Robofootball: Doublespin

Michael “Mike” Robinson was a slim man of 6 feet l inch in height, thick dark hair that he would pass on to his son, Jess. Mike always seemed 20 pounds too light, somewhat wiry, but not all that muscular. His wife, Virginia “Ginny” Robinson had bigger arms than him, but a lot of that was due to genetics and fat. She stood 5’9” tall and always seemed to be about 30 pounds too heavy. Even when she lost a few pounds, it came back, always in her arms and butt it seemed. With women you never knew, there were many places excess weight could show itself; with men, it was always in the stomach. All in all, Jess’s parents weighed about the same, around 180 pounds with a + or – 2 or 3 error factor.

Jess inherited his father’s somewhat shy disposition though Jess had unwittingly gained a measure of unavoidable popularity by being the varsity quarterback as a junior. Mike Robinson on the other hand could not come up with a date in high school no matter what the roulette wheel said, he was habitually stuck with the losing number. If he bet on red, it came up black, if he tried even, the result was odd, and the probabilities for most other outcomes were much less. Even when he asked a girl out, he was let down gently with the “we can still be friends” death knell. Since he couldn’t get dates, he banded with others in the nerdy geeky class, joining the chess club, though he was not all that great at the game. A splinter group so to speak split off and played less complex games like Risk, Stratego, and especially cards. Mike liked to play poker and even Euchre for a buck a game and 50 cents a set. Of course, you had to win the game to collect your sets.

College was even worse in the girl department as Mike had accepted a partial scholarship offer to study mechanical engineering at Michigan Tech. Michigan Tech was located at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula in Houghton, Michigan, right across the Portage River from Hancock; arguably, the most scenic region in Michigan. It once sported numerous copper mines and is still known as Michigan’s Copper Country. There are hills, mountains, river-strewn valleys, scenic drives, and unique geological features that make it a rock hound’s paradise. Unfortunately, since the school focuses primarily on engineering, mining, and forestry, it attracts more than 80% of its student population from the male gender. Even the least attractive chubby high school girls in the general vicinity of the college never lack for a date or multiple offers for one.

The winters could be quite long, cold, and snowy in Houghton and the city records over 270 inches of snowfall every year, easily 8 or 9 times as much as down state southern cities like Flint, Grand Rapids, and Detroit. Mike played a lot of cards, a good deal of dime-quarter poker, and from experience combined with a halfway decent scientific/mathematical mind, he became a pretty good player, just not a great one. To become an engineer, one had to take several calculus courses, differential equations, and probability and statistics which the latter too were often combined into the same class, even the book title would say something like “Probability with Statistical Applications” or “Statistical Methods with Probability.” It seemed like cards and dice always made the best and most frequent medium for examples and problems in the book.

There were a couple of problems with Mike and gambling. One is that no matter how much one could study the odds and probabilities, and note there is a difference between the two like Mike often pointed out to sound knowledgeable, the luck and even the cheat factor could defeat any measure of skill at any time. For instance, the probability of rolling a 6 in a single 6-sided die is 1 out of 6, but the odds are 1 to 5 with 1 potential winner against 5 losers. Odds are calculated by taking the probability of an event happening, 1 in 6 for rolling the 6, and then dividing by the probability of the event not happening or 5 in 6. 1/6 divided by 5/6 would yield 1/5 or 1 to 5. Mike’s first problem was that he was not lucky, and lost more than he won to experienced players despite having serious knowledge of odds and probabilities.

The other more significant problem was that Mike Robinson had a somewhat weak suggestible personality, one subject to addiction and prediction. Before Ginny could catch up and stop him once at an airport while taking a bathroom break, Michael as she called him during times of indignation, shelled out $20 for a Hari Krishna booklet. Ginny had learned early on that she had to be stronger, a little more dominant and controlling to keep Mike in check, but like many women with weak husbands, she would actually relish that control of where they vacationed, traveled if just for a weekend, where they dined, the food they ate, the television and movies that they watched, and above all, she handled the budget like a Chinese censor, taking his larger checks, combining them with hers, and then putting him on a strict allowance.

