Bob Wachtel

How can anybody do that?

And immediately, you could challenge them to propositions.

And those were situations you'd set up where each person would get their turn to make their move, and the game would be played out to the end.

And then you'd turn the board around and allow the other person to make their move, and the game would be played out till the end.

You'd log a whole bunch of data.

Not all of it was that valuable, because if you didn't play these games well in subsequent moves, it didn't prove very much.

But there were some very simple situations, especially in bear-offs at the last couple of moves of the game, where...

the game could be played out in 10 seconds.

And you could log hundreds of games, and sometimes if you had an advantage, you could log hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

Yes, but only a tiny segment of the Bear Off.

The first volume, I decided to name it In the Game Until the End.

Because back in the day at the Mayfair Club in New York, the marks or pigeons, when they got in these positions, would say, at least I'm in the game until the end.

There was a lot of mockery of the pigeons.

I always liken it to the vista that the pioneers in America encountered when the bison covered the plains of the whole country.

And you could shoot them at will.

They were always there for the taking.

That was what it was like in the early 70s.

There was an inflow of new pigeons, but the hustlers of the day would husband them themselves into their little flocks.

There were some hustlers at that club who really weren't good players at all.

But they had flocks of even worse players, much worse players who they'd shelter from people like me.