I flew into Washington, DC, with its leaden wintry skies and the first snow flurries of what would become a gigantic storm. The city was still packed with people after the recent inauguration of the new president of the United States, John F. Kennedy.
The meeting of the American Mathematical Society was held in the old Willard Hotel. Instead of the anticipated scholarly audience of forty or fifty, I found an animated standing-room-only crowd of hundreds. Scattered among the mathematicians were others who were sporting sunglasses, gaudy oversized pinkie rings and cigars, as well as reporters with cameras and notepads. In the manner of mathematics meetings, I had prepared a matter-of-fact talk, which I began with an explanation of how to win by counting 5s. I went on to mention that counting Tens was much better, and then hinted at the cornucopia of additional counting systems revealed by my methodology. My terse technical presentation didn’t deter my audience. I finished and placed a woefully inadequate fifty copies of my speech on the table in front of me. The group surged toward them like carnivores competing for fresh meat.
Responding to requests, the officials in charge of the meeting arranged a press conference for me following my talk, after which I was televised by a major network and interviewed on several radio programs. The scientists and technical types generally understood and believed the winning strategy I described, but the casinos and some of the press did not. In a cynical editorial, The Washington Post said there was a mathematician in town claiming to have a winning gambling system, which reminded them of this ad: Send $1 for a surefire weed killer. Back comes a note saying “Grab by the roots and pull like hell.” One casino spokesman mockingly claimed they sent cabs to the airport to meet players with systems. (I’ve waited over fifty years now for those cabs.) Another told of how I had sent a detailed questionnaire asking about the precise blackjack rules used in his gaming house. He stated that I was so ignorant, I didn’t even know the rules of the game. When starting my calculations a couple of years earlier, I had, in fact, sent just such an inquiry to twenty-six Nevada casinos. My object was to learn how the rules varied from one establishment to another, in particular to see if some places had rules even more favorable than usual. Thirteen of the twenty-six casinos were kind enough to reply to an ignorant academic.
A young reporter for the Post named Tom Wolfe followed up after my talk with an interview. The Post ran his story, “You Can So Beat the Gambling House at Blackjack, Math Expert Insists.” He was curious rather than skeptical, sympathetic but probing. Wolfe later became one of America’s most famous authors.
By this time, Washington’s airports were buried in two feet of snow, so I boarded a train for Boston. During the long ride back I wondered how my research into the mathematical theory of a game might change my life. In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. I chose to investigate blackjack. As a result, chance offered me a new set of unexpected opportunities.
Ever since my first meeting with Claude Shannon in September, we had been working on the roulette project approximately twenty hours a week. Meanwhile, I was teaching courses, doing research in pure mathematics, attending department functions, writing up my blackjack research, and adjusting to being a new father. Following a roulette work session at the Shannons’, Claude asked me at dinner if I thought anything would ever top this in my life. My thoughts then were much like I expected his to have been: that acknowledgment, applause, and honor are welcome and add zest to life but they are not ends to be pursued. I felt then, as I do now, that what matters is what you do and how you do it, the quality of the time you spend, and the people you share it with.
Meanwhile, the national AP wire service ran Tom Wolfe’s story, causing thousands of letters and phone calls to pour into the MIT Math Department. The secretaries were busy for weeks, trying the patience of everyone. I decided it was wiser not to answer some of my correspondence. For instance, one writer sent me an elaborate twenty-five-page “proof” that he was the reincarnation of Ponce de León. Although I did not write back, there followed another lengthy recitation of “connections” among him, me, and Ponce de León demonstrating that I played a crucial role in his story. He claimed it was my duty to get involved!
Another man offered to be my bodyguard, assuring me that I was going to need one if I went out to beat the casinos. When I didn’t answer him he sent a hostile letter outlining his military and firearms skills, assuring me that he could “put a bullet between your eyes at 25 yards” with a .45-caliber automatic, and that he would work free just for the privilege of learning what he could from being around me. This was followed by a final letter warning that when I learned, to my sorrow, that I needed his protection, he wouldn’t be there. He expressed bitterness that I “was just like all the rest of them” to whom he had offered his services.
The greatest number of letters asked for copies of my paper and for detailed instructions on “how to do it.” I manufactured and sent out hundreds of copies of the talk and paper, in the academic spirit of freedom of information, courtesy of the MIT Mathematics Department until, overwhelmed, I gave up.
