LEGACY

LEGACY
The parlay card
Mel Exber, an old-time Las Vegas gambling figure and innovator, died May 11 at the age of 78, but Exber's legacy lives on in several ways. A part owner of the Las Vegas Club on Fremont Street, Exber helped popularize the now ubiquitous football parlay card in the early 1950s. Parlay cards are gambling propositions where players select several teams and all must win for the player to collect. Exber's downtown casino is also home of the self-advertised "world's most liberal" blackjack rules that include allowing doubling down on any two, three or four cards; re-splitting aces, and automatically paying off on any six-card hand totaling 21 or less (a Six-card Charley). That the game is dealt from an eight-deck continuous shuffling machine and that non-suited blackjacks pay off at even money (instead of the usual 3-for-2) makes the game less appealing. A bargain blackjack game at the Las Vegas Club is a single-deck, traditional rules game with $5 betting minimums on weekends and $3 on weekdays.