I spent 90-100 days in Las Vegas every football season during the 90's. Rob was a staple at Gaming Today, often appearing on the cover with his photo next to a featured column about video poker. Rob, who had no discernible gambling credentials prior to that column, is Italian. The publisher of Gaming Today is also Italian. It is the 90's. Draw your own conclusions.

That's the background to my theory that it is probably difficult to go from having your pic front page on a third of the issues and having everyone in LV recognize and talk to you wherever you go, and then having that transform into being mathematically debunked and leaving Las Vegas and living a very non-public life. So the forums provide an opportunity to regain some of that once-high gambling world profile.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Singer was once one of most recognized and discussed figures in Las Vegas. Thousands of Gaming Todays were distributed everywhere at the time, and Rob's smiling face was in every major sports book every Tuesday. Very tough to go from man about town to man on a forum.

Anyway, that's my theory. Singer had many things right about Las Vegas -- about the hosts and the way things worked in general, people addicted to players' clubs and doing torturous speculative math to arrive at questionable positive EVs and all that, and he may be half right about the tipping. But when the math of video poker became public knowledge (in other words, as the internet was accessed by every gambler), his theories and declarations about gambling expertise kind of got swept into the dustbin of history.