Before I gave my talk at the meeting, I hadn’t envisaged the clamor and the sort of publicity that would follow. Instead, I’d expected scholars to look at my work, be very surprised at the results, and eventually agree that it was correct. But rather than this happening in a quiet, slow-paced academic way, I was besieged by strangers all wanting a piece of me. This kind of “fame” I didn’t need.
Offers to back a casino test of my system ranged from a few thousand dollars to $100,000. The decision was being thrust upon me as to whether or not to prove my academic theory would really work at the tables. I finally decided to go to Nevada, partly to silence that irritating jeer often leveled at academics, “Well, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” As a matter of personal pride and honor I felt that I owed my readers proof that the theory really worked, despite scoffs from casinos that my claims were ridiculous. The clincher was the casino spokesman on television who, speaking of my system said, “When a lamb goes to the slaughter, the lamb might kill the butcher. But we always bet on the butcher.”
The most promising offer came from two New York multimillionaires whom I called Mr. X and Mr. Y when I wrote about them later. After repeated phone calls from Mr. X and much hesitation on my part about the dangers of risking a bankroll provided by strangers in a place about which I knew little, I finally agreed to a meeting.
It was a wintry February afternoon outside our Cambridge apartment, framed by stark leafless trees against a gunmetal-gray sky. Wooden multistory houses lined the street, the pores of their wood sides and stoops permeated with coal dust and a sooty crust covering the new snow. By 4 P.M. the light was fading and our visitor was overdue. Then a midnight-blue Cadillac pulled up with two good-looking young blondes inside, one visible through the front passenger window and another who stepped out from behind the wheel. I thought, Who are these people? Where is Mr. X? While the passenger-side blonde held the door for him, a short white-haired man in a long black cashmere overcoat emerged. They rang our bell and we realized this must be Mr. X. He introduced himself as Emmanuel “Manny” Kimmel, then about sixty-five, and said he was a wealthy businessman from Maplewood, New Jersey, who knew his way around the gambling world. He explained that the two mink-coated beauties were his nieces. I took this at face value, although I could see from Vivian’s expression that she had a different view.
Kimmel dealt blackjack to me for a couple of hours and quizzed me about my research. Off to the side, Vivian, with our eighteen-month-old daughter, talked to the “nieces.” At one point, just as the younger niece was naïvely volunteering personal information, the other niece whispered out of the side of her mouth, “Cool it.”
After our discussion, Manny was ready to plan a trip to Nevada. We agreed to go as soon as I was free, which was during MIT’s one-week spring break in April. As they were leaving he drew out a tangled handful of pearl necklaces from a pocket of his overcoat and offered a strand to Vivian. The pearls stayed in the family and still, more than fifty years later, are worn by Raun.
Vivian was both apprehensive and supportive about the casino test. On the one hand, though the math details were incomprehensible to her and almost everyone else, she knew that I generally didn’t make claims I couldn’t back up, especially in math and science. Even though it was all calculations and reasoning so far, she believed I would win in a fair fight. But this was going to take place in the real world, not a world of symbols and equations. Would the casinos play fair or might they somehow cheat or render me incompetent, perhaps with drugs or violence? What about those supposed nieces who she saw clearly weren’t? I’d be entering a world of easy money and easy women, and who knew what other perils. What about my backers? Were they competent to protect me against any casino funny business? Could they last through the temporary losses we were bound to incur sometime early in the play?
In my view, after the whole country had heard my claims, backing down would appear to validate the retorts that I was full of baloney. I was certain that I was right. There was no way I would let my family, friends, and colleagues think otherwise. Even though the Goliath I was challenging had always won, I knew something no one else did: He was nearsighted, clumsy, slow, and stupid, and we were going to fight on my terms, not his. The clincher was that Vivian, despite her reservations and her preference that I play it safe, thought I could do it.
In preparation for our foray, I flew from Boston to New York every Wednesday, a day I had no classes to teach. I’d arrive in Manny’s Manhattan penthouse; he dealt while I played the Ten-Count. Although I had several card counting methods to offer, Kimmel fixated on the Ten-Count and would hear of nothing else. Meanwhile, that suited me because I had already worked out the strategy tables for the Ten-Count but hadn’t done so yet for the others. The Ten-Count raises bets when the remaining deck is rich in Aces and Tens. After a couple of hours Manny’s butler served lunch as we continued playing. At the end of each session Kimmel would give me $100 or $150 to cover expenses and, curiously, a salami. These salamis added an unmistakable aroma to the cabin during my return flight.
