_______________________
“Be aware that team play is different from individual play and may require you to change from the style with which you are most comfortable. It is vital that all players adhere strictly to the rules and guidelines contained in this handbook, without any deviation whatsoever.”
The Blackjack Team Handbook
Don Schlesinger, Blackjack Forum
As I stood at the curb of the airport terminal, the refreshing cold morning air was just what I needed after a long workweek and a particularly crowded flight from Boston to Philly. I’d packed light, but the last-minute flight meant a seat in the middle between two oversized women. This weekend’s trip would be just a quick jaunt. Our schedules had conflicted and a Friday-night arrival had been ruled out. So from Saturday morning to Sunday night, we had a short 36-hour window in which to feel out a new teammate.
About a month earlier, D.A. and his wife had moved to Delaware, closer to family and their childhood homes. The convenience of us both living in Boston was nice, but we were well past our weekly practices and day trips to Connecticut. Las Vegas was just a flight away and for trips to Atlantic City I could fly into Philadelphia. Philly was a short drive from D.A.’s house in Delaware, then it was just under two hours to Atlantic City from there.
As I awaited his pickup, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of apprehension about the person with whom we were about to meet. It had nothing to do with the man himself. It was just the fact that we were tinkering with a methodology that was already successful at yielding profits. We’d tried unsuccessfully to add players to the team in the past and we hadn’t had much success joining up with others. Still, we continued to toy with the idea of adding manpower to our team, along with the added bankroll that might come with it.
Money had become tighter for the two of us. D.A. was starting his career as a financial advisor and my business had bought out another practice, so we’d been forced to break the bank to make that happen. We played on a reduced bankroll with a betting unit that was slightly too large, creating a higher possibility for risk of ruin.
We figured that the idea of adding a teammate was at least worth consideration. If an additional member to our team helped us all make more money, then the decision could be justified. If it didn’t, then we could chalk it up as yet another learning experience and return to our two-man structure.
I’d made the call on the previous Sunday night.
“Hey, Kyung, this is Nathaniel. I met you at your house for the blackjack checkouts with Mike.”
“Oh yeah, of course. How are things?”
“Good, actually. I know you’re friends with Mike, so you probably heard that D.A. and I are playing on our own.”
“Yeah, I think that’s what everyone’s doing, actually. Lately, I’ve been driving to AC a couple times a month on my own.”
“How’s it been going?” I was curious to see how he’d progressed since we last spoke at the checkout with Mike.
“Well, actually,” he said, “it’s been going pretty well. It’s a little lonely at times, but I’ve gotten a lot better since you were last here and it’s fun to win a little.”
“Actually, that’s why I’m calling, Kyung. D.A. and I were wondering if you had any interest in joining us on our next trip to AC. We were hoping to add some new blood to our team and of all the people in Mike’s old crew, you were the only one who we thought might be a good fit.”
“Absolutely! I’d love to. It’s been months now and it doesn’t look like Mike’s going to get anything going still. Plus, those guys from New York, or New Jersey, or wherever, weren’t exactly my kind of guys, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, D.A. and I have been working on some things, but we were thinking that we could pool our bankrolls, allowing for a bigger unit, then split the wins or losses accordingly. We could back-count or do call-ins, maybe even play straight shoes.”
“Sounds great.”
I explained our financial situation as transparently as I could.
“We each have about twenty to twenty-five thousand to bring to the table, but we want to take it up a notch.” We’d certainly brought more with us on trips, but we were hoping for an addition to the bankroll without sacrificing our personal cash reserves.
“Well, I can do at least thirty-five, no problem. Maybe more.”
I was getting excited about Kyung’s enthusiasm and thought we might have tapped into a great new team member.
“Perfect. That would get us close to one-hundred grand, giving us about a two-hundred-dollar unit. Obviously, you’d get a larger portion of any profits …”
Kyung interrupted, “That’s not important to me. If we’re all pooling our money and we’re all having fun working together, then I’m not going to split hairs for profit.”
His generous attitude and trusting nature were appreciated, but I knew that without a fair split, it could eventually lead to problems. But now wasn’t the time to convince Kyung that it was in everyone’s best interest to make sure that if he were investing more, he’d make more.
“I appreciate that. Listen, we’re looking to go next weekend. Are you free?”
