During the past week, speculation about Strip shooter Stephen Paddock’s gambling proclivities took front and center in this saga for about two days. I’m in the rolodexes of some of the big media outlets and the calls started coming on Monday. The first TV show to air an interview with me was “CBS This Morning” and after, that the floodgates opened. I did about 25 interviews, including TV for CBS, CNN, and “Inside Edition” and print for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New Yorker, New York Magazine, LA Times, and London Daily Mail.

I never knew Stephen Paddock, but I might know more about his gambling profile than just about anyone outside of his closest consorts and casino employees who either hosted him or have access to his records. I’ve heard from several players who knew and played with him. I’ve heard from casino employees who’ve seen his records and results. And eerily, he was a former LVA member and a regular customer of ours. What gets out in interviews is always truncated and since the media has a limited understanding of gambling, the ideas and concepts are often poorly stated. Here’s an accounting of what I know and the conclusions that I’ve come to.

The first mentions of gambling indicated that Paddock was a “$100-per-hand poker player.” That didn’t make sense and I assumed he was a video poker player playing $25 denoms. When I asked around, no one knew the name, but once photos of Paddock became widely circulated, I began hearing from players who knew him by sight and verified that he’d played video poker for high stakes for several years at various Strip casinos. The casinos specified most often were Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand, Wynn, and Cosmopolitan (the image of Paddock on the LVA.com home page was taken by CCTV at Cosmopolitan). Given the $25 video poker tie-in, I checked vpFREE2 (an outstanding resource) and noted that Mandalay Bay’s best game at that level was 8/5 Bonus Poker. I made a mistake in early interviews indicating that the best he could have played there was a 99.17% game betting up to $125 per hand. I later learned (from current players delighting in catching me in an error) that I’d overlooked a $5 Triple Double Spin Poker option, which has a 99.58% return with the possibility of betting up to $225.

The media was hoping to find evidence of a compulsive player who’d lost his money and snapped, but that didn’t jibe with the information that was coming in. Paddock had played for too long at high levels for that to be the case. I was also getting reports that he had an intact “low 7” rating, which means a verified $1 million to $3 million in the bank, and six-figure credit lines. I was told that he was known as a player who could win or lose up to $100K on a trip. He apparently paid his markers when he lost. Accordingly, I discounted the degenerate-loser scenario.

What about the other side of the spectrum? Somewhere it was reported that Paddock had told neighbors that he was a professional gambler. Could he have been a winning player, or at least an advantage player of some type? Absolutely. I felt it was possible that he was a winner, but still unlikely. Based on my original belief that he was playing at a base return of 99.17%, it seemed more likely that he was playing the comp game – losing, but making it up in high-end givebacks. That’s an arrangement that often exists between players and casinos, where the player is satisfied with the value of the comps and the casino is winning more than the cost of those comps. The discovery of the 99.58% game made me pause on that, as the additional .41% is significant. With slot points, bounce-back cash, and VIP tournament equity, he probably could have pushed his overall return above 100%. However, I still feel it’s much more plausible that the comps were the driving factor, and almost all the knowledgeable players I’ve discussed this with concur.

Later, information began to come in about Paddock’s actual results, leaked by employees who’d peeked at his records. They show him sitting on both sides of the ledger, which also supports the fact that he might have been a winning player, since a top-level AP would probably employ methods that suppress wins and inflate losses. However, the negative balances were quite a bit higher than the positives, so again I lean toward a comp-hustling profile. Regardless, winner or comp wizard, it’s AP play and that’s the way I described it to the press. (Directly following this post is an excellent comment on this subject by Captain Jack that was originally made in another post at GWAE.)

Of course, the strangest part of this for me is the LVA connection. I didn’t even think about it at first, but after a couple days, we checked our database and sure enough, Stephen Paddock was a customer. He’d been an LVA member in the early 2000s and at that time was also buying how-to products, almost all for video poker. He bought Bob Dancer’s Video Poker for Winners tutorial software and several Dancer/Daily Video Poker Strategy Cards. He also bought The Video Poker Answer Book by John Growchowski and The Slot Expert’s Guide to Playing Slots by John Robison. He was, without question, a studied player. His most recent purchases were last year, when he bought the Tax Guide for Gamblers by Jean Scott and Marissa Chien and The Law for Gamblers by Bob Nersesian.

So you can see that I had a lot to work from, and based on all of the evidence, I conclude that Stephen Paddock was most likely a good player who played close to breakeven, but was probably losing overall and angling for comps. What’s really crazy about this is that the big-loser scenario could still be true. That’s something we won’t know for sure until his records are released, if they ever are.