Kimmel’s friend and co-backer for our venture, Mr. Y, came to some of the sessions. One of the nieces sometimes watched as well. Mr. Y was Eddie Hand, a wealthy businessman from upstate New York. He was fortyish, dark-haired, and of medium stature; he spoke with a curious mix of gruff complaint and humor. As the weeks passed, the chips piled up on my side of the table and Manny became more and more enthusiastic. After half a dozen sessions, we were ready for our Nevada adventure.
There were two main approaches we could adopt when we sat down to play in the casinos. One, which I call wild, involved betting the table limit whenever the advantage to the player exceeded some small figure, say 1 percent. This typically wins the most money, but fluctuations in wealth may be violent, and a large bankroll is required to ride out big losses. Kimmel and Hand said that they would put up $100,000, and more if necessary. (This was worth $800,000 in 2016 dollars, as the inflation conversion table in appendix A indicates.)
I was not in favor of this strategy, since there was too much that I did not know about the gambling world. Could they cheat or swindle me somehow? And how would I react if I were to get behind $50,000, each minute having to continue betting more than my monthly salary? Would Kimmel and Hand stay the course if we lost this much? If they were to quit at that point, it would mean we really had only a $50,000 bankroll but didn’t know it beforehand and so should have been betting more conservatively from the start. Besides, my goal was more to test my system than to make big money for my backers. To better achieve this, I went for a nearly certain moderate win rather than taking on more risk of loss to try for a big payout. I planned to play conservatively, betting twice my lowest bet when the advantage for me became 1 percent, four times as much with a 2 percent edge, and finally leveling off at ten times my small bets when the game was 5 percent or more in my favor. Varying bets from $50 to $500, the highest casino maximum then generally available, I felt $10,000 should be an adequate stake.
Manny reluctantly agreed. During the MIT spring break we met at the airport in New York on a cold April afternoon. We chatted for an hour, then boarded our plane. At midnight, as we approached Reno, a garish patch of light appeared ahead in the otherwise Stygian blackness. As we circled to land I got my first view of a city that looked like a bloody reddish neon spider spread over the landscape. I wondered apprehensively about what would happen to me over the next week. Vivian was more alarmed than I was about my flight into the unknown and wanted me to call every day. It relieved me to know I was connected to her and, through her, to my familiar world. In those days long-distance calls were expensive. To save money I called collect if everything was okay, asking for “Edward __. Thorp,” the middle initial being a code we had devised to tell how many thousands of dollars we were ahead or, if the initial came before “Edward,” how many behind. The idea was simple: The initial A meant less than $1,000, B meant between $1,000 and $2,000, C between $2,000 and $3,000, and so on up to Z, which covered $25,000 to $26,000. After hearing the name of the person being called, Vivian would politely tell the operator that Mr. Thorp “wasn’t here at the moment.”
After a few hours of sleep, we met for breakfast in the hotel. Sandy-eyed and tired, I fortified myself with eggs Benedict and orange juice accompanied by lots of black coffee, and the three of us headed for the tables. At our first casino, situated outside of town, I started small, betting from $1 to $10, planning to increase my bet size as I became more comfortable with the level of risk. Eventually I would bet $50 to $500. Before the trip I insisted on only a $10,000 bankroll, but I knew that Manny favored bets ten times as big—$500 bets whenever we had a 1 percent edge—backed by a $100,000 bankroll. I insisted on warming up by betting $1 to $10. I had explained carefully to Manny that I needed to work up to big bets at my own pace, but he couldn’t stand watching and waiting while I did it. Growing ever more agitated, Manny’s pale complexion eventually flushed bright red, a startling contrast with his full head of white hair. I learned later that he typically won or lost tens of thousands of dollars at casinos in the United States and in Cuba before the communist takeover.
I won a few dollars in an hour or so of play, but then the establishment closed for three hours because of Good Friday. Returning to downtown Reno, we chose a casino with very favorable rules. They dealt to the last card and allowed players to double down on any hand, and split any pair. If the dealer’s first card, always dealt faceup, was an Ace, some casinos, including this one, allowed the player to “take insurance” against the dealer’s second card being a 10 or a face card (giving him a “natural,” namely, a two-card total of 21) by making an additional bet equal to one-half of his original stake. If the dealer has a natural, the insurance bet pays 2:1.
