Only once during the summer did someone suspect a possible connection between the Project’s data taker and bettor. “Doyne and I were playing together,” said Ingrid. “He ordered an orange juice from the cocktail waitress, and I asked for a ginger ale. On the next round we reversed orders. I asked for the orange juice and he ordered the ginger ale. ‘Are you two together?’ said the cocktail waitress. ‘No,’ I explained. ‘It just looked real good.’”
There was another occasion when someone remarked on the Project’s style of betting. The computer output its predictions via octants containing four or five numbers clustered together on the wheel. These proximate numbers on the rotor, when rearranged on the layout, lie scattered across the length of it, and only a sophisticated player would note the relationship. To further disguise their betting patterns, the Projectors varied the makeup of octants by substituting adjacent numbers.
Despite all precautions, there was one winning session at the Holiday Inn when two bystanders remarked that Ingrid was betting by octant. “They were college students in town to play blackjack, and they had ‘card counter’ written all over their faces. They watched me play and then asked if I had a system. I made up a story about progressions, but then one of them figured out I was betting by octants and said so out loud. Of course I had to cash out and leave the game.”
The Projectors traded among themselves the roles of data taker and bettor, but neither Alan nor Norman could efface himself as idiotically as Doyne. Norman, pushing over six feet, bearded and lean as a coconut palm, could never completely drain the intelligence out of his face. Looking natty in his leisure suit and pastel pants, his most workable persona was that of a system player. Alan Lewis, dark-haired and tanned, seemed completely at home in Las Vegas. His parents had lived there for a short time, and as a former card counter, he knew his way around the casinos. With his Triumph Spitfire and wardrobe of stay-pressed slacks and drip-dry shirts, he needed only a few gold chains around his neck to look the classic Las Vegas high roller.
Over the course of the summer of 1978 the Eudaemonic teams staked out favorite casinos and tables. In the sawdust joints on Fremont Street the wheels were nicely tilted, but the croupiers out on the Strip, especially late at night, played the kind of leisurely game picked off most easily by a computer. Like commando teams with disguises, prearranged signals, and sophisticated equipment, the Projectors circulated night after night from the California Club to the Lady Luck, the Golden Nugget, and El Cortez before heading out to the Strip for a raid on Circus Circus, the Silverbird, and the Stardust, or sessions farther to the south at Caesars Palace and the MGM Grand.
They never played the same club on consecutive nights. They entered casinos separately and “talked” to each other only via signals on the layout. Each of them had been issued a small notebook for recording data and financial transactions. At the end of the day this record of wins and losses was transferred to the black notebook, which had pages listing each casino separately, and a master page devoted to keeping track of the Eudaemonic bank. Entitled “Daily Record,” the master page was ruled with separate columns for recording the date, casino, shift, data taker, bettor, average bet, number of trials, money won or lost, time spent at the table, and running Eudaemonic balance.
“It was like being in a war,” said Ingrid, “and the characteristics that were important in people were the kind that seem important in wartime. You had someone like Doyne who tried to push ahead, no matter what the obstacles. And then you had a person like Norman, the dependable guy who stayed up all night putting in the hours that it took to get the equipment working properly. And then there was me, who tried to make everybody feel comfortable. That was my role—sort of a mascot.”
Drowsy and forgetful ever since her afternoon swim in Mono Lake, Ingrid was examined by a doctor and declared to be suffering from mononucleosis. “I went upstairs and went to sleep and never woke up. My dreams were filled with water, and my memory of the whole summer is of being held underwater. I had worked myself into a frenzy over the Project, trying to be supportive and keep the energy high, until I finally gave out.” Ingrid woke up long enough to read Dashiell Hammett novels and play occasional games of roulette. She spent July recuperating at her parents’ house in Davis, and returned to Las Vegas in August to play a heroic role in the summer’s final assault on the casinos.