After Mike had finished college, he moved back to Harrison where he had family, namely his mother and brother Larry. He got a job in Clare as a design engineer for metal molds used in the plastic injection mold industry. Plastic pellets were melted with the machines about a metal mold to form parts, mostly for vehicles including Recreational Vehicles (RV’s). Mike’s company had three test machines to see if the prototype molds made by his fellow machinists would produce the parts to the desired size and specifications of their customers. There was some trial and error despite the best Computer-Aided Design (CAD) programs out there. The machinists would cut solid blocks of tool grade steel using Bridgeport mills, newer CNC lathe-like cutting machines with enclosed operations, and Electronic Discharge Machines (EDM’s) that cut electrically with a thin taught wire. Mike designed molds to make dashboard components, door panels, cup holders, center counsels, bumper guards, and fan housings along with 4-prong propeller blades for RV fans. For decades it seemed, there was an incredible amount of cheap oil-based plastic components on vehicles where it all had once been mostly heavy, but durable steel, limited only by the amount of rust inhibitors sprayed on it. Plastic was cheap and cracked or broke easily, but it, along with its composites, was the norm rather than the exception, even as the price of oil continuously rose.

Mike’s brother Larry was a truck driver who was paid quite well for hauling what was considered hazardous waste for Dow Chemical out of Midland, Michigan. Larry’s special hazmat license designation earned him one and half times the standard trucking mileage rate and he had a daily route that went from Midland to a special hazard dump site near Detroit. Larry was 2 years older than Mike and far more outgoing and gregarious, but less educated. Truck driving school had lasted two months. Larry was the kind of guy that could walk into a public bathroom and come out with 2 new friends when the average straight guy was doing his best not to look anywhere near the stranger using the adjacent urinal. Larry had a son with one girl while he was still a senior in high school, and then another with a second woman at the age of 19. He married the second one, Jenny, and got visitation rights with his first son every other weekend, split holidays, and a 3-week block of time in the summer. It was Larry and Jenny who had set up Mike with Ginny, as Ginny was Jenny’s high school BFF.

Ginny was a little tall and dumpy, and had the misfortune of always being taller than the boys around her until her senior year in high school. Her dates were few and far between but not quite the extreme outlier that Mike was. She swooned after the guys she couldn’t have or get, and rejected the ones she could. She and Jenny had not exactly been in the “in crowd” at Midland High, but they were close friends, occasionally double-dated, and Ginny had been the Maid of Honor for Jenny. She actually met Mike as he stood in the wedding, but was not the best man. Ginny hardly noticed him and had little contact aside from a meet and greet while Mike rarely did much of anything to initiate contact with members of the opposite sex. It was a full two years after Mike had gotten out of college that his brother and sister-in-law reintroduced him to Ginny.

There were no great sparks or love at first sight, but Ginny at least found him somewhat attractive. He was taller than her, slim, and not fat like nearly every guy she seemed to date or was set up within the last 5 years. He was very plain in dress, a cheap $12 old school barbershop haircut, a little rough in the chin from overusing cheap plastic disposable razors, and clothes that looked like Wal-Mart’s best offerings from 10 years previous – some basic non-designer jeans and a knit shirt with some unrecognizable logo along the front breast pocket that would’ve been an Izod-wannabe from ages ago. He wore white socks too that showed despairingly above some low cut Nike’s. At least his shoes were cool, but was 1 out of 5 a good probability?

He was extremely shy, and in a world where girls had caught up and even surpassed men due to their overwhelming majority in college graduation rates, it still seemed that men took the lead when it came to driving, selecting date destinations, opening doors, falling back to let the lady go first, walking on the outside nearest the street, and so forth; however, much was not the case with Michael Robinson. He was so shy and tentative that Ginny soon found that she could dictate when to hold hands, kiss, and ultimately, when, where, how, and what time to have sexual intercourse. Surprisingly, she liked it! It was new to her. If she got uppity, snide, or cross, it seemed like Mike would go out of his way to make her feel better when most real men would fight back, or just ultimately leave over time.