After a lavish dinner and a rest, I continued playing for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time and then resting for a few minutes. When I sat down again, as usual I chose the table with the fewest players. Playing slowly, I paused for thought and stared at all the cards played. Management thought I was using one of the many fallacious betting systems. These featured patterns of betting that were supposed to somehow overcome the house edge. There are infinitely many of them. None work. Such players, common in the casinos, are welcomed as long as they are losing. Whatever I was doing, playing at the betting level of from $1 to $10, I gradually fell further behind until I was $100 in the hole. All this had taken eight hours, during which time Manny became in turns frantic, disgusted, excited, and finally close to giving up on me as his secret weapon.
It was now 3 A.M. and during the last couple of hours most of the players in the room had left. I was able to get a table completely to myself. My new dealer was unfriendly, and I was tired and irritable. After a sharp exchange of words, she dealt as rapidly as she could. Annoyed and feeling that I was experienced enough to raise my bets, I moved up to the $2 to $20 range. Coincidentally, the deck turned favorable, and I won the next several hands. I recouped my losses and finished a bit ahead. I was exhausted so I stopped and went off to bed. It was 5 A.M. but it could have been any time. Casinos don’t have clocks and generally lack windows so the gamblers don’t notice day changing to night and back to day. Perhaps the best clue as to where you are in the dismal diurnal cycle of this detached surreal world is the people as they ebb and flow like the tides.
Still tired, I awoke about noon and called Vivian collect. Using our code I asked for Edward A. Thorp, meaning “Everything is okay and we are ahead but by no more than a thousand dollars.” I was buoyed by the tone of relief in my wife’s voice as she told the operator that Mr. Thorp was not available.
After breakfast Manny and I again visited the casino outside of town. Within minutes, now playing $10 to $100, I won two or three hundred dollars. Then with me counting for both of us, my excitable backer decided he wanted to play as well. After two hours, we had accumulated $650 and the house began to “shuffle up”—that is, they would reshuffle the entire pack after dealing only a few rounds. Since favorable situations come more often toward the end of the deck, early reshuffling sharply reduces the rate of profit. We decided to go elsewhere.
My play was becoming fast and smooth, equal to any dealers’ speed. I was also growing more comfortable with raising the stakes. Moving up to $25 to $250 at the next gaming establishment we visited, after an hour I raised the bets to the $50-to-$500 range. I had calculated this to be the highest we could bet safely with our $10,000 bankroll. This plan, of betting only at a level at which I was emotionally comfortable and not advancing until I was ready, enabled me to play my system with a calm and disciplined accuracy. This lesson from the blackjack tables would prove invaluable throughout my investment lifetime as the stakes grew ever larger.
Eddie Hand arrived Saturday evening, in time for the three of us to visit the famous Harold’s Club in downtown Reno.
Starting with a floundering bingo parlor in the 1930s, owner Harold Smith, Sr., had built it into the most famous casino in the United States. In addition to twenty-three hundred road advertisements on America’s highways and promotion overseas by servicemen who had been well treated, Smith had introduced the innovations of women dealers, twenty-four-hour operation, and customer service directed at the everyday gambler. The strategy was enormously profitable, and the club was a destination for high-stakes gamblers as well. Twenty years earlier, when my family drove to California from Chicago, I had been intrigued as a ten-year-old by all the roadside signs proclaiming HAROLD’S CLUB, RENO, OR BUST. Now here I was.
Manny, Eddie, and I walked into the ground floor of Harold’s Club, which was light and spacious compared with the typical gaming establishment. Passing rows of slot machines, I sat down to warm up at $25 to $250, as Manny and Eddie watched closely. My backers then asked if we could get our own $500-limit game to be free of the nuisance of players dropping in to make small bets. At this point the pit boss invited us to the private area upstairs for higher-stakes players. There I had my own dealer and one of the three tables entirely to myself. I couldn’t have asked for better playing conditions. But after about fifteen minutes, when I was ahead a mere $500, owner Harold Smith, Sr., with his son Harold Smith, Jr., in tow, slipped in from a side door and came up behind our dealer. Looking back, I believe that they knew who Manny and Eddie were and, in light of their high-rolling history, were concerned that they had some scheme that could prove costly to the casino. Pleasantries and politenesses were exchanged, but they made their point: The deck would be shuffled as often as necessary to prevent me from doing whatever it was that I might be doing.
