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“First, it must be stated that the act of counting cards has to be legal. It can’t be illegal to look at the cards dealt, and it can’t be illegal to use one’s brain to decide how to play the hand. Further, it would be both ridiculous and impossible to try to enforce a law that prohibits thinking. Therefore, the next question is, what can the casinos do about the card counters?”
I. Nelson Rose and Robert A. Loeb,
Blackjack and the Law
Eight $2,400 stacks of multi-colored casino chips sat in and around the betting circles in front of me. Their fate rested entirely on the next card the dealer was preparing to turn over. The true count was 9—not the highest we’d ever seen, but enough to increase our heart rates. Our team’s playing system had become so difficult to detect that it afforded us the luxury of removing any ceiling on the maximum number of units we could bet. In the past, we would max out at two hands of six units each, including a slight reduction in our bet size on each hand to account for the covariance that comes from playing multiple spots. Our betting unit was $300, so the normal wager would’ve been $1,800. But now without a cap, our betting ramp could climb to whatever the true count dictated.
Initially, I’d bet two hands of $2,400 without slightly reducing each hand, as I probably should have, accepting the somewhat increased risk. At the beginning of my career that would have been a lot of money to wager on one round of blackjack. It was enough to pay my mortgage back in Boston, but over the years a few thousand dollars on the felt in front of me had become well within my comfort zone. More important, we had better than a 4% advantage—huge by casino standards.
I appeared to be steaming, as if firing bets to dig out of a hole. I’d lost a couple of earlier hands while the count was rising. As I’d done many times before, I began planting a seed of deception that any losses were making me increasingly frustrated. In reality I wasn’t angry at all. The count was rising and, along with it, my profit potential. The steam was camouflage. It allowed me to bet more without drawing attention as quickly. My hope was that the casino thought I was losing control and over-betting. I’d learned to read each situation carefully to determine whether camouflage was necessary and, if so, in what form. Our advantage was becoming increasingly greater and I wanted to be fully invested, so I decided to steam. It worked perfectly as several rare splitting opportunities began to arise.
Soon the two initial bets turned into eight, and I had more money at stake in front of me than I’d ever experienced as an advantage player. The $19,200 on the table was more than what I made in a month working as a financial advisor at that time. The potential returns, however, were greater than any I could offer my clients at my real job—and that was the only job that my family and most of my friends knew I had. I shared my underground life as a professional blackjack player (or “card counter”) with a select few. Now, this moment was about to mark the conclusion of a supplemental career that spanned five years. For many, the longevity of a card counter is comparable to that of a professional athlete. While a few seemingly play forever, the average tenure is usually a couple of years. While I’d had a great run, my voluntary retirement from blackjack was just a few minutes away. The question was whether I would go out with a memorable win or shuffle back into life with blackjack as a distant bittersweet memory.
The answer was dependent upon Laura, the high-limit room blackjack dealer at the Mirage. I knew that she’d endured a grueling childhood, the youngest of three daughters of a southwestern farmer. Like her sisters before her, Laura left home when she was 18 for the bright lights of Las Vegas, only to wind up dealing cards to drunken businessmen for the next 23 years. As she aged, she tried desperately to maintain the glow she once had, despite the wrinkles, the bleached-blonde hair, and the heavy makeup.
One of the regulars told me the cautionary tale of Laura’s life. I felt sorry for her. She spent hours in the gym every day after the graveyard shift trying to maintain her figure. So while my flirtatious and gregarious behavior helped me blend in as a vacationing gambler at the table, it was quite possible that the “eye in the sky” had its doubts about my motives.
The sizeable piles of chips in front of me were enough to draw a small crowd around my back. The high-limit room wasn’t exactly in seclusion. It was adjacent to the main blackjack pits and close to the Cirque du Soleil entrance. A buzz was swirling at what had happened. In front of me, Laura had grown increasingly nervous at the multiple splits I made, as I drew jacks after kings, after queens, after tens. Four splits on each of my two hands. The floorperson was Ming, a 30-something baby-faced man, but he was inadequately trained to sniff out people like me. Ming had gone to the phone after I’d split my first pair of tens—a king and a jack.
