loved doing it to the would be wolves
This guy was desperate when he came through the door. I've been there myself other times in life where the three dollars I put up on the first bet in a bar was from an odd job I did that day. I started the day hungry and broke, I was still hungry. I have also been selling my own vehicles or land when I had a wife and three children less than a hundred yards away and no way to feed them supper unless I made a sale, and it was late afternoon. You find out what kind of a gambler you really are when you are negotiating under those conditions! I almost always got the price I wanted for something or more but if folks knew just how badly they had me by the short and curleys sometimes they could have had what I was selling for a fourth of the price.
There is a huge difference between busting other predators and busting desperate or out of control gamblers. I rarely went bust myself and if I went bust it was for the night, I kept a fair amount of cash in the bank most of the time in my gambling years. My rough times were from when I wasn't gambling regularly.
Most of the people I busted would take the ten or twenty I handed them back and go build it up into another stake. They were single and carefree and if they missed a meal or two it wouldn't bother them much anyway. One of my hard and fast rules was that I didn't raise a bet although I would get the betting started up to five dollars. That doesn't sound like much but minimum wage was $1.25 and take home was about a dollar an hour. If casual players lost a little they weren't really hurt. When a guy came in stalling and jacking the bet busting him flatter than a pancake was just good fun. It took me a long time to realize that some of these were jackasses with families that thought they were the next Fast Eddie or Vincent.
Running with the wolves is fun. Although Eli Wallach had a point in the Magnificent Seven when he said words to the effect of,"If God didn't mean for them to be sheared he wouldn't have made them sheep" I found that I really don't have the stomach for shearing sheep.
Hu
This guy was desperate when he came through the door. I've been there myself other times in life where the three dollars I put up on the first bet in a bar was from an odd job I did that day. I started the day hungry and broke, I was still hungry. I have also been selling my own vehicles or land when I had a wife and three children less than a hundred yards away and no way to feed them supper unless I made a sale, and it was late afternoon. You find out what kind of a gambler you really are when you are negotiating under those conditions! I almost always got the price I wanted for something or more but if folks knew just how badly they had me by the short and curleys sometimes they could have had what I was selling for a fourth of the price.
There is a huge difference between busting other predators and busting desperate or out of control gamblers. I rarely went bust myself and if I went bust it was for the night, I kept a fair amount of cash in the bank most of the time in my gambling years. My rough times were from when I wasn't gambling regularly.
Most of the people I busted would take the ten or twenty I handed them back and go build it up into another stake. They were single and carefree and if they missed a meal or two it wouldn't bother them much anyway. One of my hard and fast rules was that I didn't raise a bet although I would get the betting started up to five dollars. That doesn't sound like much but minimum wage was $1.25 and take home was about a dollar an hour. If casual players lost a little they weren't really hurt. When a guy came in stalling and jacking the bet busting him flatter than a pancake was just good fun. It took me a long time to realize that some of these were jackasses with families that thought they were the next Fast Eddie or Vincent.
Running with the wolves is fun. Although Eli Wallach had a point in the Magnificent Seven when he said words to the effect of,"If God didn't mean for them to be sheared he wouldn't have made them sheep" I found that I really don't have the stomach for shearing sheep.
Hu
