October 11th, 10:15 a.m. Live and via Zoom
Gambling in Exotic Locations
Jake Jacobs (our AMW president and resident gambler) will continue our gambling education, this time focusing on his adventures in Korea, Japan, and Atlantic City. He will discuss some techniques used to beat the casinos, as well as problems he and friends had with casinos who did not wish to be beaten, and ways they disguised themselves to throw them off the scent.
Jake has been a member of Arizona Mystery Writers since 2002. A native of the Chicago suburbs, he began his writing career with articles and stories about backgammon. Currently, he has written two books and over four hundred articles on the game. He also co-wrote the screenplay for a kickboxing movie, Ring of Fire. His story “Killing Grandpa” was included in AMW’s anthology A Way With Murder. After moving to Tucson, wrote his mystery novel, The Battered Butterfly.
In 2004 he was offered a “three-month” job placing bets on horses in Japan. In 2020, when the temporary job finally ended, he was living in Singapore, and had somehow acquired a wife, a daughter, and a Chihuahua. He moved them all to Tucson (in the middle of Covid).
Jake has been a professional gambler for more than forty years. Besides backgammon – he is a former national champion – he played blackjack, as a card counter, for nearly twenty-five years, and has been in casinos all over the world, in places as exotic as Kathmandu, and Peoria, Illinois. During the late nineties and early aughts he worked in Hong Kong. These days he is semi-retired, though he still plays in a few backgammon tournaments each year and is wearing out his welcome with the Arizona sportsbooks.
