We live in a pretty world time. Political turmoil the world over, growing environmental concerns, a pandemic. As it has sometimes been said “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen“. But even after all of the current madness is factored in, my mind still returns from time to time to the woman who had GoldenPalace.com tattood on her forehead.
While I would usually commend companies for thinking ‘outside of the box’ with their advertising campaigns, whoever decided to go along with this idea was clearly on a wind up that went a step too far. Not only was it ill-advised on their part, but clearly the woman in question, 30 year old Kari Smith, can’t have been the full ticket either. Admittedly it was inventive of her to come up with the idea of auctioning off advertising space on her own forehead, but the reality of the result is perhaps more a combination of sad and strange.
The winning bid of $10,000 resulted in her having the website address GoldenPalace.com written on her forehead in permanent black block letters. Smith pledged to use the money for her son’s education, so there was at least one sane decision made during this process. She remained adamant throughout said that she didn’t have any regrets about getting the forehead tattoo. Much to my amusement there is, in fact, an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to forehead tattoos.
The question on everyone’s lips though, must now surely be ‘does she still, to this day, have the tattoo?’. It’s now 15 years since that fateful day, and *drumroll* I can confirm that in 2012 GoldenPalace.com actually paid for her to have the tattoo removed. They no doubt wanted to step back from their more controversial advertising strategies. In the early 2000s this included paying multiple individuals, not just Smith, to get forehead and body tattoos of their web address. They also paid $28,000 for a cheese sandwich on eBay alleged to have the image of the Virgin Mary on it, and paid a woman $15,199 to have her name legally changes to GoldenPalace.com!
‘Casino’ is an epic crime drama film based on the non-fiction book, ‘Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, written by Nicholas Pileggi; unusually, Pileggi did not finish the book until after filming has started. Distributed by Universal Pictures in 1995, ‘Casino’ was directed by Martin Scorcese, who co-wrote the screenplay, and stars Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci.
The film charts the rise and fall of Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (De Niro), a former expert sports handicapper, who applies for a gaming licence, despite ‘at least two dozen gambling and bookmaking pinches’, and takes over the everyday running of the Mafia-controlled Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas in the early Seventies. Rothstein is joined in Las Vegas by his childhood friend Nicky Santoro (Pesci), who is assigned by Chicago Mafia boss Remo Gaggi to protect the skimming operation or, in other words, the cash taken ‘off the top’ of daily revenue to fund organised crime. Santoro, though, refuses to keep a low profile and his violent extracurricular activities earm him a place in the so-called ‘Black Book’, officially banning him from every casino in Nevada. Rothstein meets, has a daughter with, and marries former prostitute Ginger McKenna (Stone), but their relationship gradually breaks down, thanks in no small part to her former boyfriend, conman-turned pimp Lester Diamond (James Woods) and her increasing dependency on alcohol and drugs.
Rothstein was inspired by Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal, a real-life Las Vegas legend, while McKenna was inspired by his real-life wife, Geraldine ‘Geri’ McGee, a Las Vegas showgirl, and Santoro was inspired by Anthony Spilotro, a.k.a. ‘Tony the Ant’, a much-feared Mafia enforcer, whose badly beaten body was found, along with that of his brother, Michael, in an Indiana cornfield in 1986.
Released by Columbia Pictures in 2008, ’21’ is a slick, stylish crime drama film loosely based on the book, ‘Bringing Down The House’, written by Ben Mezrich, which tells the story of the real-life Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Blackjack Team. Jim Sturgess stars as brilliant, but down-on-his-luck, mathematics prodigy Ben Campbell, whose admission to Harvard Medical School depends on his ability to raise $300,000 to pay tuition fees. Having impressed statistics professor Micky Rosa, played by Kevin Spacey, by unhestatingly solving the so-called ‘Monty Hall’ problem – a counter-intuitive probabililty puzzle – Campbell is deemed suitable to be trained in the ‘dark art’ of card counting.
