary magic, but bringing out and differentiating between different character voices takes lots of practice and even more reading. Write for yourself, but also take time to write with the intention of improving skills. There’s reading for pleasure, and then there’s reading like a writer. The same applies to writing: write for pleasure, then write to improve. Experiment in these exercises. Try things you haven’t tried before. Remember, the image is meant to generate ideas, so it’s intentionally vague. If you’re not used to writing about the subjects in the image, good. Write something you’ve never written before. Push yourself. Need some help? Check out the guide on character voice, or look at the Voice & Style Summer Camp exercises for additional tips! Share your pieces, however perfect or raw, with other KSWers by posting under the “ksw exercise” tag! Need an Example? Here’s a Poor One –

Read More

Writers: If you enjoyed writing it, that’s enough. Writing can be an end in itself. It doesn’t have to be “good” by anyone else’s standards. It doesn’t have to be published or validated in any way. Delight in putting words on the page. Delight in falling down pretty rabbit holes that might not “make sense” to others. IT’S OKAY TO WRITE JUST TO WRITE, just to have fun, just to please yourself. This is your permission slip. Go forth and create nonsense. I’m cheering for you. xo

English spelling isn't that hard to understand as long as you also understand French orthography, Dutch orthography, the Great Vowel Shift, the Latin language, the history of the printing press, and the etymology of every word introduced to English in the last 600 years

Anti-villain motivations besides "tragic past"

On the Subject of Cheating

This could inevitably end up with a diatribe on why 21 is a complete waste of a film because it’s going to be the example I occasionally refer to for “this thing done badly” throughout this, so I’m not going to start with any pretence. I’ll try to keep it to the gambling aspects of the film but suffice to say the main characters are completely unlikeable (not to mention whitewashed, although the Chinese student it’s based on came out and said he preferred that to being played by a Japanese or Korean actor so ehhhh?), the pacing’s awful, it’s got a whole bunch of phoned in terrible CGI shots that aren’t necessary in any way for a film about blackjack of all things, and the ending is just nonsensical (why does he need the damn scholarship if he’s demonstrably got a method of making that much money you DOOFUS). And also it screws up quite a lot of the gambling based things.

AAAAAANYWAY. Cheating. Card counting in particular. Is it really a guaranteed way of beating the house for mathematical geniuses, or is it all total bollocks?

I’ll give you a clue, it’s the second one. Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this right now.

Card Counting

Let me be abundantly clear to start off: In the vast majority of cases, card counting won’t work. Allow me to refer to 21 here. The MIT (I think) cheating ring that that film is based on required a massive operation with a huge amount of money in reserve in order to be in any way profitable. If you’re walking in with all of fifty quid, it’s not going to help you.

Alright. What card counting is. Basically, blackjack is a game with “memory”. A fresh shuffle, which we call a shoe because of the shape of the thing that holds the cards, will have multiple decks in it - my place runs with six, but it can be four or eight too. Or presumably anything in between. As cards are played they are placed into a discard pile, and what’s in there (what’s been played) will affect what’s in the shoe (what hasn’t been played). If someone were to keep track of what cards have been played, they could then bet based on what hasn’t.

The simplest method of doing this is by keeping track of the “count” in your head, adding one for every 2-5 that is played and subtracting one for every T-A. The higher the count, the more tens, pictures (all worth ten) and aces are left relative to how many cards there are, which means the player is more likely to hit blackjack (21 in two cards, requiring an ace and any ten) which will, if the dealer doesn’t get a blackjack too, pay 3 to 2 rather than the usual 1 to 1/even money - meaning, for a £100 bet, a blackjack will pay £150 rather than £100. Hence, when the count is high it’s beneficial to bet larger.

This leads us to a major misconception. This does not take a mathematical genius to do. If you can add and subtract one to and from whole numbers in both the positive and negative, quickly, and then remember that number while also playing, (so there is NO REASON AT ALL for that person at the end of 21 to be “dazzled” either, if anything this story had given him every reason to refuse to consider the dipshit main character for this stupid scholarship, it doesn’t prove he’s worth it and it proves he doesn’t need it anyway!) you too can card count and tip the odds into your favour. This is true - the odds do change if played correctly. What’s the change?

