As reported by the Dayton Daily News: “Efforts to expand gambling in Ohio took a double-barreled assault Monday, July 20.

” LetOhioVote, a newly formed committee, asked the Supreme Court to affirm the right of voters to decide whether video slot machines should be placed at Ohio’s seven racetracks. If the court agrees, the group will launch a petition drive to put the issue on the November 2010 ballot and delay plans to roll out the slots before then, Carlo LoParo, spokesman for the group, said.

” Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner announced an investigation into alleged irregularities involving petition circulators gathering signatures to put a plan for four casinos before voters on Nov. 3. In a news release, Brunner said “in the end it is likely to be the Ohio Supreme Court that will determine whether this issue is submitted to voters this fall.”

“The challenge to the slots plan comes three days after Gov. Ted Strickland signed a new $50.5 billion, two-year state budget that includes the slots. The budget projects that slots would rake in $933 million over two years to help balance the budget.

“If successful, the lawsuit could throw the budget out of balance quickly…”

Think back to May 26, 1995. Steve Jobs was wandering in the desert, fiddling with some company called Pixar that made animated movies of dancing desk lamps, and planning his next step for NeXT. Bill Gates ruled the computing world and wrote a famous memo announcing that Microsoft was falling terribly behind in dominating the Internet, which Gates was sure to be a “tidal wave.” Microsoft control was slipping and he could feel it.

My brain keeps returning to the moment in time when Gates recognized the difficulty in controlling the creative impulses of the world — because I’ve been twiddling my thumbs waiting for Apple to approve my iPhone App version of my book, “Free for All.”

[ There are many worthwhile productivity apps you won't find at the App Store. See "21 apps Apple doesn't want on your iPhone." ]

A long time ago in March, I hatched a simple plan. I would dump the raw text of my book on the open source movement into HTML, render the HTML on the iPhone screen, and give away copies. Just for grins, I would also write a new forward to the book, call it the Gold version, charge $1 per copy, and give all of the revenues to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a charity that seems as deserving as any these days.

It was an easy idea that didn’t require understanding much about the trickier parts of the iPhone API, like the accelerometer or the camera. All it takes is a few calls to a UIWebView object, a part of the iPhone OS that implements the WebKit HTML rendering engine. Boom — it’s done.

The programming for this plan was very simple, but the distribution has been nearly impossible. Apple’s App Store is the only way to share your applications with the world, and it is lorded over by an inscrutable team of guardians devoted to maintaining control over the platform. During the last four months I’ve spent little time working on the application itself and almost all of that time waiting for Apple to respond.

A man, a plan, an App Store It is possible to skip the App Store if you want to give your application to a friend, but even this requires getting Apple to sign off on the transfer. The iPhone wants to see a cryptographically signed note from its mother before firing up any binary code. The ad hoc distribution mechanism puts a strict limit on 100 copies and enforces this by requiring a copy of each iPhone’s unique identification code to be bundled with the digital signature. Anyone who thought that cryptography was going to liberate the world was sadly mistaken.

0 investment in their son’s fledgling poker career five years ago has suspended Bill and Barbara Kopp’s dream of their son, Billy, getting a college degree, and turned it into his dream of playing poker professionally.

Last week, the University of Kentucky student from Erlanger earned $896,730 for finishing 12th in the World Series of Poker. That came on the heels of his winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in other tournaments the last few years and forced his parents into making them believers that poker could become his career.

“We have come to the realization that he may make a living at it,” said Bill Kopp. “My wife and I, neither one went to college, and our goal was for (all our kids) to get a college degree. There were several evenings where we talked to him and said, ‘You really need to get this degree, so you have a good plan B.’ We have no carrots to dangle over his head to make him a believer in that right now.”

Bill Kopp said his son, who left for a week’s vacation Monday and is turning down interview requests until he returns, needs to finish about nine more classes to earn his degree in business, but that he’s put that on hold.

“When he started playing, he promised us he would get his diploma and still tells us he’ll get it, but it’s hard for us to tell him not to pursue this right now,” said Bill Kopp. “This was not a fluke. He’s been working at this like an athlete. He’s got a goal and he’s not where he wants to be yet, so he’ll keep striving and working hard until he does.

“My brother-in-law, who plays poker, was talking to my wife the other day about this and he said, ‘It’s hard to tell him to get that diploma so he can make $40,000 a year in a regular job when he’s doing so much better than that.’ ”

Bill Kopp said it helps that Billy, a 2004 graduate of Villa Madonna Academy, hasn’t taken his new-found wealth and started spending recklessly.

“Lucky for us he has a good head on his shoulders,” said Bill. “He just bought a car, but he bought a used car and he got a good deal. Maybe it helps that he has conservative parents.”

Bill Kopp said he isn’t much of a card fan and doesn’t much like gambling, but said his wife enjoys cards and credited card memory games she played with her children when they were younger for perhaps helping Billy.

