Well, let me repeat a couple of quotes from the "Rob Singer didn't beat video poker" thread. Let's start with:

Post 83 (coach belly): "The sports books pay off winning bets with chips?"

Post 86 (Alan Mendelson): "Never heard of such a thing. And I made a few calls after that."

Post 88 (Alan Mendelson): "I don't know why anyone would be stupid enough to make up a story about being paid in chips for a sports wager."


Let's skip, for a moment, Argentino's incessant chiming in and ridiculous commentary. We'll get back to that, because I was shooting for irony.

Immediately after Post #88, I sent an email to Jimmy Vaccaro, the legendary sports book manager and current oddsmaker for South Point. Mr. Vaccaro is the gold standard in sports gambling credibility. He has been doing it forever. I told him "...the Mandalay Sports book paid in checks (chips). They made (E.C.) lug 36K to the cashier...Nobody believes me."

Now, it being very busy with World Cup, I wasn't sure I'd get an answer anytime soon. But Mr. Vaccaro was good enough to have Bill at Vegas Insider respond,

"Jimmy says you are correct. That's the way the book paid off. He added that if someone wanted to wait around for about 45-minutes to an hour, they would have given him a regular check."

Now, regarding spelling and Argentino and such. You'll notice, first, nobody corrected my spelling. Maybe they agreed with Wikipedia, or perhaps they were being nice. Now the ironic point -- I thought it was especially great that Mr. Vaccaro would respond and go to bat for me. You see, he does a weekly column. He's the most prestigious columnist in the history of Gaming Today.