Based on the principle that a deck rich in tens, court cards and aces is good for the blackjack player, keeping a tally of certain cards as they are played reveals when the odds shift in favour of the player and give a card counter a small advantage, typically between 0.5% and 1.5%, over the house. Although not technically illegal, card counting is heavily discouraged by casinos.
Having passed his initiation at an ‘underground’ casino in Chinatown, downton Boston, Campbell joins four fellow recruits on weekend trips to Las Vegas; using a well-rehearsed system of hand signals and code words they proceed to win hundreds of thousands of dollars playing blackjack. Predictably, despite his honourable intentions, Campbell is gradually corrupted by the high-rolling lifestyle and, ultimately, his arrogance and greed attracts unwanted attention. Events spiral out of control, leading to a final showdown, during which the avaricious Rosa finally gets his comeuppance at the hands of his long-time nemesis, veteran casino security consultant Cole Williams, played by Laurence Fishburne.
The movie was set to be one of the top gambling movies of all time (it did make the top 10 gambling movies in Italy ) but over time it has instead become regarded as one of many gambling flick of modern times..
Entire volumes have been written about casinos. From stories of the establishments themselves, the history of Vegas, playing strategies and big wins. There’s no shortage of approaches to take with casino Q&As. In this edition though we’ll be centering in on the money (both virtual and real) and the collectibles side of casinos.
What is the highest chip value in use in a Vegas?
This may well be one of those questions without a confirmed known answer, are there are close to 200 separate casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada – 30 of them forming part of the Las Vegas strip. Most casinos offer $1000 chips for those wishing to put their peddle to the mental, gambling-wise. If you sit at a roulette table for any amount of time, no matter the denominations people are betting, you get to see an awful lot of money exchanging hands pretty quickly. For some though, they think beyond the low thousands. Consider the Floyd Mayweather types, making tens of millions of dollars and then not thinking twice about unwinding at a Vegas casino.
After searching high and low for an answer, we’ve settled on the Paris, Las Vegas, which offers a casino chip to the dizzying value of $100,000. It’s not often you’d ever actually see this chip as it’s held back for those with multi million dollar credit lines (arguably more money than sense!). Interestingly, the $100,000 chip which of course sports a RFID security tag, is usually reserved for baccarat. The game is known to attract big money players; Planet Hollywood’s baccarat tables allow a maximum bet of a hefty $200,000!
Can you turn cash to chips and vice versa in Grand Theft Auto’s Diamond Casino?
Lover of the Grand Theft Auto franchise were elated when in July 2019 a fully kitted out casino (Blackjack, Poker, Roulette and more) popped up in the GTA 5 world. The casino, set in the fictional setting of Los Santos, even lets you exchange real money for casino chips, so is as real as can be. Chips can be purchased in-game at the ratio of $1 to 1 chip. Any winnings can then be spent in the GTA world such as on cars or weapons. However, you cannot turn your chips back into real world cash. Whether this will change in future is anyone’s guess. Some though would say that’s it’s not healthy to blur the lines between gaming and gambling. In fact a number of countries have blocked gambling based mini games in the likes of GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption.
How are casino chips made?
Much in the same way that people are often fascinated by ‘where their money comes from’, many have wondered how casino chips are made. As you might well imagine there is more to them than meets the eye. It’s important for starters that chips are aesthetically pleasing. They are central to casino play and so significant thought goes into the design process, colour scheme and even weight of the chips. The manufacturing is as granular as giving consideration to the sound casino chips make when they are clatter together. They also need to be durable and so size and thickness is a consideration. Worldwide, there are only a handful of trusted companies with the experience to make professional casino chips (Abbiati, Matsui, and Gaming Partners International); rather than the cheap plastic ones you get in home roulette and poker sets.
Chips need to be casino specific and distinctive, so they have all manner of customisation options such as the design, rim, inner/outer section of the chip, and a choice of up to 50 colours. All previous designs are stored in a database to ensure that there are no matches. Underneath the bonnet there’s plenty going on too. Chips routinely sport both UV and RFID tag elements to ensure their authenticity and security.View it as being similar to a watermark on a bank note. So in summing up, a simple casino chip is a lot more complex and planned out than it may look at first glance.