“I was planning to go anyway. I already have my room booked for Saturday night. I can’t leave D.C. until Saturday morning because of a work thing, but I can meet you there early.”
We decided to meet at the Trop.
I let D.A. know the plan. We agreed to hold off on our multi-strategy approach with Kyung until we knew that a working relationship could be established. Kyung had been the only guy we thought might fit. It was no surprise to us that his skills had evolved since our last meeting and we were hopeful that the added weapon would be just what we needed to advance our team.
“What’s up, Nathaniel?” D.A. asked as he leaned toward the passenger’s side to make himself visible.
I opened the door to his SUV, a car that provided the extra room needed for oversized drivers. I tossed my duffle bag on the back seat and extended my hand.
“You ready for this weekend, D.A.?”
“Am I ready? I think the question is, is Kyung ready?”
As it turned out, everyone was ready. Kyung proved to be a useful adjunct to the team on several levels. We’d read at length about the minimal amount of suspicion that Asian gamblers typically receive in comparison to the prototypical young white males who were more likely to be considered skilled players. What we didn’t realize was that most casinos have a marketing arm dedicated to Asian gamblers. They have hosts who speak a variety of languages and the offers that were accessible to Kyung, even with the same amount of play as us, were better. Our comp potential was greater than ever before.
Kyung booked two, sometimes three, rooms at a time at different casinos. We had backup locations where we could meet or, in the event of a back-off or barring, we had a safe haven for the night. Of course, in Atlantic City, back-offs weren’t an issue. The laws in New Jersey were different from the rest of the country. While card counting everywhere is a legal practice, in Atlantic City casinos cannot even back-off a player. There was no risk of being trespassed. It just wasn’t allowed. At worst, an observant surveillance operator might call down to the pit and the floorperson could instruct the dealer to break the deck (shuffle). It didn’t happen often, but there were times when a hot shoe got cracked and reshuffled. It was essentially the same as a back-off and, unless we left the table, they would likely continue the practice. The next time the shoe got hot, the guy in the eye in the sky, with an adequate ability to maintain the count, would call the pit again. It wasn’t ideal for casinos, since it meant that they were dealing fewer hands overall, which reduces their theoretical earnings. But long-term, with us, they’d lose. So they did what they had to do to discourage us from playing, even if it meant pissing off other players at the table. Either way, at that point it was futile for us to stay.
The other tactic used in Atlantic City was to nullify any comp points that had been earned. Thousands of points that built up on our players cards were, on occasion, wiped away. It was the nature of the game and we knew it. But face-to-face encounters with casino shift managers suggesting we might prefer a nice game of roulette instead of blackjack, well, that wasn’t a risk. Nor was there any possibility that we’d be taken in the back room and threatened with violence. Casinos are mostly publicly owned these days and mob involvement is pretty much a thing of the past, anyway. At worst, they’d shuffle up and rescind comp points, and we’d understand the message and move on.
The addition of Kyung seemed to be working out well. Our first weekend in Atlantic City was a great opportunity for everyone to get comfortable playing together. We took the time to practice a bit in the hotel room with the felt, chips, and cards that we brought along. D.A. and I were a little concerned about Kyung’s playing ability, but for the most part he made very few errors. He knew D.A. and I had been playing a lot and had become good friends. It was natural that he may have felt like the third wheel, so we tried to be sensitive to that. The trip was a success and we all agreed to formulate a calendar for the following six to eight months.
Over that time, we made regular trips, splitting the load primarily between Vegas and Atlantic City. The addition of Kyung helped minimize volatility. Kyung’s ethnic roots allowed him to sit down at a blackjack table and play for hours on end, varying his bets, uncapped, according to the count, without raising eyebrows. Casinos don’t seem to appreciate that a card counter doesn’t always have a specific look. They were profiling, in a sense, and we intended to capitalize on their biases.
As much as we liked the addition of Kyung, his skills turned out to be somewhat limited. It didn’t take long to realize that he didn’t have the game that we had. He didn’t know all the deviations from basic strategy and didn’t have much patience for call-ins, back-counting, or signaling. But then again, he didn’t need to. He could play indefinitely without suspicion. He would pull up to a blackjack table, light a cigarette, and become immersed in the game for hours. From a distance, we would catch a glimpse of him in action, but it was nearly impossible to decipher the extent of his wins and losses by the expression on his face. Many times we wondered if he was sleepy or depressed, only to find out that he was up thousands of dollars. Other times, we saw him smiling and gregarious, only to discover that he’d had a big losing session. He had enough skill to be an asset to the team and that’s all that really mattered.