Like the city’s other professionals, the Eudaemons on their nightly rounds confronted moments that later took on legendary significance. One of their favorite casinos was Circus Circus. With tour buses surrounding it ten deep, a flying trapeze over the main floor, and slot machines on a merry-go-round, this Strip casino caters to families looking for wholesome gambling. It also has tilted roulette wheels that tend to be played at a leisurely pace.
Alan Lewis knew the casino well from having shadowboxed his own system there in the early 1970s. Returning now with a smarter and more sophisticated computer tucked under his arm, he was second only to Clem from New Mexico in his skill as a data taker. “Doyne,” said Alan, “had developed an amazing ability to talk to croupiers and simultaneously keep track of where he was in the program. You had to time accurately and be comfortable with what was going on. You had to concentrate and not get sloppy about things. Working the microswitches with your toes was not so easy that you could casually do it, in which case you’d be so inaccurate as to be useless. That’s why the reflex tester was an important element in planning the whole thing. It was a nice touch to the Project.”
It was at Circus Circus that everything clicked into place for Alan’s first big win. Trying to look like a system player willing to count numbers until the sun came up, he stood next to the wheel as data taker, while Norman, rumpled but perky in his leisure suit, played bettor. They had been losing money for some time. Alan was having trouble setting parameters for the wheel, and he was about to call off the session when a shift change at two in the morning brought on a new croupier, a woman who already looked bored and ready to turn in for the night. In the early morning quiet, as she spun the rotor and launched the ball up on the track, the game in her hands took on a wonderful precision and regularity. Alan fine-tuned the parameters and got the computer clicked into playing the game.
“Things just turned around,” he said. “The predictions were right on target. Playing quarters, we recouped our losses and stacked several hundred dollars in chips in front of us. There was a gut rush of excitement in seeing everything fall into place. After all the time spent testing and troubleshooting it, the computer was finally up and running perfectly. I no longer had the slightest doubt. From that session, I knew the game of roulette had been beaten.”
9
Lady Luck
Do not approach casinos with timidity or reverence. They are simply fruit-machines tended by bank clerks and mechanics.
Ian Fleming
With the Project’s computers performing exactly as planned, the casinos looked as if they were getting worried. A croupier at the MGM Grand—mystified and upset by the stack of chips piling up in front of Ingrid—broke a fundamental house rule by grabbing the wheel and wrenching it around on its seat while the game was in play. The wheel made a tremendous screech. The shift boss came over to ask what was going on. In no position to lodge a complaint, Ingrid cashed out of the game and left the casino.
At another winning session, a croupier interested in Norman’s system asked him what she could do to help. Avoiding the technical term, Norman said, “Do you mind spinning the ball a little harder around the outside of the wheel? That makes me feel luckier.” Yet another croupier offered the Eudaemons an elegant demonstration of what gamblers call the dealer’s “signature.” Imagine someone operating a roulette wheel five nights a week ten years in a row. The slight imperfections on the track, the characteristics of different kinds of balls, the heft of the rotor and its drag on the central spindle will become intimate facts of life. On a slow night in the casino, to stave off boredom, what if our imaginary croupier expe
rimented with the game, looking for ways to enhance the regularity and precision of it? Like a relief pitcher perfecting a slow sinking curve, the croupier after years of practice might learn how to flick the ball up on the track and drop it from orbit precisely twenty revolutions later. What if he then learned how to regulate the speed and position of the rotor, until, with several more years of practice, he perfected a synchronous loop in which the ball arced neatly on its twentieth revolution into a chosen pocket waiting below?
Doyne and Norman were teamed up to play roulette at the Lady Luck, a favorite casino of theirs because of the free tuna salad sandwiches and two-egg breakfasts served twenty-four hours a day. The croupier that night, a man in his thirties with frizzy hair, was particularly friendly. The computer was also working exceptionally well, so that early in the game Norman had accumulated several hundred dollars in chips. Standard protocol in roulette calls for winning players to tip the house, and Norman was doing so by giving the croupier chips to bet at his discretion. The man always chose number seventeen, which was odd, considering that the computer itself consistently predicted the octant of numbers containing seventeen.