0.5% in the house’s favour to 0.5% in yours.

That’s still close enough that it’ll fall prey to the part where the house will be able to keep playing long after you’ve run out of money if you’re not running a huge operation, like MIT did. They had multiple people playing every table waiting for the count to get high enough for their “big spender” to come along and play with big money until the count goes back down. I know this is petty but 21 implied that once the table got hot the player stayed there until the sun came up, that was stupid. But you’ve probably gathered that I hate that movie so I will be petty for a long time.

The big attraction of it is that it’s legal in the US, or so I’ve heard asserted many a time. Not so in the UK though. As I’ve referred to earlier, the Gambling Act 2005 section 42 subsection 1 specifies that cheating is an offence punishable by fine or imprisonment. While it goes on to specify certain things such as dishonest conduct, it does so “without prejudice to the generality of subsection 1″, meaning that it doesn’t have to be specified in the text of the Act. As such, card counting is considered cheating. However, it’s also near-impossible to prove without getting into thought crime territory so nobody is ever going to be prosecuted for it when it’d just be easier to refuse to do business with them. As a result it’s never been tested in court, most likely never will be, so it might as well be legal.

And how do we clock onto card counters? Simple. We notice when the bet changes. If they’ve been playing minimum stakes for a long time, then they change their bet up (especially if they haven’t been particularly winning) and a bunch of high cards come, and then the bet goes back down? It’s possible they’re counting cards. The more extreme the change, the more regular the change, the more obvious it is. If we clock on we might reshuffle the deck. Not to mention this wouldn’t be a concern in a place that used a machine to shuffle, since used cards can be reshuffled at will without slowing the game down.

So in short, without a huge operation with enough money backing you up to be able to keep going as long as the house can, not to mention being able to keep calm under the pressure for long periods of time, card counting will not help you at all. Which is why we never really see it. As cheating methods go, it’s too much effort when there are easier, though more high risk methods available.

How Most People Actually Cheat

It is so much more common for cheaters to use simpler methods. Affecting bets after the game is complete is probably the most common methodical way of doing it. For instance, on roulette, let’s say 29 comes in. Because the dealer has to clear the table first and the chipping machine is at the 0 end of the table, it’s possible that they will have their attention off the winning number for a split second. If the inspector also isn’t watching, it’s possible to slip a few extra chips onto a split and hope nobody notices. Of course if they do notice they’ll check the cameras, see what you did and then you’ll be barred for life.

Something I also see is people placing their bets very carefully and deliberately in unclear places. The trouble with this, again, is proving it - they could be legitimately rushing towards the end of the betting window, or they could have shaky hands due to age or illness or whatever, and if we were to prosecute we’d have to explain why we know it’s deliberate and not one of those two things. But there are people I can think of who absolutely do it on purpose - I know because when I catch on and start correcting the positions (announcing how I’m accepting the bet, of course, so there can be no argument) after a while they suddenly become rather neat about it.

This tends to be how it goes. We don’t out and out to accuse people, we just quietly counter their attempts and smile. If they’ve been jabbing their nail into cards to bend them a little so they have an idea of where the more powerful cards are? We swap the deck out, replace the affected cards, and continue.

Most commonly there are opportunists, who will pounce on a dealer mistake and attempt to work it to their advantage. Who wouldn’t? The player can’t be punished because the dealer cocked it up. Depending on the error it may go to a camera check, or it might just be dealt with by the inspector there and then. Recently, for instance, I made a mistake drawing blackjack cards that resulted in three cards flipping face down and I couldn’t track which one had been where, so my supervisor (AKA pit boss, the terms are interchangable) went to check the cameras to see what had been where, one of the players - who seemed to be in a bad mood anyway - outright said that they didn’t accept how he said the cards had been. After he’d just checked the camera and written the card order down. It was frankly a marvel watching my supervisor then manage to not just go “You fucking what?” 

