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“It’s definitely possible to win at blackjack. That has been proven beyond any doubt.”
Stanford Wong, Blackjack Secrets
Eight—for a total 23 …
“Dealer bust!” exclaimed Laura with a sense of relief and giddiness not appreciated by her supervisors.
As a dealer, Laura knew that her best chance to get tips was for the players at her table to win. In fact, many dealers try to help players make good decisions at the tables. The irony was that like most dealers, the knowledge that Laura had about blackjack was just enough to be dangerous and any average player who listened to her suggestions would be worse off for it. But that was part of the game and we’d learned to accept it.
So when Laura told me earlier that I shouldn’t split two tens even if it was allowed, I certainly was in no position to explain to her the nuances of when to veer from basic strategy based on the true count. Index plays weren’t up for discussion. As I often had to, I did my best to play dumb. It wasn’t something my ego enjoyed doing, but whenever real money is involved, the ego can’t afford to get in the way. Most of the time I’d use the “I’m just here to gamble” argument. On occasion, after a couple of bad beats, I’d fail to exercise the restraint that D.A. and I had been required to embrace as part of our blackjack team. A rude look back at the dealer or even a “Please don’t tell me what I should do with my money” was difficult to contain. But with Laura, I knew she meant no harm and I’d discounted her suggestions by simply exalting my reliance on the gods of luck.
“Holy shit!” I heard over my shoulders when Laura busted and began paying each of my eight winning hands.
But the gasps that led to cheers from the crowd behind me, the scrambling pit personnel in front of me, and the nerves within weren’t enough to distract me from making my next move. And that was shoveling away my chips into the pockets of my conservative slacks and tweed blazer.
Between the winnings on this round and what I already had on the green felt table in front of me, I managed to stuff myself with almost $40,000 in chips. I’d bought in for $9,000 over the course of the session. The rest was white meat. As I quickly turned to get up from the table I saw a quiet and relieved smile on D.A.’s face.
By that point in our careers, we’d decided to make it standard practice to buy in for 10 units at a time, only buying in again a maximum of two more times, each for another 10 units and, only as necessary. Any more than $3,000-$4,000 at a time would raise the suspicions of the pit boss. Our strategy happened to coincide with a government-imposed $10,000 threshold, at which point casinos would be required to file a Currency Transaction Report (CTR). The objective was to identify money laundering and other criminal activity. In our case, the $9,000 had nothing to do with the CTR. That was a mere coincidence. We had a betting unit (and buy-in) that was relative to our bankroll. It was strictly bankroll-management principles, not CTR avoidance. Unfortunately, on more than one occasion, we believed that some casinos had filed Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) on us. Most likely, they presumed that we were “structuring,” a Federal crime for transacting amounts just under $10,000, in our case the buy-ins. For us, such coincidences often proved quite inconvenient. But we weren’t structuring and we weren’t breaking any laws by counting cards. We were just doing our jobs, which entailed beating the casinos at their own game.
“Sir, would you mind if I color you up?” Laura was doing what all dealers are trained to do. I ignored her request and focused on positioning myself to leave. I had no time to wait.
“Turney,” she broke from her professional routine and I could tell by her tone that she was dead set on coloring me up. In other words, she was asking me to turn in my many lower-denomination chips—$100 blacks, $500 purples, and $1,000 orange chips (the “pumpkins”)—in exchange for fewer higher-denomination chips. It was easier for players to transport and better for the table to have enough chips on hand to pay other players who remained. But I wanted nothing to do with the suits who looked on, clearly awaiting heavier handlers—security. No, for me, the only vision I had was making my way back to our hotel room at the MGM. That meant getting to the car without being stopped by security or being mugged.
In normal situations, D.A. and I would circle around to meet at the car. But this was not a normal situation and D.A. knew that meeting at the car was out of the question. As my teammate, his work was done and he’d soon be leaving the table too while awaiting my call. But no one could know that we played together. At some casinos, that might have been our modus operandi but at the Mirage, our act had always been to be total strangers—one an ex-collegiate athlete and the other a businessman at a convention.
As I made my way through the rows of one-armed bandits, I pulled the fake convention nametag clip from my lapel. Turney Jones was no longer. As the nametag fell to the floor, I awaited a stop by security, an intimidating foot chase, a dreaded back-room encounter, or any number of deterrents I’d come to experience. But over the past 12 to 18 months, casino heat had been at a minimum. Perhaps the downturn in the economy left casino surveillance understaffed. Maybe they didn’t get to me in time. Or, the likely answer, we’d perfected a system that was difficult to detect—or, at best, to detect quickly enough. Despite our rationalized bouts of paranoia, the reality was that we’d learned to conceal the true extent of the threat we had become. They consistently saw us winning, but they couldn’t figure out how.
Our mission was to beat the game by using a sophisticated combination of many methods for avoiding detection. Although our card counting abilities had become world-class, the key to our success was in the ancillary ways that we’d figured out how to win. Sometimes, our approach was inconspicuous. At other times, it was so demonstrative that the mere idea that we were counting cards would have been laughable. We used ingredients from the greatest minds in blackjack history, added our own flavors, and put them all together into one comprehensive masterpiece.
It had been years since D.A. and I had first met at Semyon’s seminar in 2005. Our lives had been turned upside down. We’d evolved from novice fans of blackjack and its elite players to experts at the game ourselves. But more important, we’d accomplished what the game’s greatest players before us had done for the professional blackjack community: We’d added to it.