“Why do you always bet on number seventeen?” Norman asked.
“Because if I do everything just right,” said the croupier, “I can actually hit seventeen. Not that I can do it every time, mind you, but I can get close to it. I set the wheel going at a steady rate, and then I flip the ball in this nice regular way when the zero is lined up in front of me, and I swear I can hit seventeen with better-than-average odds.”
On his last spin of the wheel before going off duty, the croupier placed his tip on number seventeen. The computer predicted the octant holding seventeen. Even Doyne as data taker got excited enough to throw a bet down on seventeen. Twenty revolutions later the ball landed right on target. “That night,” said Doyne, “we all went away happy.”
The summer’s most frightening experience came during a winning session played by Doyne and Ingrid at the Hilton. For bystanders unaware of its existence, there was something uncanny about the computer at work. Placing bets straight up on three or four numbers at a time, Ingrid was “guessing” the winning number with surprising frequency. Stacks of chips mounted in front of her, and she tried to look surprised each time the croupier pushed another pile in her direction.
“Some days you have it, and some days you don’t,” she said to the other players at the table. “I guess this is my lucky day.”
Suddenly there appeared on either side of her two large men in suits. They stared down at her. One of them wrote in a notebook. They pressed against her and waited for her next move. Ingrid placed a chip on 00, the signal to quit, and cashed out of the game. “There was so much paranoia involved in playing the system,” she said, “that I could be making all this up. But when I later went into the coffee shop, I saw the same two men sitting together at a table, and I’m sure they were house cops.
“We had agreed that anyone feeling heat could call off a session, even if the other person hadn’t felt it. We realized we were still weak on basic things like disguise, for which we hadn’t come up with a good solution. Even though we pretended not to know each other, here were two people roughly the same age standing at the same table. I was afraid it wouldn’t take them long to figure out something was going on. And as soon as they did, I realized how easy it would be for them to do something awful to us.”
On surfacing from her underwater dreams and walking into the equally dreamy landscape of Las Vegas casinos, Ingrid imagined making a movie of the Project. “I thought of a movie playing out people’s fantasies on the screen. In a collage of images focusing on our perceptions and paranoia, I wanted to get at the weirdness of Las Vegas from the inside.
“The Project for me was like a theater or music performance. It was like the ‘happenings’ I had been doing at school. But the Project was a performance in real life and for a reason: to make money underground without having to work a normal job. There was an element of danger, but it seemed like just the right amount. What you were paranoid about was the real unknown.”
Doyne himself began making notes in a “Movie Idea Book,” one of whose early entries reads, “We’re either going to end up with a hell of a good movie or a hole in our heads.” One imaginary scene depicts a fat Argentinian smoking a cigar and losing two thousand dollars in front of an admiring crowd. A woman tries to steal chips from Ingrid while bragging about having lost her ex-millionaire former husband’s fortune. The Argentinian tells the woman to be happy, that her luck is bound to change. The croupier flashes his diamond pinky ring for everyone to admire, and then in the next frame Doyne falls writhing to the floor after having been electrocuted by a short circuit in the computer. He rips off his antenna T-shirt and passes out in the arms of the pit boss.
Under the heading “Themes,” the Movie Idea Book contained notes such as the following: “Must have lots of us—minor characters, tourists—putting in their two bits about everything. Juxtapose these monologues to illustrate basic themes: adventure story, surrealism of gambling, money and capitalism, dreams and fantastic schemes. Have Hunter S. Thompson babbling on ether appear in Las Vegas with Samoan attorney and white Cadillac. Study psychology of gamblers. Contrast with our own motives (why we crave adventure, fame, money) to show how in many ways we are motivated like the gamblers who throw away their money.”
