t response to Shark Tank (fridays on ABC 8pm/7pm…shameless plug)..I wanted to repost my Success and Motivation series because it answers most of the email questions I get from the show.. En

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In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.

The vast sums of money shuttled among the accounts of these young professionals — and the shocking aggressiveness and recklessness with which they played — deepened the divide between the young online players and the older guard who earned their millions when poker was still a game played by men sitting around a table. Since the rise of online poker in the early 2000s, every principle of the game, every lesson learned over hundreds of thousands of hours of play, every simple credo uttered in some old Western gambling movie — all those tersely stated, manly things that made up the legend of poker — has been picked apart and, for the most part, discarded.

Even as celebrity activists such as Emma Thompson, Demi Moore, and Mira Sorvino raise awareness about commercial sex trafficking, survivor Rachel Lloyd publishes her memoir Girls Like Us, and the Senate introduces a new bipartisan bill for victim support, the problem proliferates across continents, in casinos, on streets, and directly into your mobile device. And, as Amy Fine Collins shows, human trafficking is much closer to home than you think; victims, younger than ever, are just as likely to be the homegrown American girl next door as illegally imported foreigners.

You will have been wondering about the drugs. Did we do them? Did I find myself on Fremont Street, cowering under an awning as a digital projection of Jim Morrison mounted the roof of the pedestrian mall’s 90-foot-tall barrel-vault canopy? Did I walk with many gaits, dragging first one leg and then the other, zig-zagging past blackjack tables and wolfish packs of Midwesterners? Was Caesars Palace where Fleur found her spirit animal, a puffer fish? Did she pet at it through the swank aquarium glass? Did it all end with me on my knees on the plush carpet that cradles the Bellagio Las Vegas, tears streaming down my face as I genuflected to the casino’s super-sized Liberty Bell, surmounted by a mighty eagle that clutched lightning bolts in its talons, the sign under which I grew up in faraway Philadelphia?<br /><br />

Of course not.

How did a blackjack player manage to win $15 million from Atlantic City casinos over the course of several months?<br /><br />

"As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to 'split' the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. That’s what Johnson did. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance.<br /><br />

"He was neither nervous nor excited. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He is a veteran player. Little interferes with his concentration. He doesn’t get rattled. With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold."

Macau's rise as the new global gambling capital leads to complications for the Las Vegas casinos that have flocked to China for a piece of the action. Its differences are illustrated in the God of Gamblers case, in which a former barber named Siu Yun Ping won $13 million, setting off a chain of events, including a murder plot: <br /><br />

"The files of the God of Gamblers case can be read as a string of accidents, good and bad: Siu’s run at the baccarat table; Wong’s luck to be assigned an assassin with a conscience; Adelson’s misfortune that reporters noticed an obscure murder plot involving his casino. But the tale, viewed another way, depends as little on luck as a casino does. It is, rather, about the fierce collision of self-interests. If Las Vegas is a burlesque of America—the 'ethos of our time run amok,' as Hal Rothman, the historian, put it—then Macau is a caricature of China’s boom, its opportunities and rackets, its erratic sorting of winners and losers."