When she thought it over from a practical standpoint, it worked as well. She had gotten nothing more than a 2-year Associates Degree as a pharmacy tech at Delta College, a community college. She would never be anything more career-wise than a gopher for the licensed pharmacists at her job in a drug store in Clare. Mike on the other hand earned well over $60,000 a year, double her own salary, and with her managing the budget, it’s like she had 3 times the amount of money to work with. Mike and Larry’s mom still had 80 acres left on the farm and split the land between the 2 sons, with the final transfer taking place upon her death. Mike and Larry’s dad had died prematurely of a heart attack at the age of 52, but he had been a big heavy set man and a chain smoker at that.

In the end, Mike wasn’t a bad choice from a practical, realistic, or even a settlement standpoint, but her sacrifice would be that he never roused much can’t-hold-back-tear-off-your-clothes passion in her and steady orgasms would not be in the cards for her, at least on the one day of the month or so that she would allow him to touch her. Once they had Jess, she would never lose the excess pregnancy weight, and would spend the rest of what would turn out to be a short life over 200 pounds. With Mike’s personality and overall plainness, she subconsciously or not, did not feel the need or incentive to go out of her way to be attractive; as a consequence, she just let herself go.

If Mike did have one vice she soon discovered, it was gambling. He may be played poker once or twice a month with his pals at work, mostly dimes and quarters; he never lost much more than $20 on a bad night. She could live with that, but when he got into a little trouble betting on football with a bookie connected to the powerful Verlucci family, who had been a friend of a friend, or more accurately, a friend of one of his poker buddies, she had put her foot down hard when he lost $200 when he couldn’t cover the spread on a Lions game against the Vikings. The Lions, once a perennial loser in the NFL, seemed to be winning more and more games than they were losing over the past few years. They won the game in overtime on a field goal, but the spread had been 6. If Mike ever won money, he bet it back again until he lost it, the same way that people do at a casino when they win some money too early rather than take it and walk out.

Little did Ginny know that after that he set up his own bank account, hoarded money when he could, pawned a few items here and there that she really didn’t miss like some golf clubs and a few family items that his mother had given him. As it got worse, he took out a small loan on the land he owned unbeknownst to her. He had an eBay account and through PayPal, everything could be done electronically on his work computer away from home. Mike’s mother had given him some old jewelry, a small coin collection of his father’s, a little Depression glass, some wooden Hummel’s and Steinbach nutcrackers made in Germany, and other odds and ends. He pulled them out of basement boxes and sold them all to feed his growing gambling habit.

With the Soaring Eagle Casino located in nearby Mt. Pleasant run by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian tribe, it was not so pleasant a place for Mike. He liked to play most all of the table games with Blackjack as his favorite. Once in a while, he’d take a sick day or day off without telling Ginny and head to the casino. He had a good mathematical mind and tried all of the betting tricks out there including some simple card counting. He would sit at one end of a blackjack table, usually 3rd base, to get a better view of all the cards that were played upward. Casinos had long ago forbid patrons from even touching the cards which did make it easier to do a soft count similar to that once employed by the MIT students in Vegas before the various houses figured out what they were doing.

The soft count was simply a positive or negative one. Using an “8” as a neutral card as suits were meaningless in blackjack, Mike would start with zero and add 1 when a card was played that was less than 8, and subtract one for those larger than 8 including aces which could be utilized as 1 or 11. If he had a positive count going, that meant that there were more large cards left in the decks in the shoe, which in turn, was a benefit to the player – it would help with double downs as well as bust the dealer more frequently when the dealer pulled up a crap card like a 4, 5, or 6. The opposite was true with a negative count and Mike would either leave the table or perhaps try a series betting scheme.

The dealer’s main advantage in blackjack is that when both the dealer and player bust over a 21 point count, the house always wins because player has to take his/her cards first. In an attempt to circumvent this strategy, Mike sometimes played by never allowing himself to bust as he would stand on a hard count of 12 or more. The trick here was to keep doubling the bet until he won, and then go back to a lower bet. For instance, at a $10/$500 min/max table limit, Mike would bet $10 and lose. He would double it; actually he would bet $25 the 2nd time after a loss since that was a convenient chip denomination. Say he would lose again, he would bet $50 the 3rd time. If he lost 3 in a row, all the while not allowing his own total to bust, he would then bet $100 the 4th time. If he won, he’d revert back to the $10 minimum bet, and keep betting $10 while he won, doubling it when he lost. This way, he would lose a total of $85 on 3 losing hands in a row, win $100 on the 4th hand, and come out $15 ahead despite only winning 1 of 4 hands. Naturally, there are flaws in any betting strategy.

