In 2016, Stephen Paddock moved to Mesquite, Nevada, a quiet retirement
community eighty miles northeast of Las Vegas with few residents widely
known beyond its city limits. Mesquite was settled by Mormons in the
late nineteenth century, but it wasn’t incorporated until 1984. Before
now, if it had a best-known former denizen, it may have been William
(Si) Redd, a Vegas gaming legend who earned another
nickname, on account of his entrepreneurial prescience: “the king of
video poker.” According to Bill Thompson, the author of “Gambling in America,” Redd helped the video-poker machine, first developed in the
late nineteen-seventies, become ubiquitous. The machine mimicked
traditional poker play but was programmed to give the edge to the house.
It eventually became a highly profitable fixture in casinos everywhere,
including those frequented by Paddock, who, on Sunday night, killed nearly sixty people and injured more than five hundred at the Route 91
Harvest festival on the Strip.

“Video poker machines made amateur players think they were playing a
casino game rather than just pulling a handle,” Thompson told the Los
Angeles Times, in 2003, in Redd’s obituary. “The
downside is the machine hooked a lot of people.” It seems that Paddock,
who told a Mesquite real-estate agent that he gambled about a million dollars a year, may have been one such person. On Thursday morning, the New York Times reported the observations of several hosts and players at Las Vegas and
Reno casinos, including the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa and the Mandalay
Bay Resort and Casino, where Paddock was seen playing video poker. A host at the Atlantis told the Times, of Paddock’s style of play, “He
was pretty statuesque in that he was stoic and stern.” Paddock played
the game for hours at a time and was known, when he wasn’t playing, for
“staring” at others while they played.

On Wednesday night, I spoke to Anthony Curtis, a former professional
gambler who is now the owner and publisher of Las Vegas Advisor, a Web site covering the
casino business. (On Thursday evening, after this piece was published, Curtis e-mailed to say that he’d just discovered Paddock’s name in the Las Vegas Advisor database. “He was buying how-to-play products from us,” he explained—all of them related to video poker.) Curtis said that, unlike traditional slot machines,
video-poker machines can be outsmarted. The video-poker machines at
Mandalay Bay, according to Curtis, paid out $99.17 for every hundred
dollars played. “Video poker is well known for attracting people who
have compulsive gambling problems,” he told me. “It’s almost the perfect
gambling game. But it also has the property of being able to be beaten.
So it attracts a lot of very intelligent people.” Curtis told me that
he’d been in touch with a number of such players in Las Vegas who “can
derive advantages over the casino of half of one per cent, sometimes
higher.” He said that around a dozen of these players, whom he declined
to name, had “ended up running in the same circles as Paddock,” and
recalled observing him over the past few months.

Curtis’s sources told him that Paddock was not a so-called advantage
player, someone who can beat the video-poker game. “They call
themselves A.P.s,” Curtis said, “and just about everyone I talked to
said, ‘No, he wasn’t A.P. level.’ They discounted him as just a high
roller, a guy who might have read a book or two, or something like
that.” But Curtis heard that Paddock was what’s referred to as “a low
seven,” or someone who has a verified low-seven-figure bank account,
which would have afforded him a six-figure line of credit at casinos.
Curtis went on, “People who are semi-sharp, as we say in Vegas, they
know they’re better off playing video poker than slots. This guy was
smart enough to know that. He was not on top of the world of play, but
he was a gambler that kind of knew how to play the angles a little bit.”

Dominic Biondi, a part-time English-department lecturer at U.N.L.V. who
also makes a living as a professional poker player, has a different view
of video poker and those who play it. “There are people who claim you
can beat video poker,” Biondi told me today, “but I’m skeptical. It’s a
slot-machine game with a set percentage of payback. If all this guy did
was play video poker, he was not a ‘poker player.’ He’s just gambling.”
He went on, “There’s a small chance that Paddock played the percentages
very well and eked out a small edge, but it’s very doubtful. That takes
a lot of skill and time, and only playing one particular kind of
video-poker machine. To make money playing video poker, it takes a lot
of luck.” He added, “The fact that this guy was a video-poker player
just makes me shrug. He was not a real poker player.”

Curtis, meanwhile, is critical of what he calls “very square,” gambling-related conjecture from the media about Paddock’s motives for the mass shooting at the music festival. Many observers have floated the theory that he had
incurred gambling debts that he couldn’t pay off. On Wednesday, Yahoo
reported that “Paddock’s finances have become a significant focal point”
in the authorities’ search for a motive. According to Yahoo, more than
two hundred “casino or wire transactions by Paddock . . . were flagged for review by FinCEN, the U.S. government’s Financial
Crimes Enforcement Network, which collects data to identify potential
money laundering or covert terrorism financing.” Casinos are required by
the federal government to follow a variety of regulations intended to prevent money laundering.

If Paddock was not in fact wealthy but financially desperate, that might
have some bearing on his behavior. Curtis, for his part, doesn’t see it.
“He was a guy who is very much coveted by the casinos,” he told me.
“That means he’s not a degenerate—he’s gambling within his means.” He
went on, “He comes back: that means he pays his markers, or his losses.
He was a guy who liked to gamble. And he could afford to gamble. I don’t
think it had anything to do with him snapping and doing what he did.”

This post has been updated to reflect Paddock’s presence in the Las Vegas Advisor database.