Scripted to the music of Pink Floyd singing “Money,” the movie would describe in its final scene how “We fix our computers, get the Project going, move to a desert island, and build rockets to travel to another planet.…”
When the Zanes returned from their vacation in July, the Projectors moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Tropicana Avenue—the main road running east from Las Vegas to Lake Mead. “Norman and I gave the manager a screwball story about our being consulting electronics engineers,” Doyne said. “He wanted respectable tenants, so we couldn’t tell him we were in town to play roulette.” The landlord in turn neglected to mention that living in the apartment above them was a speed freak who paced the floors in high-heeled shoes while pimping to a select clientele of truck drivers, cops, croupiers, and anyone else who knocked on his door.
After moving into the apartment, the Projectors played roulette for another week and then stopped to take a break. Lorna Lyons and Rob Shaw rolled into town in his “Cream Dream,” a white 1959 Ford station wagon. They had come to pick up Norman and drive him back to Santa Cruz. Ingrid went home to Davis to recuperate. Alan Lewis flew to see his family in Tucson. Doyne headed for Letty’s house in Santa Monica, where she was living with friends near the beach.
He arrived with all the computers, the KIM, the PROM burner, and enough spare chips to reburn the computer program, because he had thought of a number of bright ideas for modifying the algorithm. He imagined he could simplify the process of setting parameters and thereby shave a few minutes off the time needed to drive around the mode map. Doyne programmed in the morning and body-surfed off Venice beach in the afternoon, and two weeks later, on reburning the EPROM—the erasable programmable read-only memory in which the microcomputer stored its equations—he was able to run the computer around the mode map in record-breaking time.
A new group of Projectors gathered in Las Vegas at the end of July. Arriving from Santa Cruz via Los Angeles, where they had stopped to pick up Doyne, were John “Juano” Boyd, Marianne Walpert, and Chris Shaw, Rob’s brother. Chris was an artist working with Ralph Abraham on a series of “visual mathematics” books, including one on chaos and strange attractors. But he was also a bon vivant whose suavity Doyne thought would lend itself nicely to high-stakes betting. Driving out of Los Angeles at the wheel of her blue Comet, the irrepressible Marianne rear-ended another car on the Santa Monica freeway. When Chris jumped out, clambered up on the hood, and popped it back into place, it dawned on Doyne, “that I was heading for the Strip with three untrained players, and frankly I was skeptical.
“I was especially worried
about Juano, who had hair down his back and a neck beard. He was wearing the same brown plastic glasses he’d worn his freshman year in high school, except that now they had a lot of tape holding them together. I didn’t see any way he could make it in the casinos.”
Juano submitted to a haircut from Chris and took other hints on how to straighten up his image. The three untrained players set up the wheel and reflex tester in the Tropicana Avenue apartment, while Doyne worried over sporadic glitches in the receivers and last-minute programming changes. It was summer in the desert. Too hot during the day even to go swimming, because you burned your feet on the concrete around the pool.
“I was struck by the insanity of it,” said Marianne. “We were living in an apartment full of computers and electronic gear. We were camped in Las Vegas in the middle of summer, and sometimes I got angry at myself. I could have been doing something fun, and here I was hanging out in this incredible heat or in stupid, goddamned casinos. The rest of the time I was sewing snaps onto brassieres or wiring myself from head to foot. You really had to wonder sometimes why you were doing it. But the amount I questioned it must have been nothing compared to Doyne and Norman, who had already given up years of their lives to work on the Project.”
The Eudaemons cooled off in the evenings at Roulette Rapids, an amusement park with streams of water flowing down cement chutes. Sitting on foam rubber mats that scooted down the tracks at high velocity, people tried not to fall off for fear of getting bruised on the concrete. When not tinkering with hardware and software, Doyne read Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. The hit song that summer, played over and over again on the radio, was something called “Hot Blooded”:
The Eudaemonic Pie Page 18