On Wednesday night, I spoke to Anthony Curtis, a former professional gambler who is now the owner and publisher of
Las Vegas Advisor, a Web site covering the casino business. (On Thursday evening, after this piece was published, Curtis e-mailed to say that he’d just discovered Paddock’s name in the Las Vegas Advisor database. “He was buying how-to-play products from us,” he explained—all of them related to video poker.) Curtis said that, unlike traditional slot machines, video-poker machines can be outsmarted. The video-poker machines at Mandalay Bay, according to Curtis, paid out $99.17 for every hundred dollars played. “Video poker is well known for attracting people who have compulsive gambling problems,” he told me. “It’s almost the perfect gambling game. But it also has the property of being able to be beaten. So it attracts a lot of very intelligent people.” Curtis told me that he’d been in touch with a number of such players in Las Vegas who “can derive advantages over the casino of half of one per cent, sometimes higher.” He said that around a dozen of these players, whom he declined to name, had “ended up running in the same circles as Paddock,” and recalled observing him over the past few months.
Curtis’s sources told him that Paddock was not a so-called advantage player, someone who can beat the video-poker game. “They call themselves A.P.s,” Curtis said, “and just about everyone I talked to said, ‘No, he wasn’t A.P. level.’ They discounted him as just a high roller, a guy who might have read a book or two, or something like that.” But Curtis heard that Paddock was what’s referred to as “a low seven,” or someone who has a verified low-seven-figure bank account, which would have afforded him a six-figure line of credit at casinos. Curtis went on, “People who are semi-sharp, as we say in Vegas, they know they’re better off playing video poker than slots. This guy was smart enough to know that. He was not on top of the world of play, but he was a gambler that kind of knew how to play the angles a little bit.”
for nonamericans ( me
)
Dude was one of those white dues that be stealing white women left and right from Asian nikkas. 
