Jack was a crapshooter of the first order, and said, "Go ahead."

The crapshooter on Bus 853 spoke only on the condition that he not be named, and the embarrassment is not surprising.

He is a chess player, a dominoes player, a crapshooter, and one of the most combative, competitive people I have met.

Kahan called Paul Reichmann 'the biggest crapshooter New York had ever seen'.

If I were a crapshooter at Las Vegas, I'd put all my chips on technology in Massachusetts.

And with caution, shrewdness and bluff maybe he was still, as Richard Kahan said, the biggest crapshooter New York had ever seen.

Known for his tenacity, his aplomb under fire and his verve as a crapshooter, Mr. Edwards emerged from his hotel suite two hours after it was apparent that he had placed second.

The trend-happy media were headlining "Dole on a Roll," suggesting momentum growing for the campaign of Bob Dole, a phrase based on a crapshooter's run of luck, and not a new heroic sandwich.

Federal prosecutors sought to show he owed $2 million in gambling debts, but casino officials testified that Mr. Edwards was a successful crapshooter who averaged $50,000 in winnings a night in 10 trips to one casino.

But now the last surviving grayboy had had an unbroken chain of good luck; he was like some daffy in-the-zone Vegas crapshooter rolling a string of sevens: four, six, eight, oh goddam, a dozen in a row.

Two of Grainger's songs have endured as blues standards: "Tain't Nobody's Business if I Do" (co-authored with Everett Robbins, who had also played piano in Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds), and "Dying Crapshooter's Blues" (1927).

In this case he's the best crapshooter at the local garage and he heads off to "The Big Town" of Chicago in 1957, where he makes a pile of money and has to choose between two women: a married stripper and an unmarried mother with a heart of gold.

As a boom in legalized gambling rolls across America, no politician has stepped up to the table with more prescience and gusto than Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, a rather fabulous crapshooter who likes to risk $5,000 a roll in the casino and far more in the statehouse.

"In my opinion, in the next 20 years every major metropolitan area in America with a population of a million or more will have some form of a casino," Governor Edwards, part seer, part crapshooter, declared in an interview during his jockeying to complete the New Orleans profit-sharing agreement.