Since Kyung was tied to a single strategy, that meant D.A. and I were free to run our multi-dimensional system on our own. When one player was down, it seemed that the other two were up. It was rare that all three of us had losing sessions at the same time, though it did happen.
It was convenient to have Kyung’s schedule generally mirror ours so that we could travel between casinos together or meet up for team check-ins or meals. Our bankroll was back up to its previous level. We’d smoothed out the swings by adding Kyung, and as a three-man team, we all shared in the administrative responsibilities of the operation.
Kyung was in charge of all things related to travel, such as reserving hotel rooms by using his inflated comps, securing rental cars if needed, and booking flights. We were operating in such an organized way that Kyung had notes for each player, including airline seating preferences and frequent-flyer-program numbers. All I needed to do was show up at the airport and everything had been taken care of.
D.A. managed the statistical recordkeeping. After every session on every trip, each player documented his data, including:
Casino Name
Start/End Time
Cut-Card Penetration
Starting/Ending Bankroll
Net Win/Loss
Tips
Dealer Names and Info
Pit Personnel Names and Info
Casino Shift Info
Session Notes
D.A. then compiled all of this information into a spreadsheet. From there, we computed our expected return on investment and the standard deviation from the expected return. That’s how we monitored ourselves to make sure the results were in line with our expectation.
We also compiled an extensive database for each casino, including shift schedules, playing notes, and dealer information. When possible, we would secretly snap pictures of dealers and pit personnel with our cell phones and add the photos to our database. If Jeannie, a retired-schoolteacher-turned-dealer at the Taj, frequently overpaid on wins, or if Frankie, the floor man at the Hard Rock was more concerned with the 20-year-old bachelorettes than protecting the casino’s money, we knew about it. It went into our database along with all the people and places we should avoid. The Griffin Agency kept logs on card counters and cheats that included head shots, mug shots, aliases, and any other identifying information. Similarly, we kept comparable records of casinos and their personnel. Information and documentation were keys to the game for both sides.
Data on shift changes was important for creating our schedules, as was the deck penetration on the games. After a dealer shuffles a shoe, she inserts a colored plastic card that’s usually yellow or red (something that stands out) somewhere toward the back of the shoe. It’s called the cut card, and once that card is dealt and the remainder of that hand is completed, the shoe ends. The deeper into a shoe that the cut card is placed, the better it is for the player, because the more “true” the true count becomes. A true count of, say, 5, means that there are five extra good cards per deck remaining. If there are three decks remaining, in theory, they’d be spread out fairly randomly among those three decks. But the reality is that they could be bunched up in the final deck, never seeing the light of day if the penetration is shallow. Additionally, dealing deeper results in the more frequent occurence of high counts. So the closer the cut card gets to the back of the shoe, the deeper the penetration, the better it is for the card counter. Finally, better penetration equates to more hands played per shoe, which was critical to our success.
Many casinos put small little notches on the shoe itself for dealers to use as a guide when placing the cut card, but some leave it to the discretion of the dealer. If we found a dealer who was generous with the cut card, we were sure to document it in our database and consider it when developing our trip’s schedule.
In his book Sklansky Talks Blackjack, David Sklansky, one of the foremost authorities on advantage gaming, asserts “The biggest single factor that can make up for a discrepancy in rules between two casinos is their degree of penetration.”
I had the less specific role of being the team’s manager, organizing the trip locations, implementing mini-checkouts for ourselves, overseeing the team rules, managing bankroll and unit adjustments, ensuring player-profit payouts, and taking the lead on strategy adjustments within each playing session.
We were like a corporation. Kyung was human resources, sales, and marketing; D.A. was finance and accounting; and I was the CEO. No stone was left unturned. Sure, we took pleasure in our craft, but the enjoyment wasn’t exclusive of our intent. Like any successful corporation, we were there to profit.
The legendary Arnold Snyder said it best in The Big Book of Blackjack, “The object of the game is money.”