Since the dealer is forced to hit on a soft 16 count or less, the probability of the dealer gong over 21 is 1 out of every 3.5 hands or 2 of 7. By doubling his bet and always holding between 12 and 21, Mike expected to win more than he lost, and sometimes he did. Once he cleared $1,000 and a few times better than $500, but every strategy breaks down in the long run against the house. There comes a point when one can no longer double beyond the table betting limit. 10-25-50-100-250-500 was Mike’s base strategy; nevertheless, there were several times when the dealer would not go over 21 after a streak of 6 or 7 or even more consecutive hands. The dealer might bust 3 or 4 in a row too at times; unfortunately, the busting 2 of 7 was never consistent in the short run.

To double 5 times after the $10 minimum bet required Mike to bring an additional $925 too which he didn’t always have. He might bring $200 which allowed for a little doubling until he could build up; however, there were a few times when he sat down at a blackjack table with $200 and lost it in a matter of minutes. Like most gamblers, everyone would hear when you won $500 or even a thousand, most failed to mention the countless times they lost. Few realize that gambling is one of the most highly profitable legitimate and illegitimate enterprises in the world. The lavishness of the big casino hotels in countless cities around the world should be evidence enough of the unfathomable revenue these places capture. Legal gambling alone accounts for 1% of America’s Gross National Product, $10 billion for every $1 trillion; illegal gambling takes in even more.

Mike could use the same doubling strategy at roulette, playing red, black, odd, or even consistently, doubling the bet until the winner came up and then reverting back to a smaller bet. If he fell to $20, he’d quit roulette or blackjack, and dump the rest of it in slot machines like old broken pay phones that took your money without the benefit of a call, and when you hit the refund clapper, nothing came back, sort of like a vending machine where the candy gets stuck. By scrounging up his allowance that Ginny gave him, selling off a few things here and there, mortgaging the land, and still making a little profit off that land by baling hay with Jess, he was at least able to keep his head above water, though the water level seemed to settle somewhere between his mouth and nose. It still allowed him to breathe, but not by much. The levees would break and the drowning would commence with the death of Ginny.

Ginny had kept a serious check on his gambling ways since she controlled the paychecks. She knew that he did some, but never enough, with the exception of the $200, to get into any kind of serious trouble, and in the great scheme of things, $200 wasn’t that much. When Jess was 13, they had found a lump in her breast, and the biopsy showed that it was indeed cancerous. There was no history of it in her family as far as she knew; nevertheless, cancer was never fully predictable though hereditary consideration was definitely a significant factor in putting the odds against one. She survived with the radiation and chemotherapy, lost her hair and some weight too, but she still hovered around 200 pounds.

Despite being tested twice a year, a large lump seemed to form overnight 4 years later and this time the cancerous cells had spread rapidly like a fire in a large open cardboard box-making plant. It hit her major organs, especially the liver and kidneys, and transplants were ruled out since it had spread indiscriminately. At the age of 45 she was gone, and Mike had basically turned over every significant decision-making detail in their lives to her in the last 20 years. He was lost for awhile but not totally stupid, just a bit naïve and inexperienced. They did have 12 years left on the original 30-year house mortgage, a car payment on Ginny’s Chevrolet Malibu that they had purchased from Carly’s dad, and various bills that Ginny kept up to date in a small 2-drawer filing cabinet; the usual stuff like the water/sewer bill, the consumers energy bill for heat and electricity, cable TV, house and auto insurance, cell phones, and so forth.

