1. Own a casino.
2. Own stock in a casino company.
3. Own complementary businesses (such as bars, restaurants, pawn shops etc) near a casino.
4. Act in commercials for gambling.
My mother has made more net profit from gambling than most gamblers even though she has never stepped inside a casino or even bought a lotto ticket. As a local actress she was paid well to make two local gambling TV ads — one for the Missouri Lottery and one for The Alton Belle Casino.
5. Own land a gambling company wants to build a casino on.
6. Be a lawyer for casinos.
But be careful, not like St. Louis rainmaker Michael Lazaroff, who allegedly took money from a local casino, under illegal conditions.
7. Work as a casino employee.
8. Provide consulting services to casinos. If you know how to improve casino security or how to convince gamblers to spend more money, casinos may pay you well to enhance their bottom lines. Some former professional gamblers, such as Steve Forte, do this.
9. Be a city or state government with casinos in your taxing jurisdiction.
East St. Louis Illinois has been collecting its garbage and paying its city employees ever since The Casino Queen set down anchor on the East Side riverfront.
10. Sell your own how-to-win books, newsletters, magazines, columns, tapes and software.
11. Sell other people’s how-to-win books etc. From your local B. Dalton to The Gambler’s Bookshop in Las Vegas to various Internet sites.
12. Be a fulltime anti-gambling activist who is good at raising funds to fight the self-righteous war against gambling by lobbying against it.
13. Be a counselor or therapist who specialises in treating gambling “addicts.”
14. Live in a gambling tourist spot.
15. Sell space on your website to banners linking to casinos.
16. Run a fax news service to keep gamblers up to the minute on casino conditions.
In 1995, Stanford Wong notified all his subscribers that The Alton Belle was about to run a holiday special and pay two dollars for one on blackjacks. A swarm of Vegas card counters who’d never before heard of Alton Illinois rented a bus and crowded out the local ettors the casino had intended to reward.
17. Buy antique slot machines as a collector.
18. Buy and sell antique slot machines as a dealer.
19. Be a politician receiving campaign contributions from local casinos.
This is not legal in Missouri but according to local newspaper stories, allegedly did not stop former St. Louis mayor Clarence Harmon from doing it.
20. Be a TV station, radio station, newspaper, magazine etc that runs gambling related stories, especially horror stories that blame casinos for the suicides of gamblers and the corruption of local lawyers and politicians.
21. Be a TV station, radio station, newspaper, billboard, magazine etc that accepts and runs advertising from casinos.
22. If you are not required to file a tax return (for instance, your only income is some form of nontaxable welfare), go to casinos and race tracks and when a taxpayer wins an amount large enough that the track or casino must report it to the IRS, volunteer to accept the winnings for them, for a fee of course.
Since you don’t pay taxes anyway, you’re safe. The taxpayer saves the approximately 40% of the winnings the federal and state government would want from them.
For a $2500 slots jackpot, that’s $1000 in taxes, so it’s certainly worth it for the taxpayer winner to pay you $200 to put your name and Social Security number on the money.
In case you haven’t guessed, this is illegal. It could be charged as conspiring to evade taxes. I do not recommend it.
23. Cheat the casino.
Also illegal and not recommended, but people do it. No telling how many people get away with it, since they may get caught next week. Also, casinos lump real cheating in with advantage winning techniques.
24. Work for state and local gambling regulatory agencies.
25. Own a store or gas station which sells lottery tickets. You get a percentage of the winnings of tickets sold at your store.
26. Work for a store or gas station which sells lottery tickets. The store’s lottery income helps provide your paycheck. Also, I’ve heard that a supermarket in nearby Godfrey Illinois sent its employees on a trip after a jackpot winner bought their ticket at that store (so Illinois also paid the store a substantial portion of the pot.) Now you know why when you buy a lottery ticket the clerk tells you, “Good luck.”
27. Work for a company that makes gambling equipment and supplies, such as Bee card decks, chips, roulette wheels etc.
28. Walk through casinos looking for freebies. Slots players actually walk away from millions of dollars of machine credit annually. Find such an empty machine, play the credits and keep any winnings.
I’ve heard that this is now illegal in Las Vegas, probably because casinos there had too many street people wandering through doing this, probably bothering some of the tourists.
Similarly, I’ve also heard that some sharp-eyed folk walk over race track grounds looking for discarded but winning tickets.
I can’t laugh — I hate to admit it, but I once threw away a $50 winning scratch off lottery ticket, because I didn’t understand until later that I’d won.
29. Be a bookie.
If you do this right, you are NOT gambling. You are managing risk so that you make money no matter who wins the game.
30. Sell your opinion as to horse and dog race winners or winners of ball games. Many hustlers sell tip sheets at race tracks. Others give out their sports betting advice via 900 numbers.
THE MAN WITH $100,000 BREASTS by Michael Konik has a chapter on a man who sold ball game winners via a 900 number, based on picks by his five year old son.
Be especially careful of anyone soliciting you via mail order. There is a classic scam technique using mail order.
At the beginning of the football season, they buy a list of 1,000,000 names and addresses of known sports bettors and advice buyers. They write a great sales letter describing what a terrific sports handicapper they are. To prove it, they predict the winner of the first prominent game of the season.
Let’s say it’s team A against Team B. They print up two versions of the sales letter. One predicts Team A will win. The other one predicts Team B.
They send half the mailing list the Team A winner letter, the other half the Team B winner letter.
After the game, they discard the 500,000 names who received the losing team will win letter.
Repeat the process every week. By the end of the NFL season they have only 10,000 names left, but those people think the scammer is a sports handicapping genius. They’ve seen the “handicapper” accurately predict the winner of one game a week since the beginning of the season. What a track record!
A few weeks before the Super Bowl the con artist sends the remaining names a letter saying they will tell them the name of their pick to win the Super Bowl, for a mere $1000.
As soon as the first flurry of checks and money orders clears, they close their bank account and the Post Office box and take a cab to the airport.
They watch the Super Bowl in a hotel room in Brazil.
c 2006 by Richard Stooker
Richard will teach you the only real ways to win when you gamble:
Take Charge Gambling for Winners