Casino Life

Casino Life PDF

Author: Phil Watts

Publisher: Australian Academic Press

Published: 2018-10-31

Total Pages: 107

ISBN-13: 1925644189

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Walking through the doors of a casino can feel like entering a portal into another dimension. A cacophony of electronic and human sounds assaults the ears as you watch people transacting large amounts of money. But this is no ordinary purchasing of goods or services where you quietly wave a card or hand out notes from a purse. Instead, money is swapped for colourful plastic chips that are placed, pushed, and thrown onto gaming tables with seemingly reckless abandon by a wide array of people, young, old, cultured, relaxed, happy, and grim. Phil Watts, as an experienced forensic psychologist, knew a lot about human nature before he walked into his first casino at 40 years of age. He had treated clients with a wide range of difficulties including gambling, yet was still struck by the casino environment — an exciting world with its own culture, pace, rules, social etiquette, and shared expectations. This other world intrigued and surprised him. So, he wrote a book about it. Casino Life will be of interest to those who seeking to know more about casinos and their psychological effects, those who seek to find out why others gamble, and those who do gamble — not as a treatment, but as a window to see what you are doing and how that has an impact upon you. Along the way you will read about why people gamble, why gambling can become addictive and the treatments used to help problem gamblers, as well as the beliefs around gambling and some of the elaborate theories people use to explain why they try to defy mathematical odds. You will also learn about the fascinating cultural and behavioural patterns of everyday casino life.

The Casino Answer Book

The Casino Answer Book PDF

Author: John Grochowski

Publisher: Bonus Books, Inc.

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9781566251075

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In casino gambling there's a house advantage built into every game. John Grochowski shows you how to beat that advantage and increase your winning odds in three of the most popular casino games (blackjack, video poker, and roulette).

Super Casino

Super Casino PDF

Author: Pete Earley

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2009-11-04

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0307429733

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In this lively and probing book, award-winning author Pete Earley traces the extraordinary evolution of Las Vegas -- from the gaudy Mecca of the Rat Pack era to one of the country's top family vacation spots. He revisits the city's checkered history of moguls, mobsters, and entertainers, reveals the real stories of well-known power brokers like Steve Wynn and legends like Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel, and offers a fascinating portrait of the life, death, and fantastic rebirth of the Las Vegas Strip. Earley also documents the gripping tale of the entrepreneurs behind the rise and fall and rise again of one of the largest gaming corporations in the nation, Circus Circus -- to which he was given unique access. In his trademark you-are-there style, he takes us behind the scenes to meet the blackjack dealers and hookers, the heavy hitters and bit players, the security officers, cabbies, and showgirls who are caught up in the mercurial pace that pulses at the heart of this astounding city.

Addiction by Design

Addiction by Design PDF

Author: Natasha Dow Schüll

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-05-11

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 0691160880

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Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.

Casino

Casino PDF

Author: Barry Tighe

Publisher: Barry Tighe

Published: 2000-09

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0955488923

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Just One More Hand

Just One More Hand PDF

Author: Ellen Mutari

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-02-02

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 144223668X

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Just One More Hand tells a story that workers all over can relate to: an industry that promised a solid and stable livelihood is being transformed by competitive pressures, causing employees to lose their economic footing. What seemed like a good job one day becomes a bad job the next. Incorporating the real experiences of casino employees, the book demonstrates the difficulties for local communities that are building new casinos in the hopes of luring tourists. Local communities placing all their chips on casinos as an economic development strategy face increasingly long odds. Life stories of individual workers in Atlantic City are explored in the context of the history of the city and the now-global gaming industry. With more and more casinos competing for customers, employees are feeling the brunt of cost-cutting measures, including the wholesale closure of some casinos. While long-time employees are fighting against concessions and wage stagnation, younger workers juggle multiple part-time and seasonal jobs at several casinos. Policy makers hoping to offset these trends are trying to rebrand Atlantic City for a younger, hipper, and more well-to-do clientele using public-private partnerships. Unfortunately, scant attention is being paid to the core issue in economic development—the need for sustainable livelihoods and meaningful work. Here, Ellen Mutari and Deborah Figart explore the realities of the industry and the lives and challenges the workers within it are facing.

