1. Give out their plays early in the day, based on non-existent lines that nobody who actually gambles ever got. Then, call the winners and losers off those lines.

2. Don’t play their own games, but expect you to.

3. Give out games that are not even on the board, or worse, give out their plays for the entire weekend on Friday. How can you be a Late Phone Service and give out your plays on Friday? The team plane could crash, the quarterback could die, there could be a blizzard, a hurricane, or an earthquake, or all the starters could come down with the Bubonic Plague?!?

4. Claim Stevie Z. is their son. Right Don?

5. Invent ten or more counterfeit services. Make up ten fake names for ten little salesmen. Set up ten cubicles with ten telephones in a run down basement a.k.a. boiler-room. Start calling people and promising them the moon. Give out every side and total of every game. Pass around the customer list like the canoli tray at an Italian Wedding. Burn lots of plastic. Keep passing those names around. Lie, Lie, Lie. You the player, dangle like a marionette on a Merry-Go Round, hemorrhaging red and bleeding green until it all comes crashing down. You’re broke but you’ve learned your lesson. Maybe.

6. Have thirty, count em THIRTY 900 numbers, plus a Late Phone Service, Junior’s Late Phone Service (sound familiar Mark?) a Newsletter, and a Website, all giving out different picks. The upside? Somebody’s always winning. The downside? It’s probably not you.

7. Advocating mass suicide. Encouraging customers to play Round Robins and Parlays. "You can bet everything you own on this 4 teamer" the ad screams. Sure, and Jenna Jameson is frigid. Ask yourself this. What does your bookie do if he gets overloaded with action on either side of a game? If he’s smart, he lays off a portion to reduce his exposure if the over-bet side comes in. Now, what does he do with every parlay, reverse, teaser, and robin he gets? He holds it. He can’t wait to take it. He’d pay you to get him more. Why? Because he knows that these are sucker bets for squares only, and that the odds are stacked incredibly high against you. No self respecting wiseguy, would be caught dead or alive playing one of those things. Neither should you.

8. The salesman signs you up for the entire season at a flat rate price, and on the very first day tries to sell you additional games at two or three hundred a pop, informing you that the games you originally bought are worthless garbage. If you think this doesn’t happen, then you haven’t been around. If you let it happen after having read this, you’re an idiot.

9. You go to purchase a big game on some Clown’s 900 number, and right there on the tape, they try to talk you into calling another hideous 900 number for an even bigger game.

10. Here’s one I love, the Screamers are famous for it. You call the guy’s 900 hundred number and buy a game for 25 bucks, and it loses. Next day the cocksucker’s telling the world it won. Call the office to complain, and they’ll tell you the games on the 900 number suck, the good stuff costs much more. Finer and Duffy were famous for that one.

 11. They advertise "The Full Season Package" or a "Game of The Century" ABSOLUTELY FREE, and then do the Lambada, The Macarena, and Patrick Swayze’s complete routine from "Dirty Dancing" when you call them on it.

And Finally... They say things like "I Swear to God" or "Trust Me" or even worse "How much can you move on a game?" Reply with "Go To Hell," "Drop Dead" and "I Move Furniture Not Money."