He laughed when thinking back to a time just five years ago when Billy, still in high school, came to his parents with a proposition for funding him as an online player.

“He wanted to use our credit card and initially we said, ‘No way,’ ” said Bill. “Then we thought, well, OK, maybe we can control it and he put $20 on there. It’s the only time he ever had to do it.”

Billy won $100,000 at age 18 for just a $60 buy-in and has found success ever since.

That $20 investment might not have netted Bill and Barbara Kopp that college diploma yet, but it’s given their son Billy a pretty good financial start in life.

The Poker Players Alliance hopes a hot hand in the nation’s capital this week will help its efforts to legalize online poker.

As part of its “National Poker Week,” the group has set up nearly 100 meetings with members of Congress and their aides, and plans to present a petition to President Barack Obama on Wednesday that had more than 350,000 signatures at last count. Famous poker players such as Annie Duke, Howard Lederer, Andy Bloch and Greg Raymer are participating as well.

On Tuesday night, the poker group will host a charity poker tournament, with proceeds going to the USO and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The Poker Players Alliance, chaired by former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., gets its money from the Interactive Gaming Council, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based trade association for online casinos, as well as from the alliance’s poker player members.

Recently a seat at a $200 minimum blackjack table was vacant in one of Las Vegas’ most spectacular casinos. A man in dark, nondescript clothes wearing large-framed glasses slipped into the spot, silently placed his bet and began to win. He didn’t say much and when he did he seemed shy, even depressed. The pit boss, monitoring several tables, forgot about him the moment he took his seat.

Players came and went from the table barely noticing the quiet, unsmiling player. But one guy with a few drinks in him who was systematically losing his shirt had witnessed the nerd’s phenomenal luck and could no longer hide his exasperation.

“Well, at least you could get happy,” he said.

But Richard Harvey, professional blackjack player and author, who looks and dresses nothing like a morose doofus, was actually very happy. His disguise had allowed him to ply his trade. If he had showed up as himself he would have been recognized and barred from playing, he said recently on a visit to LIBN’s office.

Harvey requested that no pictures be taken of him and that parts of his biography be off the record.

“If you think I’m paranoid, you’re right,” he said.

Since he started playing professionally he’s been intimidated by beefy bouncers, suffered a mysterious carjacking, had a gun pulled on him and had private investigators look into his life, he claimed. Less violently, if he’s recognized, casinos use countermeasures when he’s allowed to play such as cards and dealers changing every few minutes.

The Long Island native, who has lived out west the last several years, is back home to see to family responsibilities and promote new editions of his books. “Blackjack the Smart Way,” originally published 10 years ago is now in its fifth edition, and “Cutting Edge Blackjack,” published in 2002, has just been published in a third edition. Both publications, published by Connecticut’s Mystic Ridge Books, have been updated with new chapters.

Gambling and its offshoots comprise a huge American industry, including books on the eternal quest to beat the house. According to the American Gaming Association, gross gaming revenues topped $32.5 billion in 2008, a five percent drop from the previous year, which set the record. And paper never refused ink when it comes to getting over on a casino. Online bookseller Amazon has 20,100 results for the search term “blackjack.”

Harvey, in the business of selling books, not surprisingly disparages all blackjack books which preceded his as well as current competitors. He is one of the very few authors who preach discipline and patience, he claimed.

“I’m not talking about winning streaks, but winning cycles,” he said. “I’m talking about
winning seasons, like baseball.”

Growing up in Deer Park in a lower-middle-class home, Harvey said he attended a prestigious university and studied statistics and computer science, earning a degree in theoretic mathematics. He became fascinated with blackjack in the late 1970s.

“I thought, ‘It’s just numbers. I can do this.’ But I knew I had work to do.”
Looking at the game as purely a math problem, Harvey went so far as to hire dealers and stenographers to play countless games of blackjack, painstakingly researching every nuance of the game, he said. Then came the evening to put up or shut up.

“I went to Atlantic City and won $800 in 20 minutes,” he claimed.

Since that night he hasn’t had a job, he said. “It’s been a free lifestyle.”

Harvey’s system, outlined in his books, is really many systems, including proper betting, detecting shuffling and cutting patterns and mathematical probabilities of what the dealer’s hole card is and what cards remain in the deck.

His system is not “card counting,” a method made famous in the movie “21” and the book “Bringing Down the House” on which the movie was based, both of which claimed to be true stories. (An investigation by the Boston Globe found both to have significant fictional parts.) But Harvey’s methods do rely on probabilities and percentages.

His education in math theory is never far from his system. During the interview he went to a whiteboard a couple of times, rapidly sketching out equations which would’ve made Einstein proud.

Don’t call him a gambler. “Gambling is making bets without knowing why, playing cards on hunches and guessing,” he said. “I’m an expert card player.”