Tales From The Pits

Tales From The Pits PDF

Author: P.J. Lev

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2011-04-18

Total Pages: 60

ISBN-13: 1462855229

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What is it like to work inside a casino on the floor at one of the table games? Here is a brief view to give the run of the mill person a small glimpse of what really goes on at the table games from a floor person perspective. Greed, lust, deception, and personal hygiene (or not) play a major role when you throw the glitz and glamour of the gambling scene. When is enough, enough; what does money (around you all the time) lead the everyday person to do or not to do? How does the casino life effect someone who comes from a rural country family life setting? Well, venture inside and see what and how life can change in a blink of an eye and how it can change a persons personality not to mention the outcome of their life. Everything in life is said to be a crap shoot, well the dice aren’t always going to be on the up and up

New Life of Young Generation

New Life of Young Generation PDF

Author: Gift Jerry Baloyi

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2015-11-11

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 1514463067

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This book is an ultimate guide for understanding life on itself and to show that a door requires a key to open unless a person decides to do a different plan to open it, but a different plan will result in a procrastination of time. Although there are many keys in the shop, they differ with strongest and with numbers. Actually some of them are imitation, which means they get broken easily, so to be free in mind, read this book with care and giving all your heart.

Escape from Time

Escape from Time PDF

Author: Frederick Kile

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2000-07-28

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0595009778

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Book Description: Why are millions disgusted with our political parties? Did the huge explosion in the federal building in Oklahoma City make any sense? We wait nervously for another school shooting. What's next? America is changing so fast that laws and culture are almost meaningless. Escape from Time is the story of how we are divorcing the past. We are rid of the worst and the best of our inherited culture. We are what no other country has ever been. Culture--laws, religion, the "story of America"--belong to the immigrants who came looking for a future. Those immigrants are history. They lived for the future. We live for "right now." Past and future are not our psychological radar. We live by impulse. If it feelsright, it isright. We don't understand our culture, certainly not our laws and institutions. These relics manufacture "crimes" from what we call everday life, and we can't build enough prisons to keep up. Escape from Time is the story of a new way of life in America--life in the NOW! Read it and understand who we are; escape the fiction that we are who we were. Author bio: Frederick Kile—engineer, theologian, corporate futurist. As parish pastor, he encountered wealthy and poor, “old-timers” and social rebels. Engineering experience includes Project Apollo and designing global socioeconomic computer models. Currently adult education director in a large Lutheran church, Fred also chairs a multinational committee of engineers studying international stability.

Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places

Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places PDF

Author: Boudien de Vries

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1351951106

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In recent years the concept of 'civil society' has become central to the historian's understanding of class, cultural and political power in the nineteenth-century town and city. Increasingly clubs and voluntary societies have been regarded as an important step in the formation of formal political parties, particularly for the working and middle classes. The result of this is the assertion that the more associations existing in a particular society, the deeper democracy becomes entrenched. In order to test this hypothesis, this volume brings together essays by an international group of urban historians who examine the construction of civil society from associational activity in the urban place. From their studies, it soon becomes clear that such simple propositions do not adequately reflect the dynamics of nineteenth-century urban society and politics. Urban associations were ideological in purpose and deliberately discriminatory and as such set the boundaries of civil society. Thus competing and segmented associations were not only an indication of pluralism and strength, but also highlighted a fundamental weakness when faced down by the interests of the state. Through a wide array of urban associations in a broad range of settings, comprising Austria and Bratislava, France and Italy, the Netherlands, Austro-Hungary, England, Scotland and the US, this volume reflects on the construction of class, nation and culture in the associations of the nineteenth-century urban place. In so doing it shows that a deep and interlocking civil society does not automatically lead to a rise in democratic activity. Expansion of the networks of urban association could equally result in greater subdivision and to the fragmentation and isolation of certain groups. Partition as much as coherence is our understanding of civil society and associations in the nineteenth-century urban place.