Word: gambler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Explains Skinner: "One of the most powerful schedules, the variable-ratio schedule, is characteristic of all gambling systems. The gambler cannot be sure the next play will win, but a certain mean ratio of plays to wins is maintained. This is the way a dishonest gambler hooks his victim. At first the victim is permitted to win fairly often. Eventually he continues to play when he is not winning at all. With this technique, it is possible to create a pathological gambler out of a simple bird like a pigeon...
...picks up half a dozen strays. As each hitchhiker gets into the bucket seat beside him, GTO shrewdly sizes him up and, chameleonlike, takes on a completely new identity, one that he hopes will impress his listener. Spinning out fantasies about imaginary pasts, GTO becomes by turns a gambler, a television producer, a racer, a war hero. The role of GTO in the movie Two Lane Blacktop calls for virtuoso acting, and gets it-from a 43-year-old veteran of a hundred movie and television westerns named Warren Gates. Still little known to the public, Oates is now being...
...anywhere, it is reality he is letting in. Talking to his passengers-a faggot cowpuncher, a grandmother caring for a newly orphaned child, a couple of soldiers on leave-he attempts to draw them into his own baroque imagination. He is by turns an ex-fighter pilot, a gambler, a test driver from Detroit. It is only clear about G.T.O. that whatever road he takes, he will always be lost...
...article last week in Turf World, Antony Parisella, director of mutuels at Belmont Park. said, "The difference between the ordinary bettor and a top gambler like Jules Fink or Larry Darby or S?m Lewin is that when they (Darby et. al.) lose they lose in small handfuls, but when they win they take the money away in wheelbarrows. The ordinary bettor just does not know...
...first day in a Bronx gambling squad, he was taken by his partner to meet a known gambler, was handed an envelope and told "to go buy yourself a hat.'' Astonished, Serpico handed back the envelope, said he didn't need a hat, and walked out. Later he was told such gifts were standard, a "fringe benefit." The bribes amounted to $800 a month per man, he says, and rose to $1,200 for commanding officers. At first he tried to ignore the blatant payoffs. "But every day," he recalls, "they just tried to bring me into...