The owners instructed our dealer to shuffle with twelve to fifteen cards left in the deck. I still won. They shuffled halfway through the deck. Finally, the cards were shuffled after only two hands had been played. I squeezed out another $80 and we left.
At our next stop, the maximum was only $300, but the rules were excellent. Players could insure, split any pair, and double down on any set of cards. Even so, the cards ran badly, I lost steadily, and after four hours I was behind $1,700 and discouraged. Of course, I knew that just as the house can lose in the short run even though it has the advantage in a game, so a card counter can fall behind and this can last for hours or, sometimes, even days. Persisting, I waited for the deck to become favorable just one more time.
It happened a few minutes later as the deck suddenly produced a 5 percent advantage. I made the maximum bet of $300, which took all my remaining chips. Thinking about whether to quit or buy more chips if I lost this one, I picked up my hand and found a pair of 8s. They must be split. Why? Because 16 is a terrible hand. Draw and you probably bust, or stand and the dealer probably beats you with 17 or more. But if you split, you start each of your two new hands with an 8—a so-so first card. I flung three $100 bills from my wallet onto the second 8. On one of the 8s the second card I received was a 3. Doubling down was the right move, so I dropped another $300 onto this hand and was dealt one more card. Nine hundred dollars, the largest bet I’d yet made, was now lying on the table.
The dealer, showing a 6 up, had a Ten under and promptly busted, so I won both hands for a gain of $900, leaving me only $800 down. This deck continued to be favorable, calling for big bets, and the next deck quickly became good as well. In a few minutes I had wiped out my losses and went ahead $255. Then we quit for the evening.
For the second time, the Ten-Count System had shown moderately heavy losses mixed with “lucky” streaks of the most dazzling brilliance. I learned later that this was a characteristic of a random series of favorable bets. And I would see it again and again in real life in both the gambling and the investment worlds.
The next afternoon the three of us visited the casino outside of town again. Before sitting down at the table, I called Vivian. When I came back my friends told me the casino had barred us from play, but would be only too happy to pick up our meal tab. I asked the floor manager what this was all about. He explained, in a friendly and courteous manner, that they had seen me playing the day before and were puzzled at my steady winning at a rate that was large for my bet sizes. He said that they decided that a system was involved.
I later read that Nevada casinos were able to bar players without cause because—incredible as it sounds—they were considered to be private clubs, not offering themselves to the general public, and so could exclude whomever they pleased. Skin color was among the criteria once used by some gaming establishments.
The next afternoon, we drove to Stateline, Nevada, at the south end of Lake Tahoe. The town was jammed against the Nevada side of the border with California. Across the line, California looked normal, with motels, coffee shops, and residential areas. But in Nevada, where gambling was legal, casinos and hotels crowded as close to California as possible, to better their chances of luring the tourists entering Nevada.
Amid the glitter and congestion, we arrived about 6 P.M. at a large, brightly lit gambling factory. It was jammed. I was barely able to get a seat at the blackjack tables.
I placed $2,000 worth of chips on the table, and Manny, unable anymore to bear simply watching, insisted on playing beside me, with me calling his plays and attempting to control the size of his bets. This was a bad idea because he didn’t know the strategy and, playing the cards the way he was used to doing, he lost the advantage. I was unable to correct him at the table without making what we were doing obvious. Meanwhile, besides playing my cards and trying to quietly instruct him, I was counting cards and determining how much we each should bet. Excitable and a bad listener under normal circumstances, he paid little attention to me, misplayed hands, and bet too much for our $10,000 bankroll. Soon I had won $1,300. Betting wildly, Manny won $2,000. Then a drooling pit boss invited us to dinner and the show. Passing on the show, we enjoyed filet mignon and champagne. Within hours, Destiny would present us with the bill. The charge? Eleven thousand dollars in lost profits.