Their insurance agent turned out to be a great help as they had a $50,000 term life insurance policy on Ginny that Mike was able to use a quarter of it for all of the funeral and burial expenses. Had he been a wise man without a serious addiction, he could have invested the rest, perhaps set a little aside to help Jess with college, or even paid off most of the remaining mortgage principal; however, the extra money proved to be a rather tempting boon to his gambling addiction, one that he could not ignore or fight against.

The little $25 and $50 bets with the bookie soon ballooned to $100, $200, $300, and even $500. Unbeknownst to Mike, the local bookie was affiliated with the powerful Verlucci family, a much larger organized crime syndicate in Detroit who took a large piece of the central and northern Michigan action, and an even higher percentage on the bigger bets. Bigger bets had to have some stronger financial backing, especially on the off chance that a long odds underdog came through. To make matters worse, Mike began drinking more to cope with the loss of Ginny. He had never been much more than a social drinker, 2 maybe 3 light beers at a poker game with his work pals and brother Larry, shared a bottle of wine or champagne with Ginny on a rare special occasion or nice dinner out, and another beer once in awhile. His physique was not built all that well for volume bender-like consumption, but now, he was hitting the bars, drinking in the casinos when he never did before while gambling, and over-indulging consistently during poker nights.

Mike had a more distant relationship with Jess than Ginny. Ginny encouraged the sports as Mike was never much interested in or really much good at any. Sure, he threw a few balls around with Jess when Jess was little, maybe got a football going at Thanksgiving with Larry, but Mike was the ball fumbler, strikeout king, and would be lucky to hit any part of the backboard with a basketball from over 12 feet away. When it came to picking players, Mike would end up somewhere in the middle since the captain picking would at least observe that Mike had a little height despite being skinny, and assumed wrongly that he would be more athletic than most girls. Once he was observed playing, Mike would fall in the team-picking trial toward the end with the awkward girls and the Nancy Boys.

Jess was just the opposite. He inherited some of Mike’s tendency to thinness, but thanks to Ginny, he was broader in the shoulders and upper arms. Jess was frequently made one of the two captains as the gym teacher, respective coach, or what have you, often took the best two athletes and made them captains to split them up. Jess tried to play it all with Ginny’s encouragement: football, baseball, basketball, and soccer were all school sanctioned sports in Harrison. About the only major sports exclusion was hockey, and that was because Harrison did not have a hockey rink or indoor ice arena for that matter. Jess may have been a little shy and tentative around girls, and may also have needed one to lead him around, but with Carly, it was more 60-40 in her favor, not 95-5 like his parents. The biggest difference however is that the kids were in love at an uncommon level at their young 16 years of age, the kind that Mike and Ginny would never aspire to.

Ginny spent much of her time hauling Jess to countless practices and games. Mike usually tagged along to most of the games and only filled in for practice duty if Ginny was not available. Unlike most parents who boast and exaggerate the athletic ability of their kids, the same ones who think that their kids are more skilled than they really are, constantly berating coaches for not playing their kids more, and believing that these kids are bound for glory and full ride scholarship offers from multiple colleges prior to their legendary pro career, Ginny was actually right about Jess. He was always just better than his peers, quicker, faster, a better hitter, a better ball handler and shooter, and an excellent thrower with a great arm whether it was at 3rd base or quarterback. He likely could have tried his hand at pitching too, but that was one position that he had little interest in though he pitched in Little League baseball. During his junior year in high school, the only question was whether or not the pro baseball scouts could persuade him to give up his favorite sport of football in favor of one less prone to injury. From what Ginny could tell, it would be no contest as football was it. She would be the proudest and maybe the loudest too if Jess could get a shot at a Big 10 school like Michigan or Michigan State. Unfortunately, she would not live to see it and Jess’s own dreams and goals would suffer a serious interruption as well.

“In the beginning, the Lord of Beings created men and women, and in the form of commandments in a hundred thousand chapters, he laid down the rules for regulating their existence with regard to Right, Gain, and Love….Sexual intercourse being a thing dependent on man and woman requires the application of proper means by them, and these means are to be learnt from the Kama Sutra. The non-application of proper means, which we see in the brute creation, is caused by their being unrestrained.”

Kama Sutra, 1, 1; 2, 1-4 (5th Century)