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...Control yourself, that's the main thing...

...Granted, then, that the difficulty of making certain there will be no loansharking, no skimming, no payoffs for protection, no bribery of susceptible officials, weighs heavily against plans to rejuvenate the Rockaways in Queens with roulette and Long Beach on Long Island with blackjack...

...This poor customer apparently is being lured by the new glitter of Atlantic City to throw away the family savings, and in the view of the editorialist, it is the duty of the state to save him from his compulsion by making it more difficult for him (and everybody else) to find an institution willing to relieve one of one's cash...

...That was that...

...at certain magic moments, to vault the rules and fly in the face of the odds-but always conscious that one is doing so...

...to pit one's concentration and daring against odds, but not against impossible odds...

...and instantly whatever thread of good fortune I'd spun about me since arriving here had been snapped...

...Not by a long shot the most powerful piece of reasoning ever to appedr on that page...

...Of Fortune and Mathematics BUT LET that go, as a misdeal on the part of a rushed or weary editorial writer...

...Must we on that account ban the sale of alcoholic beverages...

...to become part of a world utter y unlike anything in the real world and far more exciting...

...Aware that many kinds of experience are perilous, they would confine experience in the service of safety...

...The best argument against further legalization of gambling is that the odds are against keeping unfastidious elements from taking charge...

...Must we on that account ban certain magazines...

...But much of the opposition to legalization rests on other kinds of concerns...

...I have been to casinos since, but for limited periods and never with such a sense of the possibilities of freedom...

...the fabled pioneers of Las Vegas were unwholesome fellows and they have not by and large passed on their batons to the pure in heart...

...It is, after all, our compUlsions which turn us into great men," That sense of being an adventurer on a high-risk expedition is not available to many of us these days...

...Even if we assume, with the writer, that the compulsive gambler will find no other way to ruin his life as long as casinos are denied him (would Dostoevsky have been a model of control if he had been forbidden to get close to a roulette table...

...Well, if Aleksei had too little control, I had too much...

...It signifies not only weakness of character but the weakness of one's philosophy of existence...

...To strike the table because of a piece of cardboard is as absurd as shaking one's fist against the heavens...

...The principle that the state has the duty to prohibit all its citizens from enjoying certain pleasures in deference to the weaknesses of some is the stuff of Ayatollahism...

...In his new, rich book, Memoirs of a Gambler (Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., $9.95), Jack Richardson describes his feeling at being part of a high-stake poker game: "I had discovered the cold, pure enjoyment of being encapsulated in something of deep meaning and demand, and I was at last comprehending the force that had kept a Humboldt in search of another specimen, a Goethe another line, a Caesar another province...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Of Fortune and Mathematics Place Your Bets WITH NEW casinos coming up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, like craps on an unlucky shooter's dice, faltering resorts from the Catskills to the Poco nos are looking to get in on the action...

...All it takes is to keep control of yourself just once, and your whole life will be changed in one hour...

...it would take a strenuous affirmative action program to place uncorrupted or incorruptible executives in that industry...

...Like other trades, the running of a casino requires special skills, not to mention considerable muscle...

...A recent editorial in the New York Tillles, for example, drew our attention to the plight of the potentially compulsive gambler...

...Whatever emotions rage in the righteous gambler's bowels or soul, they must be controlled while the game is afoot...

...For the truly committed gambler, as Richardson suggests, there is no limit, and in my few forays at casinos or poker tables, I have been only too conscious of my limits, occasionally to the disservice of a potentially winning hand...

...The memory of what mighthave-been has never faded, however...

...I could understand, as never before, the mad faith of Dostoevsky's Aleksei Ivanovich, who could never stop reassuring himself, "All it takes is to be calculating and patient just once in your lifetime-that is all...

...Intimations of Doring Now, I do not pretend that when it comes to gambling I am a Dostoevsky or a Richardson...

...Moreover, I like still to think that the opportunity will come again and, yes, perhaps this time, if the guardians of my well-being do not make it too difficult, I shall have the courage and imagination to take it...

...to marshal one's most disciplined powers against the temptation to be careless or sloppy...

...to use money in a special way, not as something to purchase goods with but as a measure of one's standing with the gods...

...There, for the next 24 hours, unburdened by commitment, I wandered along the strip, from casino to casino, stunned like any hick at the wonder of the place, the lunatic perfection of it all...

...But one Sunday morning some years ago, I found myself in Los Angeles with nothing to do, and no one to see until noon the following day...

...All I did was lose a small sum and go on my way that Monday morning, for a meeting of utterly no significance during which I was scarcely able to keep my eyes open...

...and, "in front of the spectators, in front of the salesman who had seconded me, in full view of the sulking Cuban and my punctilious opponent, in sight of the attentive serving-girl and the indifferent dealers, and in the presence of the lady whose smile might have been forever happily perpetuated in my memorywith all these as witnesses, I, only once, but with obvious petulance, struck the table with my hand...

...Any business with so much loose cash flying around is an invitation to the larcenous...

...Some persons are probably moved to rape after their dreams have been stirred up by a girly magazine...

...It is this instinct on which his [the gambier's] survival is based, for if he ignores it and, while feeling disconnected from propitious flows and patterns, continues stubbornly to force a return of the good feeling he had about himself, he becomes nothing but an item of desperation, someone doomed to be unloved by fortune and destroyed by mathematics...

...At one critical moment in a game of baccarat-a high-stake contest that rides simply on which player has two cards that add up closer to nine-Richardson holds a seven, a promising hand, but his nemesis across the table draws an eight...

...the policy leads us into a no-win situation...

...to call upon resources within oneself that may otherwise go forever untapped...

...The great question becomes: Is the player worthy to be master of fortune and mathematics or merely their plaything...

...The alcoholic is assuredly a much greater threat to his family and community than the compulsive gambler...

...So I checked out of my hotel, left my bag at the airport and flew to Las Vegas...

...I made no great wins or losses, but as I sat at poker table or blackjack table, intimations stirred within me of the excesses I was capable of had I been man enough to stay on a bit longer, long enough to shed the restraints of my ordered existence and fall in with the jungle ways of the gaming room...

...That is the challenge...

...and as for the gods, never to plead with them, never to abase oneself before them, but to confront them with pride-let them do the best they can for me and I shall not scream with delight, let them do their worst to me and I shall not moan...

...Yet there is surely a dimension of experience that none of these worthy activities can even approach: To risk more than prudence permits, and to do it at the turn of a card, yet with an intellectual and spiritual rigor that is rarely required in the daily round...

...There is another, more evocative side to the compulsion to gamble...

...to lure fate to one's side by the uprightness and firmness of one's play or to defy it, as one magnificent force defies another...

...Well, I do not expect such considerations to cut any ice with the good people who wish the citizenry to live prudent lives and would restrict the liberties of all to assist us to do so...

...For to give way is not only to risk losing chips, but losing one's sense of being adequate to the impersonal forces ranged against one...

...We may read, watch TV, play tennis, jog a bit, and of course go to our work and return from it at more or less regular hours-and there is nothing wrong with any of that...