So. What about the more concrete cases where we can absolutely say “you have cheated and we know it”? There’s only two cases I can think of, and only one of those have been since I’ve worked there - most of the time it just comes down to opportunism. Case number one was on three card poker, something of a niche game that I’ll explain another time, but because we don’t use shuffling machines, the dealers shuffle the cards manually, which means we ask the player to cut the deck before play.

A player had been playing in the first box to receive cards for most of the night and it got to early morning before this was noticed. Every time a new dealer came onto the table they change the decks, the old cards are checked, and nobody noticed this until eight hours and a few grand too late - every ace had been bent horribly. What had happened was that the player had been quickly bending the ace cards so that when it was his turn to cut he could feel for where the aces were in the deck and cut there, guaranteeing himself at least ace high, thus giving him an immense advantage. The dealer that clocked onto this noticed that he always got ace high on his cut, and when the cards were examined this was found out and so the issue was dealt with. Every dealer that had been on the table, and every inspector that had watched, was written up for that one.

The second case was on roulette. There were two guys in (you may notice that most of these people are men - that seems to be the demographic) who had been hanging around for about an hour watching tables, I think looking for the weakest dealer. They picked one, and towards the end of the spin, just as the ball was dropping, one of them placed a series of late bets that the dealer rightly removed. It took until after the ball had dropped though, and in that time the other person had watched and put a significant amount on the winning number. The inspector had been concentrating on another game so saw nothing, and it was only because the dealer clocked onto this and thought something was amiss that they got a camera check, which revealed what had happened. The two men were of course a) not paid out, and b) barred.

Which leads me to one last thing:

What Happens When We Catch Them?

So let’s say we’ve clocked onto a method. There’s concrete evidence, and we’re moving in. What do we do?

Well. As satisfying as the scene where Morpheus beats the living crap out of that unlikeable tosser in that stupid stupid movie was, we don’t beat people up. Of course we don’t - casinos are ultimately a business and if someone starts running around saying “I won too much so they took me round back and pummelled me senseless” that’s not good for business. Maybe in those underground mob casinos from pop culture thirties America this might have been more common but now it’s not because of course it’s not.

A lifetime ban and being put on the casino blacklist is the usual routine. If there’s very concrete evidence maybe they will be prosecuted, or it’s also possible they might appeal the ban in which case as far as the UK goes it goes up first through the company and then to the Gambling Commission. I recall a story where a man had convinced a dealer to rotate certain cards in a deck because the design on the back (which should be perfectly symmetrical) had been cut wrong, so if certain cards that might just happen to be beneficial to him were rotated he could see based on the back - this is called card marking, and again is common. His ban went to the courts, since he maintained it wasn’t cheating because it wasn’t strictly dishonest (it was) and anyway it was the casino’s fault for using dodgy cards. The court had none of it though and he was done for it.

Finally, do we ever ban people for winning too much? Generally no. There’s only one that I know of that we’ve banned, and of course that’s not because they won a whole bunch on one visit. People won’t be banned for getting lucky on one visit, or even a few visits. That one person who got banned for winning too much had come in most afternoons for months, was never in for more than a hundred, and about half the time was cashing out for four figures. There does come a point where we will get suspicious. It’s possible that he just got that lucky that many times, but it’s some incredibly long odds that we don’t believe are honest, so he was suspended because we figured he had to be doing something to affect his odds. Last I heard he might have been taking it to the Gambling Commission but that was long enough ago that I think nothing further is going to come of it

TL:DR

So. Thanks for giving this a read, hopefully this’ll help someone figure something out with their story. Any questions, do feel free to ask. And I am very proud of myself for managing to shut up about the movie, I was anticipating ripping on it way more than I did. Don’t watch it, and also please don’t go out and gamble, guys. It will only lead you to misery.

Thanks again! –Nora

Photographs from the Howard University series by Alfred Eisenstaedt (1946) via the LIFE Photo Collection.