After dinner we strolled over to the new glittering high-rise that housed one of the biggest casinos, Harvey’s Wagon Wheel. It had evolved from a one-room log cabin built in 1944 by Sacramento meat wholesaler Harvey Grossman and his wife, Llewellyn, on the Nevada side of the border with California. The name came from the wagon wheel they had nailed over the door. Now the site held the first tower on the south shore, featuring a casino within a 197-room, twelve-story hotel. I bought $2,000 in chips from the cashier’s cage and made my way to an empty table. Soon I was plagued by $1 bettors who came and went, slowing the game and concealing cards, which made it harder to count.
Betting $50 to $500, I pointedly reduced my minimum bet to $1 whenever another player arrived. After a few minutes the pit boss got the message and asked if I would like a private table. I said it would transport me with ecstasy. He explained that the club didn’t like the psychological effect of a private table on the other customers, but with a trace of a smile he added that a $25-minimum game could be arranged and wondered if that would be satisfactory. Indeed it would, and when the sign was posted it cleared the table of all customers but me. A small crowd gathered. They were quiet, perhaps anticipating the imminent slaughter of their fiscally plump fellow lamb.
After I had won a few hundred dollars, Manny once again jumped in. He had agreed not to do this after the last time. Again he wouldn’t listen; I tried to make the best of it. I kept the count and again directed the play of the hands for both of us. I tried to be subtle and he wasn’t paying close attention, but he did know to follow me in moving his bet size up and down. Since this is more important than exact play of the cards, he still had an edge. After thirty minutes we emptied the table’s money tray—the blackjack version of breaking the bank. No longer smiling, the pit boss was scared.
The employees began to panic. Our dealer begged her higher-up boyfriend, who had been attracted by the commotion, “Oh, help me. Please, help me.” The pit boss was trying to explain away our win to a nervous knot of subordinates. While the money tray was being restocked, the crowd swelled. They began to cheer their David on against the casino Goliath.
We played another two hours and broke the bank again. The great heaps of chips in front of us included more than $17,000 in profits. I won $6,000, and Manny, again overbetting wildly, had added $11,000 to his stake. I was tiring from the aftereffects of our huge dinner, the increased effort in managing Manny’s hand along with my own, and the fatigue from the previous few days. It was getting harder to count properly and my partner was also wilting. Insisting that we quit, I headed for the cashier. Stuffed with chips, my pockets bulged like saddlebags. My bounty did not go unnoticed. Along the way, I was startled to meet three or four lovely ladies wandering back and forth across my path smiling affectionately.
I cashed out and wended my way back to the tables to watch horror-stricken as Manny, feeling lucky and refusing to stop, poured back thousands of dollars. For me blackjack was a game of math, not luck. Any luck, good or bad, would be random, unpredictable, and short-term. In the long run it would be unimportant. Manny didn’t see it that way. When I tried to dislodge him he cried excitedly, “I…will…not…leave…this…place!” In the forty-five minutes or so that it took to pry him loose, he lost back the entire $11,000 that he had won. Even so, when we returned to our hotel that evening with my winnings, we were ahead $13,000 so far on the trip. My daily calls to Vivian had shown her that we were winning more each day. Now came the best call of all: I asked dramatically for Edward M. Thorp (ahead between $12,000 and $13,000). In a relieved and buoyant voice she told the operator I wasn’t home.
On our last day we returned to the club where I had first practiced. I put $1,000 in chips on the table and began to win. Word had spread and within minutes the owner was on the scene. In a panic, he gave the dealer and the pit boss instructions. If I changed my bet size, the dealer was to shuffle the entire deck before the next deal. Whenever I varied the number of hands I took (I could now play from one to eight hands at a time, and faster than the best dealers could deal), the cards were shuffled. The dealer whom I had last played against in my little practice session was standing in the background saying over and over, in reverent tones, how much I had advanced in skill since the other night. When I happened to scratch my nose, the dealer shuffled! Incredulous, I asked her whether she would shuffle each time I did so. She said she would. I tested with a few more scratches. She meant what she said. I asked if any unusual act, no matter how minute, would cause her to shuffle. Again she said, “Yes.”
I was now playing merely even with the house, as shuffling all the cards and starting each deal with a full deck destroyed my advantage. I asked for larger chips—$50 or $100—as all I had were twenties. The owner stepped forward and said that the house would not sell them to us. He then had a brand-new deck of cards brought in. The dealer carefully spread it facedown, then again faceup. I asked why they spread them facedown. Although this practice is common, casinos seldom examine the backs of the cards but now they did, for a full two minutes. Even though I wear glasses, the dealer explained that they believed I had unusually acute vision, and could distinguish tiny blemishes on the backs of the cards. This let me know what cards would appear next. I scoffed, but the panicky owner brought in four fresh decks in five minutes.
