Some one has advanced the statement that every human being is
a gambler at heart. Yet for a man to go into the business of
establishing a card gambling house under modern conditions is to
attempt one of the riskiest businesses in the world. Recently one
of the most noted gaming-house keepers in the country seems to have
suggested a further anomaly in the situation in his utterance in a
court of record:
"When I conduct a house on a 10 per cent basis of profit it is only a
matter of time until my steady patron 'goes broke.'"
In the face of this statement, however, the innocent layman may be
still further at sea when it is recalled by old habitues of the gaming
table that nearly every gambling king of modern history has finished
close to the poorhouse and the potter's field! How is it possible that
the gambler with the insidious, certain 10 per cent which inevitably
wrecks the man who goes often enough to the green table almost
invariably dies in poverty?