Reply To: Ways to raise capital for real estate investing…..

[Lance Thompson]

Trailer for the movie Rounders & although the chosen profession studied in the movie is poker, it’s really a movie that teaches you about risk-taking period………Oh by the way, wanna make sure that you all have a very “deep” understanding of 1 particular scene where you can miss it if you’re not careful. The scene near the end of the movie where Worm gets busted cheating by the state troopers and ends up getting both him & Mike’s a$$es whipped. What Worm was using was an illegal dealing method called “base-dealing” where the dishonest dealer is dealing off of the bottom of the deck. When the Sarge says “Okay, if you boys aren’t working let’s let the cards do the talking. Stu, turn over his cards” and when Stu flipped the cards over there were three 7s and an Ace right? Then the Sarge says “One more thing, let me see the deck…..” and when Stu handed him the deck, the Sarge shows everybody the bottom card which was a second Ace that Worm was just about to give to Mike. Well that would have given Mike two Aces and three 7s which would have been a Full House. Out of the Top 10 Ranking Poker Hands, Full House is the 4th highest ranking hand you can have. The only other 3 hands that beat a Full House are a 4 Of A Kind, A Straight Flush and a Royal Flush and it was next to impossible that anybody else at the table would have had any of those 3 hands……not completely impossible but NEARLY impossible. Worm basically handed Mike what they call in poker “The nuts” which in poker lingo means “nothing beats it”…..he was dealing him a hand that could have cleaned out several stacks at the table…..that’s why those cops were so angry and reacted the way that they did.

That’s why the #1 thing I took away from that movie is whatever you do, STAY AWAY from playing poker in underground spots. Only play in the casinos where there are floor managers & cameras in the ceilings watching “every move” of the dealers. I’m not saying that it’s “completely impossible” to cheat in casinos, but it’s extremely difficult……extremely difficult. The movie Casino with Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone shows you how intense the monitoring that takes place in these casinos really is, and that was back in the day BEFORE they began installing surveillance cameras in those establishments. So casinos are pretty trustworthy, at least U.S. casinos. Can’t necessarily vouch for the casinos in other countries but I’m betting that in most “advanced industrialized” countries that they have systems setup pretty similar to what they do here in the U.S.