About Me

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Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. Well, I can tell you that after teaching high school, handling an unruly gambler was a piece of cake. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." I wanted to write the first realistic novel about casino life from the perspective of an experienced table games dealer. I spent the next five years circling the globe for Princess Cruises. Sometimes life exceeds your dreams. I was awed by the wonders of Venice, the fjords of Norway, and the Northern Lights in Leningrad. I returned from ships with a very special souvenir, my Scottish husband Ray. We went to work in Palm Springs. We now live in Hollywood, Florida, where I write about my casino years while wistfully gazing out at the ocean.

ROULETTE, CAN YOU SPIN IT TO WIN IT?

I just found an interesting article and experiment on spin control with roulette wheels. I for one don't believe that any dealer can control the ball to the degree required to hit a specific number or section. If it were really possible to do this, then the game of roulette as we know it simply could not exist. And that for me is a very simple proof showing that spin control is all in the dealers head.
I started in the casino business at a major London casino, and the standard spin was very slow, only about 4 or 5 times around the wheel, and also with the wheel just turning at a fairly leisurely speed. The idea was to get as many spins in a day as possible. We never reversed the spin either, and guess what, it made not a whit of difference in anyone's ability to predict the number. The casinos P/C was the same as anyhere else. I was very surprised when a few years later I started work at another casino and discovered the dealers whacking the ball around at a hundred miles an hour, changing the spin direction and also using such high wheel speeds that the ball would sometimes bounce clean out of the wheel! No doubt this was all mandated by management’s belief that this would prevent players/dealers from predicting the outcome, or that it would make the result more ‘random’ in some fashion.

Modern wheels and even the balls are highly sophisticated pieces of fine engineering. Also, nowadays the separators between the pockets are very low, ensuring that the ball will jump into and out of many pockets before coming to rest. Generally, the ball will fall into a pocket when it begins to slow down, but then the ball will bounce out and around the pockets landing in many numbers until the ball finally stays in one pocket. If you spin the ball enough times a pattern will ‘seem’ to develop, just like when you flip a coin a hundred times, it will very rarely land on fifty heads and fifty tales. Some numbers will win more often on the wheel, but that pattern cannot be predicted. That is just the randomness of numbers and the proclivity of the human brain to see ‘patterns’ where there are none. It is simply how we have evolved to make sense of our big scary world.

My highly rated thriller Casino Queen has been featured at The Big Thrill, Charlotte Reader Podcast and dozens of other publications. Spend some time at the Night Hawk and find out what it is really like to work behind the felt.

Caroline Popov, alone, heartbroken, and deeply in debt ends up in glamorous Palm Springs, California where Native casinos have just opened. She lands a job at the Palm Oasis Casino and is mentored by the charismatic tribal chairman, John Tovar.

Embraced by casino culture, Caroline works her way up to casino manager of the Night Hawk, in the High Desert town of Joshua Tree. There, she is responsible for managing multicultural team members, satisfying the demands of challenging guests, growing revenue while rooting out corruption.

Her list of enemies grows as she uncovers the underbelly of corruption running through the casino. With her life on the line can she pull out a win?

Click the link below to order at Amazon

Casino Queen at Amazon.com

Click the link below to order at Barnes and Noble 

Casino Queen at Barnes & Noble

 

Our first date became our book cover!

You can read Cruise Quarters free at Kindle Unlimited. It is about my years working on a cruise ship and meeting my husband there. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Click the link below to check it out. 

Cruise Quarters Kindle Edition Amazon.com