Our careers had come full circle. When we began our blackjack lives as amateurs, like most players we adhered to the rule that one should never split tens. Then our training told us that there were certain times when splitting tens was the right play to make. Eventually our experiences told us that no matter how correct it might be to split, a casino’s theory is that a player who splits tens is either an idiot or a card counter. So by this time in our careers, we rarely did it unless we had very good reason to believe that it wouldn’t trigger a call to surveillance, or if it was toward the end of a playing session at a casino we would never visit again. This time was a little different. We were saying bon voyage to the game itself and we had little regard for surveillance. But first, I had another problem to contend with.
“I’m sorry sir,” Laura had said softly, with a slight southern drawl. “You can’t split those cards.”
I’d been in this situation before, specifically in Detroit and upstate New York. In smaller casinos like those, it was common to encounter pit personnel, especially dealers, who lacked a fundamental understanding of the rules of the game. Most didn’t even know basic strategy. But this was a carpet joint in Vegas, and I hadn’t anticipated that Laura, a seasoned dealer, didn’t know that because the ten-valued cards (tens, jacks, queens, and kings) were all of equal point value, they could be split in most casinos.
“Are you sure? I thought I could split tens, and you know that’s why I’m here, Laura, to gamble. Can you double-check with Ming?”
I didn’t want the conflict, but I knew what I had to do.
Hearing his name, the portly floorperson in an inexpensive black suit peeked his head over the corner of the table and smiled. “What’s up, Turney … Laura still won’t give you her number?” Of course, my real name wasn’t Turney. That was my alias, for now. I’d felt a growing insecurity about using my real name in light of recent wins at other MGM properties on the Strip. My true identity had run its course on the other side of the country, but in Vegas, Turney Jones was relatively new to town.
“No, sir,” Laura interjected. “He’s requesting to split his king/jack, but I told him he can’t because they’re not the same tens.”
Ming’s smile slowly faded when he realized the amount of chips in each betting circle, as well as the other stacks piled high next to my near-empty Corona bottle. Reluctantly, he instructed her to honor the split and then made a beeline to the phone in the center of the blackjack pit, presumably to call surveillance or locate the pit boss—probably both. By the time I’d split and re-split a few more times, the pit boss had arrived to witness the action. I’d seen this amount of heat before, but I’d learned to block it out—or run. I could see D.A. out of the corner of my eye. Although he had a calm exterior, I knew his heart was racing as fast as mine. My 6-foot-8 inch, 240-pound teammate sat three seats over from me with a mere $200 bet in front of him. The two small black chips meant nothing to us right now. His blood pressure was high for the same reason mine was: We had nearly $20,000 in play. D.A. lost the previous several hands, while I’d continued to win. So his $200 bet remained constant hand after hand, awaiting a win before chipping up, and I’d been chipping up in accordance with the count.
Our system had afforded us an extensive shelf life in the cat-and-mouse game of card counting, but this was the make or break moment of our careers. Soon we’d go back to our regular lives. But now, all we could think about was the dealer’s upcard, a 6, and what the hidden hole card beneath it might be.
Laura turned up her hole card—a 9. She had a total of fifteen, so she had to draw another card.
Hard to believe that less than four years before, the only thing I knew about blackjack was that it was a fun game to play over a bachelor-party weekend. But as life so often does, it took me down a path I’d never imagined. Eventually I was introduced to the professional side of the game and once my interest was piqued, it led me on a journey that brought me to this moment.
I wasn’t exactly a whale, but the size and quantity of my bets were enough to make Ming sweat. I knew that the yellow cut card would be coming within the next few rounds of dealing so this was it. Any anxiety I felt was easily trumped by the palpable tension among the gallery of people around me, as well as Laura, Ming, and (I surmised) casino surveillance.
Laura reached again to pull a card from under the coarse hairs of the front of the blackjack shoe …