Changing decks didn’t matter to me, so they gave up on that. In whispers, they formulated a new theory. I asked them what they now thought my secret was. The dealer claimed I could count every card as it was played, so I always knew exactly which cards had not yet appeared. It is well known to students of mnemotechny (the science of memory training) that you can learn to memorize in proper order a deck of cards as it is dealt. However, I am familiar enough with the method involved to know that the information, when so memorized, cannot be used quickly enough for play in blackjack. So I challenged the dealer by rashly claiming that no one in the world could watch thirty-eight cards dealt quickly off a pack and then tell me quickly how many of each type of card remained.
She claimed the pit boss, standing next to her, could do just that. I offered $5 for a demonstration. They both looked down sheepishly and wouldn’t answer. I made my offer $50. They remained silent and ashamed. Eddie Hand, who had been watching throughout, increased the offer to $500. There was no response. We left in disgust.
Spring break was ending at MIT, so our trip also was at an end. In thirty man-hours of medium-to-large-scale play, our $10,000 grew to $21,000. At no point did we have to go into our original capital further than $1,300 (plus expenses). Our experiment was a success, and my system performed at the tables just as the theory predicted. I was satisfied. Future blackjack trips, if any, would have to fit in around my academic schedule and my family life. I made no plans for another trip with Manny and Eddie, and simply left the possibility open.
On the plane back to Boston, I remembered the casino spokesman who, upon hearing my claim that I could beat blackjack, scoffed, “When a lamb goes to the slaughter, the lamb might kill the butcher. But we always bet on the butcher.”
The day of the lamb had come.
Some thirty years later, author and investigative journalist Connie Bruck filled me in on Manny Kimmel’s background when she called to interview me for her book Master of the Game. The book details the story of how Steve Ross “took his father-in-law’s funeral business and a parking lot company and grew them into the largest media and entertainment company in the world, Time Warner.” The parking lot company was Kinney Service Corporation, started in 1945 by a hidden partner, Emmanuel Kimmel. Kimmel allegedly made his fortune in the 1920s and ’30s from bootlegging and the numbers racket, in company with Abner “Longie” Zwillman (chronicled in the book Gangster #2 by Mark Stuart), the don of New Jersey and supposedly the second most powerful mobster in the United States in 1935. Knowing this now, I’m glad I decided to play with a $10,000 bankroll for an almost sure moderate win, rather than with a $100,000 bankroll and any risk whatsoever of a serious loss. It also makes me reflect on my own past naïveté, and the greater wisdom of my wife, Vivian, in these matters.
Manny’s friend Eddie Hand was also a source for Connie Bruck. At the time of our trip his company “shipped all the cars and trucks for Chrysler.” Based in Buffalo, New York, he was battle-toughened through conflict with the Teamsters Union. A few years later he sold his company to Ryder Industries. During my stock market years I learned that he received Ryder warrants that, on the day I checked their price, were worth $47 million. Once when he, Kimmel, and I were flying from Reno to Las Vegas, Eddie Hand suddenly became nostalgic while reading the “Milestones” column in Time magazine. The vignettes mentioned the upcoming marriages of two ladies with whom he had been romantically involved. One was a Chilean copper heiress and the other was tennis player “Gorgeous Gussy” Moran, who scandalized Wimbledon by presenting herself for play in lace panties.
According to Bruck, Manny Kimmel died in Florida in 1982 at the age of eighty-six, leaving a young widow named Ivi, the older of the two nieces who had, with her younger sister and Manny, visited us so long ago on that dreary winter afternoon in Boston. Manny told me he met her while she worked in a jewelry store. They married after the death of his wife. In 2005, the History Channel featured Vivian and me in a one-hour program about my blackjack story. Ivi, who also appears on the program, still had a copy of a letter I’d written Manny in 1964 with some of my new discoveries about baccarat. When I last spoke with him, Eddie Hand was prospering in the wealthy enclave of Montecito in Southern California. Later he retired to the south of France.
Meanwhile, blackjack had still more to teach me, about both investing and how the world worked.